A new kind of Galaxy Book has launched today: the gaming-oriented Galaxy Book Odyssey. For those unfamiliar with Samsung’s line of computers, Odyssey is the umbrella for everything gaming, including laptops, desktops, VR headsets, and monitors.
The introduction of this new laptop was strangely low-key during Samsung’s Unpack event, but we think it is an exciting product. Let’s start with the technical highlights.
Pairing a Gen11 Intel i5/i7 CPU with the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050/3050Ti Max-Q clearly makes it a gaming laptop.
It may not be at the high-end of the performance spectrum but should be much better than anything with integrated graphics and better than many older generations GPUs that are more power-hungry. Below are screenshots of the Samsung official specs.
On top of that, it is possible to have 8/16/32GB of RAM, which would make it very suitable for heavy Creative work, especially if the 1080p display has good color accuracy. We can’t vouch for it yet, but Samsung typically ships with excellent panels. The question here is: what’s the maximum refresh rate?
The 135W USB-C charger is a bit of a surprise since these connectors are typically limited to 100W, and that’s great because it’s not a proprietary format, so you can use the power adapter to charge any USB-C device, including other laptops.
The Galaxy Book Odyssey features plenty of ports as well:
| 3x USB-A 3.2 |
| 2x USB-C |
| 1x HDMI (full-size) |
| 1x MicroSD |
| 1x Security slot + 3.5mm audio |
| 1x RJ-45 |
For LAN gaming, the wired Ethernet connection is still my favorite, and it has higher and more stable throughput than WiFi anyway. I wish that it was a full SD slow instead of microSD, though.
Nothing indicates if the USB-C ports are Thunderbolt or not, so that piece of information will be essential for anyone who wants to use external storage or external GPUs.
The good news is that there are two SSD slots (probably m.2), and Samsung says that the RAM is upgradable by the user, although it seems like there is only one slot.
With 356.6×229.1×17.7 dimensions and a weight of 4 Lbs, this laptop should feature an interesting performance/weight ratio, making it very good as a mobile workstation for specific use cases.
It seems to benefit from the same Samsung-to-Samsung device connectivity as the new Galaxy Book Pro we’ve talked about earlier, so I won’t dwell on that right now.
It looks like this whole Ultralight gaming laptop concept promoted by Intel is getting more OEM support. Perhaps many gamers will prefer something heavier and faster, but it’s not hard to imagine that Samsung may want to attract a cross-section of gamers and creative users who want this computing profile.
Because the dual SSDs could accommodate 2x1TB, you might not even need external storage, but frankly, I hope that one of the USB-C is indeed a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 one. Let’s wait and see what comes out of this.
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