Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro Review: Stellar Internals Craving for Better Thermals

Samsung has been making laptops for many years now. Even though the laptops always looked elegant, performance wasn’t the company’s strong point. However, that changed last year when Samsung launched the Galaxy Book2 Pro, a more powerful and portable laptop for the masses, but it still had some weaknesses.

A year later, building upon last year’s offering, Samsung has launched a successor to the Galaxy Book2 Pro. It’s called the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro, and it features interesting hardware and addresses some of the shortcomings of the Galaxy Book2 Pro.

But this new package also comes with an increased price tag. Considering the number of options available from other brands in this price range, is the increased price of the Galaxy Book3 Pro justified, and is it the right laptop for you? Our Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro review should help answer that.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro: Design and Build

At first sight, the Galaxy Book3 Pro looks similar to the previous model, with a clean and minimal design and a subtle off-centered Samsung branding engraved on the top of the outer lid. However, the choice of material used in both models is what separates them.

While the Book2 Pro had a magnesium chassis, its successor uses aluminum. Not only does this make the Galaxy Book3 Pro stronger and sturdier, but it also gives it a more premium finish. Sure, the design may feel a little dated to some. But if you prefer clean designs on your laptops, you’ll surely like the Book3 Pro.

Samsung offers the Book3 Pro in just one color, Graphite. If you fancy hue on laptops, this might disappoint you a little. While I don’t mind the color, it annoys me that it easily attracts fingerprints and smudges.

One thing I like about the Galaxy Book3 Pro’s design is that it’s pretty thin and light: even though Samsung has used aluminum for the laptop chassis this time around, it’s still light and more portable than most laptops. Our unit, which is the 14-inch model, is only 11.3mm thick, the same as the MacBook Air (2022). And it weighs just about 1.17 kilograms, which makes it lighter than even the MacBook Air. If you commute every day and work on the go, the Galaxy Book3 Pro will serve you well.

Coming back to the build, Samsung’s decision to offer an aluminum chassis on the Galaxy Book3 Pro makes it feel solid and sturdy, as I already mentioned. Its hinge works fine, too, albeit it does add some wobble to the lid, which is apparent, for instance, when adjusting the screen angle or using the laptop in a moving car. Opening the lid is easy, but it does take a while to get used to before you can do it single-handedly.

As for the rest of the stuff, the Galaxy Book3 Pro has two speaker grills along the left and right edges of the top case. It has a large vent in the upper half of the back panel for the fans to expel warm air and keep the laptop running cool. This makes using the Book3 Pro, just like any other laptop with an air vent at the bottom, an unpleasant experience.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro: I/O and Connectivity

Even though the Galaxy Book3 Pro is thin, Samsung’s managed to fit in an assortment of I/O on the laptop. To begin with, you get a full-size HDMI 2.0 port along the left edge, which is a valuable addition that can make your life easier if you mostly use your laptop hooked to an external monitor. Below the HDMI port sit two Thunderbolt 4 ports to facilitate charging, attaching USB Type-C devices, and quick file transfer.

Switch over to the right side, and you’ll have a USB 3.2 Type-A port. It’s good to see Samsung offering this port on the laptop, as you can use it to attach accessories, like the USB receiver of an external mouse, directly to the laptop. Eliminating the need for external accessories further, Samsung also includes a microSD card slot on the Galaxy Book3 Pro. It works really well and can come in handy when there’s a need to move files from your camera to your laptop, for example. Last but not least, Samsung also includes a 3.5mm jack on the Galaxy Book3 Pro. And thanks to it, you can easily attach audio accessories, like your favorite pair of wired headphones, to the laptop without an adapter.

Among other things, the laptop comes with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1, so you’re covered with the latest standards in terms of connectivity.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro: Keyboard and Trackpad

Samsung uses chicklet-style keys on the Galaxy Book3 Pro. These keys are flat and have low key travel, and as someone who’s used them would tell you, typing on them isn’t the best experience.

