Samsung Series 5 Chromebook Review

Because it's impossible to install our standard benchmarking tools -- things like SiSoftware Sandra, 3DMark, PCMark, etc. -- we were forced to use only web-based benchmarks. This is also the very first Chrome OS notebook (or machine of any kind, actually) that we have tested, so there's no real baseline to reference. The Series 5 is blazing its own course, and will serve to set the baseline for future Chrome OS machines.

Because the browser is the only playing field, we were forced to simply benchmark the Chrome browser. We ran it through a few of our favorite browser benchmarks (Sunspider, Acid3, PeaceKeeper, etc.) and have the results displayed below. It's important to remember that no Chromebook will be a powerhouse. Your video playback will be limited to YouTube clips. Your gaming playback will be limited to the likes of Angry Birds, and other titles that are lightweight enough to actually run within a Web browser. That said, a few numbers are better than none, so here goes.

Preliminary Testing with Peacekeeper Synthetic Benchmarks

Preliminary Testing with V8 Benchmark Synthetic Benchmarks

As more anecdotal testing on the Series 5's hardware, we opened up four YouTube HD (720p) tabs and played them at the same time. The machine pretty much slowed to a crawl. In other words, don't do that. When we closed all but one, that one played back perfectly smooth. You may think that's no big deal, but it wasn't that long ago that some netbooks couldn't handle 720p content without stuttering somewhat. Sadly, a 1080p YouTube clip proved too intense for the machine, and we couldn't watch it without a significant amount of stuttering.

We also made it to 20 open tabs before we felt the machine begin to crawl. We highly doubt you'll find yourself in scenarios where having 20 open tabs full of useful data is necessary, but at least it's possible.