Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 (2024) Laptop Review

The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 is available in a Gray or Silver colorway, though the latter seems to be only in select regions. See the bottom of the laptop.

The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360's build quality is outstanding. Its full-aluminum chassis feels very sturdy, exhibiting little to no flex on the lid or keyboard deck. The display doesn't twist when manipulating it either. The chassis' finish is fairly resistant to scratches and smudges, though the keys and screen pick up oil pretty easily. There are no complaints about the feet—they feel solid and firmly attached to the bottom.

The hinges are outstanding. They feel smooth and sturdy when opening and closing the lid, and they're stable, exhibiting very little wobble when typing heavily. They have a fair amount of resistance, which is typical for a 2-in-1 convertible, but you can still open the lid easily with one hand.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360's serviceability is mediocre, as there isn't much that you can replace. Accessing the internals is straightforward; you only need to remove four screws and release the bottom panel's clips with a thin prying tool. Just be careful when using the prying tool, as there's a risk of damaging the speakers. The screws are under the feet, but the feet aren't glued on, so they're easily removable. The storage slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

You can download the user manual from Samsung's support page.

• 65W power adapter
• USB-C to USB-C charging cable
• Samsung S Pen
• Documentation

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360's display looks very sharp and provides plenty of room for spilt-screen multitasking. Its 16:10 aspect ratio is well suited for productivity, as it gives you slightly more vertical space than a standard 16:9 display, allowing you to see more information when reading a document or website. The only thing to remember is that OLEDs are susceptible to permanent burn-in, so you'll have to take active measures to prevent it, like hiding the taskbar.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360’s OLED display has a 120Hz refresh rate, providing increased input responsiveness and smoother motion than a standard 60Hz display. Its response time is decent, resulting in only a small blur trail behind fast-moving objects. Dynamic Refresh Rate is a battery-saving feature that allows the display to vary the refresh rate depending on your usage, meaning it’ll ramp up the refresh rate to 120Hz when you’re actively navigating the desktop and lower it to 60Hz when the content is static. This feature isn’t the same as G-SYNC or FreeSync, so you’ll likely still see screen tearing when gaming with an uncapped frame rate.

The contrast ratio is effectively infinite since OLEDs can turn off individual pixels to produce perfect blacks.

The Samsung Book 5 Pro 360's display gets bright enough for use in most indoor settings but not outdoors in broad daylight. It’s very dim at the lowest brightness setting, which is great for dark room viewing because it causes less eye strain.

The display's reflection handling is excellent. Its glossy finish does a fantastic job of reducing the intensity of bright light sources, like a lamp or open window during the day. Some reflections can still make dark-color content hard to see, depending on their brightness; however, they aren't really an issue when viewing light-color content.

The display’s horizontal viewing angle is okay. Like most OLED panels, colors shift fairly quickly as you move to the side.

The display’s vertical viewing angle is passable. Again, color shift is the main issue when viewing from above or below. This isn’t a problem if you’re only viewing documents, but you’ll have to look at the screen more or less straight on if you need perfect accuracy for color-critical work.

The display's accuracy is decent out of the box. Most white balance inaccuracies are minor and hard to spot with the naked eye. The color dE is high mainly because the display is in DCI P3 when there isn't a set color profile, causing oversaturation. Some people might prefer this oversaturated look; just know it isn't accurate. The color temperature is only slightly cooler than the standard 6500K target, not enough to make a huge difference visually. The gamma is too high throughout, making all scenes too dark.

If you don't like the oversaturated look, there's a Natural preset color profile that's much more accurate, as it limits the color reproduction to the sRGB color space. Here are the measurement charts:

• White Balance/Gamma
• Color Accuracy

The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360's OLED panel has a superb color gamut. It has full coverage of the commonly used sRGB color space as well as the wider DCI P3 and Adobe RGB color spaces, making it suitable for media consumption, print photography, and HDR video production.

