The 15” Samsung Series 9 2012 with Ivy Bridge has been a pleasure to test. It’s a stylish Ultrabook with potentially very long battery life and a great 3D performance boost over 1st-generation Ultrabooks. The screen is good and bright and the keyboard a pleasure to use. But all is not perfect. A surprising lack of CPU Turbo under battery load, a strange touchpad action and too many ‘micro’ ports takes some of the shine from the Series 9 but despite that, it sits in a unique position in the market. There are cheaper Ultrabooks in the 15” bracket but you won’t find a 1600×900 screen for this price or weight.
In a typical ‘premium first’ move, Intel have announced 4 new 3rd generation Core processors aimed at Ultrabooks and other highly mobile PCs.
It’s easy to see which devices are going to be best for gaming and video work – the i5-3317U runs a slightly lower max GPU clock. All have a 17W nominal TDP although we already know that this TDP can be programmed up or down for design purposes.
The official list matches the one we published last week…
Appearing on Geizhals.at very briefly this week were the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A and UX21A models. Although the resellers appear to have pulled their offerings, it’s left a trail of specs and prices behind.
If you thought that tracking processors, clockrates and TDP figures was hard last year, just wait until later this year when ‘programmable TDP’ CPUs hit Ultrabooks. It looks like we’ll have to make a change to our product database to accommodate this new idea in multi-use CPUs.