While I didn’t experience a significant drop in my typing speed and accuracy on the Galaxy Book3 Pro keyboard, the typing fatigue did set in after a while due to low key travel. If you’ve used a chicklet keyboard, you’d know what I’m talking about here.

Samsung offers backlit keys on the Galaxy Book3 Pro keyboard, which makes typing in low-lighting conditions easy. It’s also managed to do it well, as there’s no light bleeding around the keys. Additionally, the company gives multiple backlit settings on the laptop, which you can set using the dedicated function key based on your preference.

Samsung also equips the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro with a fingerprint scanner. It’s located in the top-right corner of the keyboard, and it’s quite fast and reliable and makes logging into the laptop easy.

As for the touchpad, it’s a massive one, placed right below the keyboard in the middle of the top case. And while Windows laptops have a bad rap for not having the best touchpads, that isn’t the case with the Galaxy Book3 Pro: Samsung’s done a good job of making the touchpad responsive and clicky. And by offering a large area to work with and including support for a varied set of gestures (customizable), it also simplifies multitasking on the laptop.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro: Camera, Mic, and Speakers

Samsung continues to use a Full HD (1080p) webcam on the Galaxy Book3 Pro, just like its predecessor, and it’s located right in the center of the top bezel. Although the webcam’s fine for video calls, it struggles under low light. A higher-resolution camera would’ve, perhaps, offered a little clearer and sharper quality.

As for the mic, it’s a dual-array mic, which is good, and you can use it for online meetings without any problem. When it comes to the speakers, Samsung’s packed a quad-speaker setup from AKG on the Galaxy Book3 Pro. It includes two 5W woofers, two 2W tweeters, and an amp. In addition, there’s also support for Dolby Atmos.

I was underwhelmed with Galaxy Book3 Pro’s speaker system. While the speakers get sufficiently loud, the bass lacks the punch, so listening to songs isn’t as much fun. Considering the laptop’s price, this isn’t passable, as many laptops in this price range, like the MacBook Air, for example, offer good-sounding speakers.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro: Display

The display is one of the areas where Samsung’s made great strides on the Galaxy Book3 Pro compared to the previous generation. Unlike the Galaxy Book2 Pro, its successor gets slightly bigger displays: 14 inches over 13.3 inches, similar to 16 inches instead of 15.6 inches. Not just that, but it also gets an improved screen resolution and aspect ratio.

What still remains, though, are asymmetric bezels: the top bezel is slightly bigger than the left and right bezels since it houses the webcam, and the bottom chin, due to all the cable and other connectors, still remains quite big. Our unit is the 14-inch model, which delivers a screen resolution of 2880×1800 pixels. It’s a beautiful and sharp display with bright and vibrant colors. And since it’s an AMOLED, the contrast levels are also excellent, not to mention the AMOLED also helps reduce battery usage.

Samsung says the display can reach a peak brightness of 400 nits. While it may seem on the lower side compared to the likes of the Apple MacBook Air (2022) at 500 nits, I didn’t notice any issues with it, even in outdoor settings—albeit the glare can affect your experience, so it’s best to use the laptop under a shade. The color gamut is also impressive, and you get multiple color profile options so that you can choose one based on your preference. You get good viewing angles, too, and I didn’t notice any color shift during my time with the laptop.

Another noteworthy addition to the Galaxy Book3 Pro’s display is the 120Hz refresh rate. Although some suggest refresh rates don’t matter much, they do, and you’ve to use one to realize the difference it makes. By default, Samsung has set the display on the Book3 Pro to use a dynamic refresh rate, wherein it automatically switches between 60Hz and 120Hz as required. But, if you wish to use 120Hz throughout, you’ll need to change that under the display settings.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro: Performance

Performance is the most crucial metric to consider when buying a laptop. The Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro gets a significant upgrade in this department, too, with the company switching things up on the inside by including new processors and an even bigger 1TB storage option. Samsung sent us the Galaxy Book3 Pro with an Intel Core i7-1360P processor (with Iris Xe Graphics), 16GB LPDDR5 RAM, and 512GB SSD, so my review will only be limited to its performance.