The OLED display’s flicker frequency is relatively low and may bother people sensitive to flickering.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 has a good keyboard. Its layout is relatively standard, though the location of the power button at the top right corner can be an annoyance if you often use the numpad, as a single press will put the computer to sleep. The overall typing experience is good; the keys are stable and tactile, and they aren't overly loud, so you don't have to worry about causing too much noise in quiet settings. However, the keys require a fair amount of force to actuate, and their spacing feels a tad cramped. Also, the key travel is very short, which some might not like, as it's easy to bottom out. There are three backlight brightness levels; the light shines through the legends well, making them easy to see.

The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 has an excellent touchpad. It's quite large, which makes it comfortable and easy to use, especially for actions like dragging and dropping over a long distance. While the off-center placement is normal for a laptop with a numpad, it's a tad too far to the left, leaving very little room to place the left hand when typing. It tracks all movements and gestures well—albeit less so if you start the movement from the corner of the touchpad—and there are no issues with palm rejection. This is a diving board touchpad, so you can only click in the bottom half. The buttons feel tactile but require a fair amount of force to actuate.

The Samsung Book 5 Pro 360's speakers get pretty loud with minimal compression artifacts at higher volume levels. However, they sound unnatural and lack dynamic range. There's some bass, though not a whole lot.

The Samsung Book 5 Pro 360 has a decent webcam. The image looks relatively sharp and detailed, with true-to-life colors. There's some noise throughout, and the exposure is a tad too high; however, these issues aren't bad enough to affect the overall image quality significantly. Voices sound loud and clear over the microphone, though there's a fair amount of background noise. There's no physical privacy cover—you can disable the camera and microphone using the F10 and F11 shortcuts.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 has an excellent port selection. Both USB-Cs support Thunderbolt 4 (up to 40Gbps data transfer speed and two 4k @ 60Hz displays), DisplayPort, and charging. The USB-A supports USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed of up to 5Gbps. The HDMI port has a maximum output resolution of 8k @ 60Hz or 5k @ 120Hz.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5's wireless adapter is an Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE201 320Hz. Like Wi-Fi 6E, the Wi-Fi 7 standard gives you access to the 6GHz band but with even faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference. You need a router that supports Wi-Fi 7 to benefit from these features.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 is available with the following CPUs:

• Intel Core Ultra 5 228V (8 cores/8 threads, up to 4.5GHz, 8MB cache)
• Intel Core Ultra 7 256V (8 cores/8 threads, up to 4.8GHz, 12MB cache)

Both CPUs are mobile processors designed for thin and light laptops from Intel's Lunar Lake (Core Ultra Series 2) lineup. Like their Meteor Lake predecessors, these chips have a mix of performance and efficiency cores; however, the performance cores no longer support Hyper-Threading, so you can expect a performance drop in multi-threaded workloads compared to the Meteor Lake CPUs. They can still handle general productivity tasks just fine, like text processing, web browsing, video playback, and spreadsheets, but the performance might be a bit limiting if you plan on using the laptop for more demanding workloads like programming. 

Both chips have the same core composition of four performance and four efficiency cores—they only differ in clock speeds and cache size. The Core Ultra 7 is faster, though the difference isn't huge, so you likely won't notice it unless you perform highly intensive tasks that stress the CPU. Both have a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to handle AI tasks like background-blurring on video calls and image generation in photo editing apps. The Core Ultra 5's NPU has a potential peak AI performance rating of 40 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), while the Core Ultra 7 has a performance rating of 47 TOPS. You can see more information about these chips in Intel's product brief.

Note: As of November 2024, the Core Ultra 5 228V model isn't available on Samsung's website; however, some reviewers have received a Core Ultra 5 model to review. It's unclear whether this is a region-specific model or will only be available at a later date.

The Samsung Book 5 Pro 360 is only available with integrated graphics. The Arc Graphics on these Lunar Lake chips are a noticeable step up from previous generations when it comes to gaming, performing just slightly worse than the aging NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 mobile. This means you can get 60 fps in some demanding games at 1080p, but only with the lowest graphical settings. For specialized computing tasks, you're still better off getting a laptop with a dedicated GPU, as these Arc Graphics don't really perform better than other current-gen integrated graphics. There's technically a performance difference between the Core Ultra 5 and the Core Ultra 7's GPU (Arc 130V and Arc 140V, respectively), but again, the difference isn't night and day.

