Samsung Galaxy Book Ultra4

Few have come closer to delivering a "Windows MacBook" than Samsung, but as we have stated several times over the years, while their Galaxy Fold has been a slow, iterative, but steady march towards something quite significant, which now finally feels realised with the Fold7, the development of the Galaxy Book computers has been more uneven.

The Galaxy Book Ultra4, for example, is not exactly the latest craze and is actually last year's model, but even though we are a little late to the party, it's striking how much Samsung has actually nailed the basics here and how far they have come in certain areas.

The construction itself is stunning. The matte grey surface works brilliantly and gives the machine a professional look, with a large, stylish trackpad and a fantastic keyboard with a numpad, too. It also weighs 1.86 kilograms, which is quite impressive across the board, and that's without sacrificing any essential ports. You get two Thunderbolt 4 ports, USB-A, HDMI 2.1, WI-FI 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3. There's nothing missing as such.

The display is also nice, but here we encounter a fundamental flaw. Yes, it's 16 inches, yes, it's an AMOLED WQXGA+ panel at 2880x1800, and yes, it's 120Hz, and that's all good news. Furthermore, technically speaking, it's a 16:10 panel, but nevertheless, perhaps due to the size of the chassis, there is a "chin" at the bottom that does nothing but house a Samsung logo, which seems like a waste. But that doesn't mean the display is poor, on the contrary.

With up to an Intel Core Ultra 9-185H and an RTX 4070, and 64GB LPDDR5x RAM, you also get performance for your money. No, it doesn't come close to the Asus ProArt PX16, which offers the latest 50-series GPUs from Nvidia, but you should be able to get Samsung's model a little cheaper, and there are aspects where a Book Ultra4 is lighter and performs better.

Because even though the Book Ultra4 doesn't beat the ProArt PX16 in benchmarks, which makes sense since they are a generation apart, we actually squeezed over 12 hours out of a single charge with light office-related tasks. Yes, if you push the machine, its endurance drops dramatically, just like with Asus, but there is a striking difference in the way these machines generate heat, noise, and battery consumption, all to Samsung's advantage.

As mentioned, it may make less sense to test the Galaxy Book Ultra 4's performance, as this is a machine from last year that we only got our hands on very late, but given that many people probably buy this for particularly creative tasks, we ran a small suite of tests anyway.

Geekbench 6

• Single-core: 2452


• Multi-core: 12469

3DMark:

• Night Raid: 35909


• Fire Strike: 17790

Time Spy:

• 8029

Handbrake video (4K to 1080p):

In this context, we saw that the CPU remained surprisingly cool, albeit with Samsung's own built-in TDP for both CPU and GPU, which certain other media outlets say has limited performance slightly. We saw just under 40 degrees, which is noticeable, of course, but not burning hot, and even though the noise level was around 45 decibels, it was a fairly pleasant noise without the "coil whine" that Kim here in the office has demonstrated, which is far more annoying over longer periods.

The Galaxy Book Ultra4 is basically an excellent idea, and they are dangerously close to matching Apple here. Perhaps it would be better if Samsung attempted a slight redesign of the chassis to emphasise that the Ultra version is something a little different - slightly softer edges, perhaps - but regardless, you get performance, battery life, and robustness for your money.