The Core i7-1360P is the latest 13th-gen offering from Intel. It comes with four performance cores and eight efficiency cores, which take charge depending on the task, and offers a maximum performance-core frequency of 5.0GHz. Ideally, this should mean that the Galaxy Book3 Pro must be capable of handling pretty much any task you throw at it without any hitch. However, that wasn’t the case in my usage.

For instance, on weekdays, when I mostly do browser work (researching, filing stories, etc.), along with checking and replying to emails, keeping up with Slack conversations, and editing images in GIMP, the Galaxy Book3 Pro got warm within 15-20 minutes of use, and I was surprised to see the fans kicking in so early.

Despite getting warm, though, the Book3 Pro didn’t stutter at all and ran everything smoothly. So, to push it further, I hooked it to an external monitor and opened more tabs and a few windows in Firefox. I also had music playing in the background on Spotify. This stressed the laptop a little more and made it even warmer, and this time, the fan noise also became more apparent. No noticeable performance drop yet, but the RAM consumption was almost at 60%.

Meanwhile, during weekends, my workload got more intense, with things like a Linux virtual machine (inside VirtualBox) and a couple of code editors (mostly Visual Studio Code) running alongside a few other apps on the Book3 Pro. I still had 8-10 tabs open in Firefox, and occasionally, I also edited some pictures in Lightroom Classic.

Considering this workload, I decided to switch on the Performance mode on the Book3 Pro to extract the most performance. However, things went south very quickly from here. The performance took a hit this time, as Firefox failed to keep tabs in memory on a couple of instances, and the VirtualBox software crashed in the middle once.

Moreover, the memory consumption was around 75% now, and the laptop had become way too hot. It’d reached a point where typing on the keyboard and using the touchpad felt unpleasant. By this time, the fans also got louder, and it wasn’t until I closed a few tabs and a couple of apps that things returned to normal. Mind you; the laptop was on a desk all this time. All things considered, I can’t imagine (and wouldn’t recommend) using the Galaxy Book3 Pro on the lap owing to the overheating problem.

To sum it up, I’ll say the Galaxy Book3 Pro is a good laptop for regular productivity tasks. It can serve you well if you mostly work out of a browser and have a few less/moderate resource-hungry apps running in the background. But in no way is it a Pro machine, as its name suggests. We say this because of two reasons. One, when you think of a laptop with a Pro moniker, you expect it to be adept at handling even the most resource-intensive tasks with ease—that too, without overheating. In the case of the Galaxy Book3 Pro, though, the thermal flaws hold it back quite a bit, and it’s something that wouldn’t result in a sustained performance under intensive workloads.

We feel if Samsung opted for a U-series processor instead of a P-series one, the Galaxy Book3 Pro would’ve delivered better with its form factor without compromising much on the performance. Alternatively, Samsung should’ve done better with heat management to contain the heat and get the best out of the current processor under the hood.

And two, the Galaxy Book3 Pro comes with integrated graphics. As such, it’s hard to imagine it performing well under creative workloads like video editing. Needless to say, you can’t play any graphics-intensive titles on the laptop, as well.

Among other things, the Galaxy Book3 Pro is Evo-certified, which means it boots up faster and wakes up from sleep almost instantly.

Benchmarks and Tests

While we don’t think it’s ideal to evaluate a laptop’s performance based on only synthetic benchmarks, it’s one thing that still matters to some people. And combined with day-to-day experience, it can help one make an informed purchase decision.

Here’s how the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro performs on some of the popular benchmark tests.

1. Geekbench 6

Geekbench 6 is a popular benchmark program that gives you an idea about your device’s CPU and GPU performance. In our CPU benchmark test, the Galaxy Book3 Pro scored a single-core score of 2373 and a multi-core score of 6479. GPU score, on the other hand, was 12701.

