A trim soldier ready for battle
ATIV's Book 9 Lite falters in the memory department, but for most purposes, it's ready to roll
The ATIV Book 9 Lite is a slim and light notebook computer with a high-definition touch screen that lets you work conveniently on the go.
Book 9 Lite comes in a sleek black body that’s only 17.4mm thin and weighs just 1.58kg, so you can comfortably carry it around for working on your Office documents, reading Web pages, checking mail and watching videos.
It comes with a 13.3 HD LED-backlit display with 1,366 x 768 pixel resolution, which is good for viewing photos and videos. Its stereo speakers have 1.5 watts x 2 power and the sound system uses SoundAlive technology so the notebook sounds really good for watching movies and listening to music on the go.
Samsung does not give information about the processor, but I learned online that the notebook uses an AMD A6-1450 APU running at 1.4GHz. It is a quad-core processor with an AMD Radeon HD 8250 Graphics processor integrated into the main processor.
And the graphics processor shares the video memory from the main memory of 4 gigabytes that has been installed onboard, so the graphics performance is not outstanding. An application, CPUID of CPU-Z for checking the hardware, reports that the graphics processor shares only 512 megabytes of main memory for graphics and this might be why its graphics performance is not optimised.
So ATIV Book 9 Lite cannot handle extensive graphics games but it can manage casual games fine. Anyway, its graphics processor can handle Photoshop Element 11, whose trial version has been pre-installed.
Book 9 Lite runs on Windows 8 64-bit and its touch-screen works well with the touch-screen functions of Windows 8. The touch-screen is responsive and scrolling smooth.
Book 9 Lite has a good performance for a high-mobility Ultrabook. During my test it started up in 10 seconds. It instantly went into sleep mode when I clicked on the sleep button and exited sleep mode in less than two seconds. It took about three seconds to turn off the screen and about five more seconds to completely shut down when I clicked the power-down button.
Book 9 Lite handled general applications well, although its benchmark scores did not look impressive when assessed with Windows 8’s internal tool.
On a scale of 1.0 to 9.9, it got only 4.5 points for the processor’s performance of calculations per second and 5.5 points for the performance of memory operations per second.
For desktop graphics performance it got 4.1 points and 5.8 points for 3D business and gaming graphics performance.
Anyway, it got an impressive score of 8 points for the performance of disk data transfer rate apparently because it uses 128 gigabytes of Solid-state drive for storage. The SSD drive greatly contributed to start-up, sleep and shutdown speeds.
The notebook comes preinstalled with several useful applications, including Samsung SideSync for synchronising with Samsung Galaxy smart phones and Samsung HomeSync Lite for using the notebook as servers for mobile devices, especially those of Samsung brands. There are also S Player+ for playing video and music files and S PhotoStudio for editing photos.
Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite retails for Bt24,900.
Key specs
_ OS: Windows 8 64-bit
_ Processor: AMD A6 quad-core 1.4 GHz
_ Memoy: 4GB DDR3L System Memory at 1066MHz (on BD 4GB)
_ Display: 13.3" HD LED Display (1366 x 768) with Touch Screen Panel
_ Graphics adapter: AMD Radeon HD 8250 Graphics built into the processor, sharing main memory for graphics memory
_ Storage: 128GB Solid-state Drive
_ Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11bg/n, Bluetooth v4.0, Gigabit Ethernet [10 / 100 / 1000]
_ Web cam: 720p
_ Optical drive: n/a
_ Ports: 1 mini VGA (Adpater type), 1 Micro HDMI, 1 USB3.0, 1 USB2.0 (Sleep-and-Charge), 3-in-1 (SD, SDHC, SDXC) Multi-media Card Reader, 1 Headphone out / Mic-in Combo, 1 mini Ethernet
_ Battery: 2 Cell (30Wh)
_ Dimension: 324 x 224 x 17.4mm
_ Weight: 1.58Kg