You can configure the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 with 16GB or 32GB of RAM. However, the 32GB is only available on models with a Core Ultra 5 228V CPU. The Core Ultra 7 256V can only support up to 16GB of RAM.

You can configure the Samsung Book 5 Pro 360 with 512GB or 1TB of storage. The SSD is user-replaceable; the slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 scores well in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. Its Intel Core Ultra 7 256V CPU has strong single-thread performance, an improvement over its Meteor Lake predecessors. Its multi-thread performance is good, too; however, it's a step backward compared to its Meteor Lake predecessors due to the lack of Hyper-Threading. This multi-thread performance is suitable for general productivity tasks and some moderately intensive workloads. For highly demanding tasks, there are significant faster CPUs on the market, like the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (M3, 2023)'s M3 Max SoC and Intel's own Core i9-14900HX in the Razer Blade 18 (2024). As for the GPU, although its Arc Graphics 140V performs well for an integrated GPU, it's still far too slow for highly demanding workloads, performing worse than the aging NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 mobile GPU.

Note: We've performed all benchmarks using the laptop's best performing mode (Performance in this case) instead of the default Balanced mode, which usually throttles the performance to prolong battery life. This is more representative of the laptop's maximum potential (you can always turn it down if you prioritize battery life and/or lower fan noise and thermals), whereas the Balanced mode would only show the manufacturer's tuning of that mode.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 scores well in the Cinebench R23 benchmarks. Its Intel Core Ultra 7 256V CPU's multi-thread performance is good enough for some moderately intensive workloads and heavy multitasking, but again, there are significantly faster CPUs on the market that can provide a smoother experience and complete tasks in less time in highly demanding tasks.

While you can perform 3D rendering tasks in Blender using the CPU, getting a laptop with a discrete GPU is best. Even an entry-level dedicated GPU, like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, can render images significantly faster.

The Samsung Book 5 Pro 360's Intel Arc Graphics 140V performs decently in the Basemark GPU benchmark, scoring in the same ballpark as some discrete GPUs, albeit aging ones like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 mobile. This means that it can push playable frame rates in some graphically demanding games, as you'll see in the gaming benchmarks, but only with the lowest graphical settings. The Core Ultra 5's integrated GPU is a little weaker and will have a harder time maintaining consistent frame rates.

To better simulate typical usage, we've conducted the web browsing and video playback tests using the Balanced mode and the gaming test using the Performance mode.

Borderlands 3 runs poorly on the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360. Although you can get over 60 fps at 1080p with low settings, the gameplay is a little too choppy for a good gaming experience. The integrated GPU isn't powerful enough to handle this and other similarly demanding games.

Civilization VI is very playable. Although 60 fps isn't really a requirement in strategy games such as this, you can easily achieve it with some tweaks in the graphical settings. The Core Ultra 5 can also run this and other similar games smoothly. The average turn time is decent and within the expected range for a current-gen CPU.

Counter-Strike 2 runs well on the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V CPU. Stutters do happen, but not enough to make the game unplayable. The Core Ultra 5 can also run this and other similarly demanding games smoothly, though you'll have to tweak the settings slightly.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360's performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider isn't bad. You can get fairly smooth gameplay at 1080p, albeit with low graphical settings. The Core Ultra 5 will struggle a bit more, resulting in occasional stutters. The large frametime spikes are scenes changes and aren't representative of the performance.

The keyboard gets a bit toasty under load and may cause some discomfort as the hot spot is near the middle. The bottom of the laptop also gets hot, reaching 46.9 °C (116.42 °F), so you might need a lapboard to use the device comfortably on your lap. Thankfully, the fans remain relatively quiet.

