 Welcome to a very exciting unboxing. Samsung's fairly new at the gaming notebook game. However, they've been doing notebooks for a while. They're obviously very experienced when it comes to a lot of aspects of IT, especially manufacturing. So I'm very excited to check out the English side of the packaging here on the 700 series NP-700G7C. This is the S01 and the particular spec is it is a 17-inch notebook with Windows 7 Home Premium, a Core i7-3610QM, this is an Ivy Bridge CPU, hence the 3 at the beginning of the part number, a 17.3-inch full HD 400-nit LCD screen, a GTX 675M with 2 gigs of GDDR5, so that is not your grandmother's graphics card, 16 gigs of DDR3 memory, as well as a Blu-ray player, gigabit LAN, as well as 802.11 ABGN and Bluetooth 4.0. This is a black gaming notebook. It has an illuminated keyboard and I believe it also has a 1.5 terabyte drive inside it. So let us take a look-see at what we will find. First, we have accessories in a very plain brown box that, oh, this is not what I would have typically expected to find in terms of sort of packaging strategy. This is a very strange shape. I'm really not sure what they were going for here. I know that's slick, but I just don't understand how this fits in here. Okay, well, no, see, that didn't even go in there. No, it doesn't. Yeah, even then I really don't see it. Okay, forget it. So anyways, we have a power brick, which is a pretty substantial power brick. It's a GTX 675, so it's, yeah, pretty significant. So, how many? 19 volts, 10.5 amps is what they want for this guy. Got a power cable. Not a whole lot in terms of accessories, although that's pretty much to be expected and it's not much that goes with a notebook. We've got a battery, standard battery pack, battery cells made in Korea and assembled in China, 89 watt hours or 5900 milliamp hours. Okay, that's valid. Okay, get started with Windows 7. Don't forget, guys, if you buy a notebook today, you can get a Windows 8 upgrade for nothing. No, not for nothing, for 15 bucks US or something like that. So don't worry about buying a Windows 7 notebook today and not being able to run Windows 8 when it comes. We've got nice soft cell foam here. Again, it's a very strange shape. Why is it bowed like that? See that? See how it's bowed? Why is it bowed? See, this one's bowed too. See, look at it. Did they save money on the foam by having slightly less foam here? Pretty strange. I mean, either way, the notebook arrived in one piece, so we can't really complain. The notebook was in several pieces, then we would definitely, definitely complain. That's very nice, actually. Check this out. So this is a very unique finish. Now, Samsung isn't new to the whole brushed plastic thing, so brushed aluminum-y looking plastic. However, this one has a glossy layer on top of the brushed plastic look with their Samsung logo right there, looking pretty nice as well. This is actual aluminum right here, so that is an actual brushed aluminum finish right there. Although I'm usually a bigger fan of just the plain brushed plastic for a number of reasons, including their being easier to clean. For a gaming notebook even, this is a lot of cooling. Huge cooler here, huge cooler on the other side, even on Asus' G series. I've seen them have two big vents at the back, but one of them is actually just a dummy vent, and there's nothing actually in it in terms of heatsinks. No, this one is serious business about the cooling, because this is, again, not your grandma's notebook. She can't lift it. It is a gaming notebook. It is pretty heavy, and it is pretty thick. There's the old iPhone comparison that you guys are so fond of, and let's see what else we got going on here. Should we boot it up first, or should we... Here, let's put the battery in really quick. The battery goes here. Okay, it locks into place. All right, let's flip her over. Let's see what we've got in terms of easy upgradability. These ones look like they don't come off too easy. This one looks like it comes off pretty easy, so I see... Yeah, I can't tell what I see in there, so let's flip it back over. Okay, so let's boot her up. Let's see how much of a charge comes on the battery. Ooh, look how nice it is. I'm very fond of this. Maybe I'll get one for my birthday. Probably not. Let's go ahead and take all the plasticky bits off. Look at that backlight keyboard. That is gorgeous. All right, so while it's booting up, we can have a look at what we've got in terms of... Oh, man, look at that. Here. Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself here, but look how awesome that is. Can you see how awesome it is? Dead sexy. Very bright. Very nice. Okay. All right, I.O. So there's your Blu-ray drive. There's your USB 2 port. Here's another more different USB 2 port. This knob right here is for gaming mode, balance mode, energy saving mode, and then I think that's probably normal mode. So you just go like that to switch between all the different power modes. It's pretty cool. So we're going to put it in balance mode for now. Okay. On the front, we find not a whole lot other than a power LED as well as a hard drive indicator LED. Oh, no, I don't think that's what that is at all. I don't know what that is. Okay. So along we've got on the back, ventilation, and on the left, the bulk of our I.O. So here we find our Kensington lock, our power input, our gigabit LAN, VGA, HDMI, and display port. Lots of different options here. Two USB 3 super speed ports, an SD card reader, microphone, and headphone jack. So that is a very vibrant display as well. Viewing angles not bad. Color doesn't distort too much. Actually, that's not bad at all. My language is definitely English, so let's go with that. Okay. You cannot change your language later. Ha ha. So let's go demo. Press next. Type a password. Okay. Look away. Okay. And hint. Oh, that's not a very good hint at all. Okay. So you can accept license terms, which I have of course speed read through really fast because that's an important part of making sure that you accept license terms properly. Okay. So here we go. So we've got lots of different sort of like sexy stuff going on in here that like apparently