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One thing that sets Samsung’s budget laptops apart from the competition is their style. Even when you’re spending around £500, you can guarantee the laptop will look fantastic. The RV720 is no exception, with its gunmetal grey finish and stylish two-tone chassis. Take a closer look though, and it’s clear this isn’t a case of style over substance.
The 17in chassis is certainly imposing, but also helps make the RV720 incredibly user-friendly; there’s ample space around the keyboard tray, even with a full-size keyboard and separate numerical keypad. The keys themselves have quite short travel times but plenty of spring, providing lots of tactile feedback. We did notice some slight flex in the keyboard tray, but only when we applied significant pressure; during normal use, we had no trouble.
The touchpad below the keyboard is a good size, although we would have liked to have seen slightly more horizontal space to match the widescreen display. A smooth plastic finish creates minimal friction and the two physical buttons felt firm, creating an audible click with each press. The row of lights directly underneath the touchpad indicate power, disk and wireless activity, keeping the number of flashing LEDs to a stylish minimum.
Aside from the internal DVD re-writer, connectivity was slightly disappointing: three USB ports, of which none support the faster USB3 standard, and a multi-format card reader are all you get.
The RV720 is well suited to multimedia playback, thanks to its huge 750GB hard disk for a large media collection and a bright 17.3in display. Once you’ve loaded your files, you’ll be able to enjoy them on the 1,60×900 glossy display, which looks very sharp. Colours looked very vibrant, and although contrast wasn’t the greatest, we could still enjoy films and catch-up TV. Viewing angles were about average, but there was enough screen tilt that we could always find the ideal angle for the best image. A pair of speakers above the keyboard tray produces decent enough audio, although still no match for a dedicated external set.
Like most budget 17in laptops, the RV720 uses an entry-level Core i3 processor to keep costs low. The Core i3-2310M used here runs at 2.1GHz, which is fast enough for most tasks, especially when paired with 4GB of RAM. However, it lacks the Turbo Boost ability of faster, more expensive i5 CPUs. This came across in our multimedia benchmarks, where the RV720 managed an overall score of 42. While this is by no means slow, it does fall behind similarly priced Core i5 laptops.
Without a dedicated graphics card, the CPU’s integrated graphics chip has to take over video rendering duties. This is fine for drawing the Windows desktop, and even playing high definition video, but it can’t cope with modern games. Our Dirt 3 test struggled along with a poor average frame rate of just 13.5fps.
Unsurprisingly for a laptop with a 17in screen, battery life wasn’t exactly stellar. Just under four and a half hours in our light use test shows that the RV720 isn’t well suited to a life on the move and you’ll have to keep the power brick to hand, although it is refreshingly small and light.
You’re unlikely to buy a 17in laptop if you want something portable, which makes concerns such as battery life less of an issue. For something designed to sit at a desk, the RV720 is a great all-round laptop that looks like it’s a lot more expensive. If you want a large screen, there are very few alternatives out there that are quite such good value.
