The Samsung R519 is a great value, no-frills budget 15in laptop.
As well as notable netbooks and popular ultraportables, Samsung has also successfully staked out the competitive ground of entry-level full-size laptops.
The Samsung R519 is a solid if slightly pedestrian-looking 15in all-rounder of a laptop, which crucially hits an attractive sub-£500 price point that overlaps some mini laptops.
In fact, at £378 it's practically the same price as its own 11.6in-screen N510 Ion netbook.
Our sample of Samsung R519 is based on an Intel Dual Core processor - not to be confused with the cooler and faster Core 2 Duo chips - yet its quite capable of taking on most domestic duties. In WorldBench 6 tests, the Samsung R519 scored a useful 75 points; or about twice that of your average netbook.
This older tech CPU runs a little hotter than the latest, a fact reflected in the mediocre battery life tests. Despite a promising 6-cell battery (albeit with an unexceptional 44Wh capacity; two-thirds of that found in Samsung netbooks) our best MobileMark 2007 score was 187 mins.
At three minutes shy of three hours, this Samsung R519 is no road warrior. And the widescreen-stretched 2.4kg body is far from being a slim'n'light package.
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Ports and socketry options on the Samsung R519 mirror most netbooks too, with three USB, headphone jack, analogue VGA video output and an SD card slot. Ethernet networking is last century's 100Mb/s, but that'll be more than fast enough for family use.
And a dual-layer DVD±RW optical drive is built-in, instantly trumping the optical disclessness of any netbook
Gaming is not really on the feature list of the Samsung R519. With its integrated Intel 4500M processor, we only saw 4 frames per second in Maximum quality FEAR, wheezing up to a still slo-mo 13fps after dropping settings down to Medium.
If you don't mind watching inflated pixels, there's always Low quality in the FEAR game, which let the Samsung R519 nip along at 47fps.
Despite the plain design, budget components and somewhat chunky chassis, the Samsung R519 still represents a lot of laptop for the money. Its keyboard and touchpad are unornamented but functional, and the careful restraint in fashioning the looks of this budget portable actually count favourably toward its overall no-frills appeal.
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Comments
Tootsie said: Sorta Good for Internet browsing but Crap for Gaming as only 64MB of Vram Cant do Video Editing without freezing and heats up fast had to get Fan cleaned because of so Much dust they even found a dead Fly in there LOL
Brunokrai said: My laptop wont start properly Plz help
Im2sik said: The samsung r519 is a bit rubbish as it starts to go slow and the fan heats too much and the mouse starts to be comes non reactive after a year and some parts come off a bit