Samsung unveils 13″ and 14″ Series 5 Ultrabooks – Core i5, HDD+SSD and AMD HD7550M inside, aluminum outside

Samsung made official their Series 5 Ultrabooks – that’s right Ultrabooks, not Chromebooks – in South Korea. While not the thinnest or lightest, they pack some mouth-watering specs.

The Series 5 Ultrabooks come in two sizes, 13″ and 14″, but the difference between them is more than just an inch.

The 14″ model has a body carved out of aluminum that is 20.9mm thick and weighs in at 1.8kg. The screen has 1366×768 pixels resolution and anti-reflective coating (hooray!).

The internals are pretty impressive – an Intel Core i5 CPU (no info on the model, unfortunately), up to 8GB of RAM, AMD HD7550M GPU, 1TB HDD, 16GB SSD for Samsung’s ExpressCache technology and an optical drive. The 14″ model also features an assortment of ports – USB (no idea whether its 2.0 or 3.0), Ethernet, VGA and HDMI.

The 13″ model has a screen with the same resolution and coating, but drops the dedicated GPU (relying instead on the CPU-hosted Intel GPU) and optical drive to reduce its overall dimensions to 14.9mm thickness and 1.4kg of weight.

You still get a Core i5 CPU and up to 8GB of RAM. The hard drive is 500GB big, but it’s still paired with a 16GB SSD for ExpressCache. The 13″ model has the same USB, Ethernet, VGA and HDMI ports.

ExpressCache was introduced in the Series 7 laptops and uses the SSD to speed up the performance of the hard drive – waking from hibernation takes just 7 seconds with this technology. Another technology, FastStart, wakes the ultrabook from sleep in 2 seconds.

The Series 5 Ultrabooks will be available in South Korea by the end of the this year for $1300 for the 13″ model and $1170-$1340 (depending on configuration). There’s no info right now if (and when) the two will be available outside of Korea.

Source | Via