Samsung unveils Ivy Bridge powered notebook too early

Unless Intel has decided to move the launch of its Ivy Bridge processors forward, Samsung is getting way ahead of itself as the company had put up one of its Ivy Bridge powered notebooks – the NP700G7C – on its US website yesterday. Beyond having an Ivy Bridge processor, the 17.3-inch notebook also sports Nvidia 600-series mobile graphics.

The product page has since then been pulled, but thanks to Google's cache the details are still available. As for the notebook, it's part of Samsung's 7-series, although there seems to either be a mistake in the specifications, or Samsung posted the wrong pictures as the key count for the keyboard doesn't add up. That aside, we're looking at a fully loaded notebook here with a Core i7-3610QM quad core CPU clocked at 2.3GHz with 6MB of L3 cache, 16GB of RAM (using four 4GB modules) and a pair of 1TB hard drives in RAID with the addition of Samsung's ExpressCache which adds 8GB of on-board flash memory as an SSD caching solution.

As mentioned, we're looking at a 17.3-inch screen and the good news here is that it means 1920x1080
resolution. The GPU in question is a GeForce GTX 675M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, although it's unclear in this point in time as to where in Nvidia's new line-up this GPU will end up. Other features include a Blu-ray drive, 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi with WiDi support, Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet, an HDMI port, a Samsung specific connector for a D-sub adapter, two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port, a memory card reader, a headphone/mic combo jack, a 2Megapixel webcam and finally there's a backlit keyboard.

Samsung has also thrown in an 8-cell battery, but there's no mention of how long this will keep the notebook going away from a power socket. That said at 3.8kg, this isn't a notebook you're going to want to lug around with you for too long. For the pleasure of owning this loaded out notebook, Samsung is asking for Ł1,299.99  which isn't what we'd call the bargain of the day, but it doesn't sound like a terrible deal considering what you get for your money.