Samsung ATIV Book 6 Notebook Review

Performance-wise, the Samsung ATIV Book 6 handled itself very well. In every benchmark we ran, the ATIV 6 ended up outperforming many of the ultra-books we've tested recently, though it couldn't quite catch some of the more powerful gaming-oriented machines. That's what we expected, however, since the ATIV 6 is aimed at mainstream consumers. The ATIV 6 is more powerful than your average thin-and-light machine, but obviously it's not on the level of bona fide gaming rigs that ship from Alienware and the like.


The Samsung ATIV 6 is designed to address all of the needs of mainstream notebook consumers looking for a relatively powerful notebook. With a mid-sized 15.6" panel, decent battery life (for its size), a discrete GPU for occasional gaming sessions, and a peppy CPU, the ATIV 6 can handle just about anything you throw its way. The design is also meant for the masses. It's sleek, understated, and rugged. The ATIV Book 6's aluminum frame is sturdy and remains cool to the touch, and while the numeric keypad leads to a cramped keyboard area, Samsung spruced things up by incorporating a backlight in there. Plus, the extra-wide, gesture-enabled trackpad is better than most Windows trackpads in terms of responsiveness and accuracy.

Essentially, this is a safe-bet machine. You could hand it to just about any Windows user, and it would probably satisfy them. It wouldn't blow anyone away, but it gets the job done well. The issue, however, is that Samsung may have cut a few too many corners for it to stand out in the crowded 15 inch laptop market. The touch-enabled LCD is very reflective and the included hard drive was somewhat sluggish. Yes, 1TB is a lot of space, but the spindle speed (5400RPM) makes the drive and system seem slow compared to more nimble offerings on the market today. In 2013, no laptop priced over $1000 should ship solely with a 5400RPM hard drive in our opinion. We would've preferred an SSD with one-quarter of the space, to be honest.


The ATIV Book 6 comes close to being an exceptional mid-range machine. It's classy, beautiful, offers good battery life, and has the potential to serve as a potent content creation machine or even a medium-duty gaming rig. But its exceptionally reflective LCD and the sluggish 5400RPM hard drive detracted from the experience for us. At around $1100, we simply expected a more fluid performance across the board. With that said, the Samsung ATIV 6 is good looking, sports a host of relatively powerful components, and it's built well too. It's not a home run, but the ATIV 6 is worth a look if you're in the market for a larger, touch-enabled notebook that'll be equally adept at running Office applications as it is playing mainstream game titles.