2. CrossMark

On the CrossMark benchmark, which tries to evaluate overall system performance with the help of real-world applications, the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro managed to score 697.

3. Cinebench

Cinebench is another popular benchmark program. It relies on a number of real-world tests to evaluate a machine’s performance capabilities. In our Cinebench benchmark test, the Galaxy Book3 Pro scored 686 points in single-core and 6632 points in multi-core tests.

4. CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is an open-source benchmark tool for assessing a drive’s performance. The Galaxy Book3 Pro returned sequential read and write speeds of 5036.42 MB/s and 3981.46 MB/s, respectively.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro: Software Experience

The Galaxy Book3 Pro runs Windows 11 Home. Combined with its hardware, the performance here is exemplary, as it should be, given its price. I had no issues with the software during the testing period.

However, there’s one thing to note here: Samsung bundles a bunch of its apps on the Galaxy Book3 Pro, which may be a good or a bad thing, depending on which smartphone you use. It’s kind of like an ecosystem thing—similar to what Apple offers on its devices—but slightly less mature. If you don’t use a Samsung phone or wish to uninstall these Samsung apps, you should be able to do so from the Samsung Update app.

I use the Galaxy S23 Ultra (review) as my primary device, and I found these features and some of the Samsung apps (the ones I use) on offer here very useful. Quick Sharing, for one, is a nifty feature that makes moving files between the laptop and a Samsung smartphone super convenient. Similarly, the Book3 Pro also comes with Samsung Flow, which lets you use your phone from the laptop to see and respond to notifications. Then, there’s the one-touch hotspot feature that allows you to get the Book3 Pro connected to the internet using your phone’s internet within seconds, among others. You also get the ability to control your phone’s screen right from the laptop’s touchpad.

All that said, there’s one gripe I have with the software experience on the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro. It’s got to do with the McAfee antivirus app, which comes pre-installed and keeps pestering you with notifications while you’re in the middle of something. It’s uninstallable, though, should you wish to do it.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro: Battery Life

Samsung includes a 76Wh battery on the Galaxy Book3 Pro. In my usage, which I’ve mentioned in the performance section, the battery lasted around 6 hours on a single charge, which is average, but your mileage may vary depending on how you use your laptop.

At times when I switched to Balanced mode, I was able to get over 6 hours of screen-on-time on the Galaxy Book3 Pro. And when it ran out of juice, the 65W charger bundled with the Book3 Pro offered a quick top-up.

Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro Review Verdict

Samsung offers the Galaxy Book3 Pro in two screen sizes and a few other configurations than the one we’ve tested. However, we’ll talk about the model we have here—14-inch, i7-1360P, 16GB RAM, and 512TB SSD, which is available for Rs 1,34,990 / $1818.

At Rs 1,39,990, the Galaxy Book3 Pro is an expensive laptop. Sure, it’s got premium looks, is portable, has a very good display, and a good I/O selection, among other things, but it fails to get the most out of the capable processor under the hood owing to the laptop’s poor thermals, which makes it hard to recommend it at this price.

That’s not to say the laptop performs badly. It’s just that it doesn’t qualify to be called a Pro with such a glaring issue, not to mention the integrated graphics can be a bottleneck if you plan on using it for demanding creative tasks. Of course, you can get day-to-day office tasks on it done without any problem, but then again, for the price that it comes at, there are other laptops in the market that offer better value for money.

For example, in and around the price point of the Galaxy Book3 Pro, the Asus ZenBook S13 OLED, for one, is a good option, with its long battery life. Similarly, the Dell XPS13 is another solid laptop that you can consider; it’s not that hefty and is still a solid and reliable performer. Alternatively, if you don’t mind switching to the Apple side of things, there’s the MacBook Air (2022), which delivers unparalleled performance and can last you longer than most Windows laptops.

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