Pigs do fly even outside of Pink Floyd concerts, apparently. There’s no question that Samsung builds high-end TVs and clever Android phones, but high-end laptops? Not so much. Although to be fair, the Korean giant has been stretching the boundaries lately with a MacBook Air competitor called Series 9 that looks absolutely delicious, but with a low-voltage CPU and integrated graphics it’s hardly a gamer’s best friend.
Otherwise, durable mainstream laptops and netbooks would sufficiently describe Samsung’s lineup so far, but this is about to change. TweakTown reports from GamesCon 2011 in Germany that Samsung is entering the fray with a Series 7 gaming laptop, which appears to be equipped with some really interesting hardware. A quad-core Core i7 CPU is included and the graphics are handled by the capable AMD Mobility Radeon HD 6970M that should put it on par with the equivalent configuration of the mighty Alienware M17x among others.
It looks like it borrows heavily from the new MSI GT 780R as far as the design goes, and there’s even mention of some sort of performance boost feature that is also one of MSI’s main attractions. The keyboard is nicely backlit with highlighted W,A,S,D keys to further emphasize that this is a gaming machine. It also comes with a Blu-ray player, 16GB of RAM and 1.5TB of hard drive space spread across two drives.
What is perhaps even more important is that the Series 7 laptop uses Intel’s brand new Smart Response technology–a hybrid SSD solution that is built into the motherboard. Just like the current SSD/HDD hybrids from Seagate, Intel Smart Repsonse works like a cache that stores the most frequently used files for quick access.