like it's like muted now or I don't know. Is this like a wheel? We'll have to figure that out. Okay. So we've got speakers here. We've got like turbo buttony thing going on here. There's our hard drive indicator, LED. There's our caps lock indicator. Power button's here. More speakers here. And what happened to that backlit keyboard? It looks so good. Oh, there we go. Oh my goodness. Touch sensitive button. So sexy. So that's your, is that your mute button? I don't know, but I like this one. Oh yeah. So cool. Okay. So we've got lots of different hot keys with the functions. So brightness up down. Looks like control panel, external display, turning the touch pad off. Apparently it has software on it that will automatically turn the touch pad off and turn the windows key off. I don't know if you're playing a game, so I don't know how well that works because I haven't tried it, but this looks like it's probably the keyboard LED backlight. How bright do you want it or how not bright do you want it? Given that all the software isn't loaded, like probably all this functionality isn't necessarily working yet. That's something to do with fans and that's turning wireless on and off, although there is a dedicated button for that as well. So why don't we give it a few minutes to boot up here and then we'll come back to this. So we took this off to find out what was under it, not realizing that it was of course clearly labeled optical, hard drive, and memory. So down here, check this out, we've got two memory DIMMs. Each of these are 4 gigs, so that means there's probably two more under the keyboard. That's a very common configuration. And then we've got two hard drives. You can also remove the optical drive with this screw right here. So you could actually remove one of these 750 gig drives, which are probably in RAID 0, I would assume, although that's the least wise possible thing to do in a notebook. In my personal opinion, I would go with an SSD and a hard drive for mass storage. But yeah, so I would take one of those out, throw it in an external enclosure, and get yourself a 750 gig drive out of the deal and then reinstall your OS onto an SSD drive. That is the way to go. I love notebooks that have multiple hard drive installations. That is one long screw. As it gives you the option to have the best of both worlds, SSD and HDD. So we have the system, I think, pretty much booted up. Thank you, but we're good. Set the touchpad in Windows Key Game option mode. Okay, that's cool. Gaming mode dial, brilliant graphics card, fast booting. Okay, all right. So they actually, that is a very cool desktop background, but this is not a cool mouse pointer. Yeah, Samsung, just no. You may not do that. Okay, let's try some more of the buttons and stuff. So let's try the turbo button. Okay, we'll have to find out how that works. So let's finish up the physical attributes of it. There's your microphone. So if you were, say, for example, web camming it up with somebody with the included webcam, then you could make sure that you sort of talk sort of close to that. That would be good. Okay, all of these buttons are working now that we're actually loaded into the OS. So you can see brightness goes up and brightness goes down. Keyboard brightness, actually, this will be more evident with the lights a little bit lower in here. Keyboard brightness can also be turned up or down. There you go. So it's all the way down and it's all the way up and all the way up looks really good. So cool. Okay, moving right along. Turbo, it turns out, is just like an LED. Okay, this does mute it. Okay, so you can see over here, mute, not mute. Okay, the wireless one. Okay, all of that stuff seems pretty good. Built-in full keypad, full number pad. Honestly, the keyboard feels pretty good. There's very little flex to it and the keys feel really, really nice. The system also seemed really responsive and I was kind of going to slick. I was like, well, does it have an SSD cache? Oh, it looks like they have these configured, not in RAID. So just two separate drives and then they're using, they are using an SSD cache to cache the boot drive. So that's 8 gigs of SSD caching, which you can see here from the Samsung iSSD. So that's really cool. Love to see that. SSD caching is awesome and it should be used absolutely everywhere. Yeah, yeah, don't worry, I haven't forgotten. Nice big touch pad, left and right buttons. All of this is pretty much to be expected and I think that pretty much covers it in terms of, you know, overall build quality feels really good actually. The weight's a little high, but what can, it's a gaming notebook. What can I really tell you? So let's show you guys the different modes here. So if you switch to balanced mode, you can see that the actual desktop background does change and it goes into, you know, well more of a balanced configuration. So we switch into whatever mode that is here. Let's find out what that mode is because I was sure we still had it. Did you just call it library mode? Because I don't think that's what it is. Honestly called library mode. Okay, then library mode. Guess it's for like reading and then the last mode is eco-friendly mode, which is the most power saving one. So if you're in balanced mode, the silence button actually works. So if you go here and here, you can go into silent mode, which incidentally makes it run very quiet. Now we're going to turn silent mode off and I'm going to show you guys like the coolest thing ever. Check this out. So we're going to go back into gaming mode. Hold on, hold on, you have to watch me hit the switch. We'll just go back so they can see everything. See, I'm going to hit the switch. Oh, it's muted. Okay, we have to, oh, we have to do it again. Okay, so we go back to balanced mode and then here, hold on, I'm going to turn it up. Dramatic pause. Oh yeah, gaming mode. By the way, your battery might run out quickly if you don't plug in AC power in gaming mode and you actually play games. So that sort of goes without saying. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at Samsung's Series 7 gaming notebook. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.