The posted results are measurements taken in the Performance mode. Here are the measurements in the Optimized, Quiet, and Silent modes:

Optimized

• Keyboard Temp Under Load: 39.4 °C (102.92 °F)
• Fan Noise Under Load: 41.2 dBA

Quiet

• Keyboard Temp Under Load: 38.1 °C (100.58 °F)
• Fan Noise Under Load: 40.3 dBA

Silent

• Keyboard Temp Under Load: 36.7 °C (98.06 °F)
• Fan Noise Under Load: 38.1 dBA

We've conducted this test using the laptop's best performance (Performance) mode with the fan speed at max instead of the default Balanced mode we've used in previous laptop reviews.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 has many pre-installed applications, including:

• Air Command: Lets you customize the S Pen's functions and shortcuts.
• Bixby: Samsung’s digital assistant.
• CLIP STUDIO PAINT START for SC: Digital art creation app.
• ColorEngine: Photo editing app.
• Dolby Access: Adds Dolby Atmos support. Requires in-app purchase for headphone functionality.
• Galaxy Book Experience: Lets you quickly access all Samsung apps installed on the system.
• Galaxy Book Smart Switch: Lets you move data from your old computer to the Galaxy Book.
• Goodnotes for GalaxyBook: Note-taking app.
• Live Wallpaper: App that automatically changes your wallpaper image based on your interests.
• McAfee: Antivirus software. Requires subscription.
• Multi Control: Virtual KVM. Lets you use your mouse and keyboard to control other Galaxy devices.
• Noteshelf Samsung: Note-taking app.
• Online Support Service: Contains Samsung support contact information. You can also request a repair or check the status of a repair.
• PENUP: Social network app that lets users create and share drawings.
• Quick Search: Lets you quickly find files and text in saved documents.
• Quick Share: Lets you share images, videos, and files with your friends.
• Samsung Account: Lets you access your Samsung account, see all your Samsung devices and recent activities, and access device location function.
• Samsung Cloud Assistant: Lets you access Samsung's cloud services, like cloud storage, notes and settings synchronization across multiple devices, and headphone auto-switching.
• Samsung Continuity: Lets you control and share content across Samsung devices.
• Samsung Device Care: Lets you monitor the computer's health (malware detection, battery usage and health), check for software updates, optimize performance, and change battery settings.
• Samsung Find: Helps you locate misplaced Samsung Galaxy devices, like your phone, tablet, pen, and earbuds.
• Samsung Flow: Lets you transition your activities across your Samsung devices.
• Samsung Notes: Note-taking app.
• Samsung Pass: Lets you sign into various apps using your biometrics.
• Samsung Settings: Lets you access network, power, display, audio, keyboard backlighting, and S Pen settings.
• Samsung Studio: Video editing app.
• SamsungPhone: Lets you receive and make calls, answer messages, and view alerts from your Samsung phone.
• Screen Recorder: Lets you record your screen.
• Second Screen: Lets you use your Samsung tablet as a second screen.
• SmartThings: Lets you control and manage other Samsung SmartThings-compatible devices from your computer.

The Samsung Book 5 Pro 360 has a fingerprint sensor built into the power button. You can use it to log in quickly, authorize purchases in the Windows Store, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.

This laptop supports pen input and comes with a stylus included in the box. Samsung's S Pen uses Wacom technology, so if you don't get one or lose the pen, you can use any Wacom pen on the market. The S Pen feels comfortable to hold and use. Pressing the side button while hovering over the screen brings up the 'Air Command' menu, allowing you to quickly access functions and shortcuts. Latency is pretty good, as you can see in this slow-motion video, though palm rejection doesn't always work. Unfortunately, there's no pen garage to store the stylus for transport. There's a magnet strong enough to hold it securely on each side of the touchpad, but this would prevent you from closing the lid. There's also a magnet on the left side of the laptop; this won't prevent you from closing the lid, but the magnet itself is far too weak to hold the pen.

As mentioned in the software section above, you can use a Samsung tablet as a second screen, similar to Apple's Sidecar feature. The tablet still detects touch input when used as a screen, and latency is noticeable but minimal.