The optical disk drive is the only thing not included in the laptop's design

Feb 22, 2013 08:06 GMT  ·  By

As far as laptops go, the Series 7 Chronos is one that earned quite a bit of attention when it was introduced during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013), and with good reason, as we've just found out.

The device has been listed on Best Buy. This event has disclosed, or confirmed as the case may be, two essential things about it.

Firstly, the mobile personal computer has very high performance capabilities. Secondly, it is very expensive, with a tag of $1,200 / 908-1,200 Euro.

The hardware more or less justifies the price, though customers will have to decide on their own if they can afford or feel comfortable spending so much on a mobile PC.

That said, the screen is a 15.6-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) with integrated touch support.

An Intel Core i7-3635QM central processing unit (CPU) acts as the beating heart of the system, with its four cores (eight threads), clock speed of 2.4 GHz (3.4 GHz Turbo Boost) and 6 MB of cache memory.

This CPU is backed by no less than 8 GB of DDR3 RAM (random access memory). Sooner or later, other versions of the laptop with less RAM and maybe a weaker CPU might show up, but this is the only one in the US for now.

Then there is the AMD Radeon HD 8870M GPU (graphics processing unit). While Samsung could have settled for just the integrated chip in the CPU, this is not an ultrabook or low-end PC. It is a high-end one, so it gets the parts that fit that classification.

On that note, the streamlined design is meant to clearly show what kind of product this is supposed to be (aluminum case, smooth finish).

The only component that the company decided not to include is an optical disk drive (DVD, Blu-ray, etc.). It might be a drawback for those who want to watch films from disks, but not to everyone else, since USB 3.0 flash drives and external HDDs/SSDs can substitute for ODDs (assuming owners don't have an external optical unit too).