Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Long battery life
- Incredible AMOLED display
- Good build quality
Cons
- A little expensive
- Multithreaded performance is on the low side
- Keyboard could feel more premium
- For an extra $50, you can get this as a 2-in-1 with an S Pen
Our Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro delivers incredible battery life, a beautiful display, and solid desktop performance. But for an extra $50, you could have this as a 2-in-1 machine with a bundled S Pen.
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The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro is a 16-inch laptop with an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) CPU and a beautiful AMOLED display. I previously reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360, which is the 2-in-1 equivalent to this machine.
The non-360 Galaxy Book5 Pro model is a more “traditional” laptop — it ditches the 360-degree hinge and the S Pen. It’s not a 2-in-1, but it still has the same beautiful touch screen. It’s a tad lighter and cheaper, too.
Further reading: Best laptops 2025: Premium, budget, gaming, 2-in-1s, and more
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Specs
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro includes a power-efficient Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processor, also known as Lunar Lake. This hardware delivers snappy desktop performance with very low power usage.
As we’ve seen when benchmarking other laptops, Lunar Lake shines at battery life and delivers surprisingly good integrated graphics performance, but its eight-core design isn’t optimized for delivering high-end CPU performance in multithreaded workloads.
The review model Samsung loaned us has 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, and it has a retail price of $1,649. Samsung also offers a configuration with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD for $1,449 and one with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD for $1,749.
- CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 256V
- Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X
- Graphics/GPU: Intel Arc 140V
- NPU: Intel AI Boost (47 TOPS)
- Display: 16-inch 2880×1800 AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate
- Storage: 1TB PCIe 4 SSD
- Webcam: 1080p camera
- Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C), 1x USB Type-A (USB 3.2), 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x combo headphone jack, 1x microSD card reader
- Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
- Biometrics: Fingerprint reader for Windows Hello
- Battery capacity: 76.1 Watt-hours
- Dimensions: 13.99 x 9.86 x 0.49 inches
- Weight: 3.44 pounds
- MSRP: $1,649 as tested
The Galaxy Book5 Pro lasted for 1,395 minutes in our standard battery benchmark before suspending itself. That’s 23 hours and fifteen minutes — nearly 24-hour battery life.
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Design and build quality
IDG / Chris Hoffman
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro is the spitting image of the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360. It’s a big 16-inch wedge of gray metal with black keys and a black bezel around the display.
The design is minimal, but in a good way. There aren’t a lot of flourishes: Samsung lets the big, beautiful display make a design statement.
It’s also incredibly solid thanks to all that metal. At under three and a half pounds, you can easily pick it up from anywhere on the base and hold it. At 3.44 pounds, it feels surprisingly portable and light for a 16-inch laptop.
The hinge works well and you can easily open and close it with one hand. That hinge is the biggest difference from the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360. While that other machine has a 2-in-1 design with a 360-degree hinge, the hinge on this laptop only opens to about 135 degrees.
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Keyboard and trackpad
IDG / Chris Hoffman
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro packs a full-size keyboard complete with a traditional number pad at the right side of the keyboard. It has a white backlight you can turn on and off.
As on the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360, this chiclet keyboard feels nice enough to type on. It’s a good size! But the key travel feels a little shallow — I’m sure the laptop’s thinness contributes to this.
The build and screen of the laptop feel incredibly premium, but this keyboard doesn’t feel premium to me in the same way a ThinkPad keyboard does, for example.
This machine has the huge trackpad I’ve come to expect on Samsung Galaxy laptops. Moving the mouse cursor is smooth, and the click action feels good. While the trackpad’s large size was off-putting to me on the first Samsung Galaxy laptops I tested, I’m coming to appreciate it more.
Why wouldn’t you want the largest trackpad possible below the keyboard? The position of the trackpad is smart, and it doesn’t get in the way while typing. Palm rejection worked well, too.
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Display and speakers
IDG / Chris Hoffman
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro’s display is beautiful. It’s probably a reason why many people would choose this machine in particular. It’s a 3K (2880×1800 resolution) AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It produces the vivid, beautiful colors I enjoy seeing on a good OLED display. It has a good amount of brightness, and the AMOLED technology likely contributes to this machine’s great battery life.
This is a touchscreen. So, while this isn’t a 2-in-1 machine, you do still have access to touch input. It also has an anti-reflective coating. As it’s been a frigid winter here in the northeast, I haven’t had a chance to test it outdoors, but the coating on the similar Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 worked well in direct sunlight, in my experience.
Samsung touts a quad-speaker setup on this machine: Two woofers and two tweeters. As I mentioned in my review of the 360, they’re solid speakers for a laptop. Loud and clear, but without the bass you’d get in dedicated speakers or a pair of headphones.
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Webcam, microphone, biometrics
IDG / Chris Hoffman
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro includes a 2 MP 1080p webcam. It’s fine, but it produces a clearer image quality outdoors in natural light than it does indoors. As I mentioned when reviewing the 360 model, this is far from the best webcam I’ve used on a laptop, but it’s fine for online meetings.
Also, as this is a Copilot+ PC with an NPU, you get access to Windows Studio Effects for the usual suite of AI-powered on-fly-the webcam effects, including fake eye contact and background removal. This is an “AI laptop,” after all.
Unfortunately, there’s no physical webcam privacy shutter switch here. I prefer having that feature on a laptop for privacy reasons.
The built-in microphone setup delivers great audio quality. Samsung boasts “studio-quality” dual microphones on this system. They’re impressively clear and are excellent for online meetings.
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Connectivity
IDG / Chris Hoffman
Like its 2-in-1 sibling, the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro offers a reasonable selection of ports. On the left side, it has two Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C) ports plus an HDMI 2.1 port. This laptop charges with USB-C, however, so you’ll be plugging it into the charger with one of those ports.
On the right side, this machine has a single USB Type-A port (USB 3.2) along with a combo audio jack and a microSD card reader.
It’s a fine selection that will meet many people’s needs. Some people might want more USB Type-C ports or more USB Type-A ports. You can always add a dongle if you need more ports.
Thanks to Lunar Lake, this laptop also supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. The Wi-Fi worked well, and it’s always a bonus to have support for the latest standards — even if most people aren’t using Wi-Fi 7 routers yet.
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Performance
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro delivers great performance in day-to-day productivity tasks while delivering great battery life, thanks to its Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) processor.
As always, we ran the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs.
IDG / Chris Hoffman
First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. With an overall PCMark 10 score of 7,299, the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro, this machine is right in line with the performance of the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 and other Lunar Lake-powered machines.
However, in terms of raw performance, it’s behind the AMD Ryzen AI 9-powered HP Omnibook Ultra 14 — no surprise there. Samsung’s Galaxy Book5 Pro will far exceed the Omnibook Ultra’s battery life. Intel and AMD’s chips have different advantages.
IDG / Chris Hoffman
Next, we run Cinebench R20. This is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage.
A score of 4,416 is on the low side, but that’s exactly what we’d expect to see from Intel Lunar Lake. These machines just don’t deliver high top-end performance in CPU-heavy multithreaded tasks. While they deliver very usable desktop performance, they’re not ideal for workflows that demand a lot of CPU crunching.
IDG / Chris Hoffman
We also run an encode with Handbrake. This is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. This demands the laptop’s cooling kick in, and many laptops will throttle and slow down under load.
The Handbrake encode tells the same story as the Cinebench benchmark. The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro completed the encode process in 1,433 seconds — that’s nearly 24 minutes. It’s not a speed demon when it comes to extended CPU-hungry tasks like this.
IDG / Chris Hoffman
Next, we run a graphical benchmark. This isn’t a gaming laptop, but it’s still good to check how the GPU performs. We run 3DMark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance.
With an overall 3DMark Time Spy score of 4,410, Lunar Lake’s integrated Intel Arc graphics deliver surprisingly decent graphical performance once again. Lunar Lake is still far behind a solid discrete GPU — like one from Nvidia or AMD — but it’s a nice generational leap for integrated graphics.
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro performed exactly how we’d expect it to. It’s basically the same performance as the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 we already benchmarked – within the margin of error, anyway. Both of these machines deliver stronger performance than the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, which is also powered by Intel’s Lunar Lake hardware.
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Battery life
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro has a sizable 76.1 Watt-hour battery, which it combines with a power-sipping Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processor. While it’s a 16-inch laptop, the AMOLED display should be more power efficient than a typical OLED display. We’d expect to see amazing battery life here, and that’s exactly what we saw.
IDG / Chris Hoffman
To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this.
We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks, and it’s worth noting that the Galaxy Book5 Pro’s AMOLED display has a bit of an advantage, as OLED screens use less power to display the black bars around the video.
The Galaxy Book5 Pro lasted for 1,395 minutes in our standard battery benchmark before suspending itself. That’s 23 hours and fifteen minutes — nearly 24-hour battery life.
It’s very impressive, and the laptop feels long-lasting in real-world use as well. Before sitting down to write this final review, I charged the laptop and unplugged it. Hours into putting together this review, I looked down at the battery status and found it still had 90 percent of its battery power left. That’s awesome.
Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro: Conclusion
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro is a great laptop, just like the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 is. It combines great build quality with a beautiful 16-inch display and a power-sipping Intel Lunar Lake processor.
Lunar Lake is still a sticking point: Some people will want more top-end CPU performance for multithreaded CPU tasks, and Lunar Lake can’t deliver that.
Aside from that, the main concern is the price. This is a fairly premium laptop experience overall, but the retail price of $1,649 is still on the high side for a laptop.
More importantly, the 360 model is only $50 more at $1,699 and it includes a 360-degree hinge as a well as a bundled S Pen. For an extra $50, it’s hard to argue with that value. Yes, this particular laptop is a tad lighter than the 360 model, but not by much.
Still, it’s a good machine, and people who don’t plan on using a pen can save $50 and get a lighter laptop, so that’s fine. It does feel like this should be available at a little bit more of a discount versus the 360 model, however.
Either way, this is a great machine. If Lunar Lake meets your needs and you aren’t looking for a 2-in-1 experience with a pen, it’s an awesome machine for productivity and day-to-day desktop use. You’re getting excellent battery life and a beautiful display and that’s great.
