Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra

Design and Keyboard

• Industrial aluminium chassis
• Solid port selection
• Snappy keyboard and huge haptic trackpad

The Galaxy Book 6 Ultra continues Samsung’s industrial-chic design for its top-end laptops, with a lovely dark grey aluminium finish that feels excellent. As is typical with the brand’s laptops, there is a MacBook Pro flavour to its look, which fits the Ultra namesake rather well here.

At 1.89kg, this is a heavy brute of a laptop, weighing some 300g more than the Galaxy Book6 Pro, although we are packing a discrete GPU and therefore more cooling as a result. This mass is slightly reduced against an equivalent-sized MacBook Pro, although a near 2kg laptop isn’t necessarily what I’d call ‘portable’. For a lightweight, large-screened laptop, the LG Gram Pro 16 is hard to beat.

As for ports, the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra is bestowed with a vast selection, with the left side having a pair of Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports alongside an HDMI 2.1 port. On the right, there’s a headphone jack, a singular USB-A and a full-size SD card reader. That exceeds the MacBook Pro by a simple USB-A port – thanks, Samsung.

Against the previous model, Samsung has changed the keyboard layout of this laptop. The number pad is gone, and the keyboard has been centralised, a la MacBook Pro. The layout also mimics Apple’s keyboard, with arrow keys in the bottom right corner, a button in the top right that doubles as a fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello, and a feature-rich function row across the top. It’s a functional and tactile keyboard with a short and positive travel that feels very similar to the Galaxy Book6 Pro.

The haptic trackpad of this latest model has also been enlarged to MacBook levels of size, providing your fingers with some serious real estate for navigation and gestures. It’s also as smooth as silk, and very pleasant to use.

Display and Sound

• Smooth and detailed OLED panel
• Excellent black level, contrast and colours
• Upgraded, beefier speaker array

Samsung has stuck with a large 16-inch 2880×1800 resolution OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate on the Galaxy Book6 Ultra, which is immensely detailed, smooth and rather ideal for creative workloads.

We’ve got deep blacks and fantastic contrast, as measured by my colorimeter, with results of 0.01 and 25470:1. The 6800K colour temperature is also pretty good.

The virtually perfect colour accuracy here is also no surprise, given this is an OLED screen. To be specific, we’re getting 100% coverage of both the mainstream sRGB and creative DCI-P3 gamuts, while Adobe RGB coverage at 92% is also excellent, making this screen an ideal pairing for both mainstream and more colour-sensitive workloads.

Against some of Samsung’s older large-screen laptops, the Galaxy Book6 Ultra benefits from a boosted brightness figure with a peak HDR brightness of 1000 nits. There is also a bump up in SDR brightness, as I noted with my colorimeter, with a peak of 484.4 nits, which is some 25% brighter than the peak of the old panel, for even punchier images.

Samsung has also upgraded the speaker system of this laptop compared to the other Book6 models, kitting this top model out with two upfiring tweeters and four force-cancelling woofers. It’s one of the better speaker systems I’ve dealt with on a Windows laptop, with good clarity and depth, and a surprisingly meaty sound.

Performance

• A new powerful Panther Lake chip inside
• Underwhelming graphical performance from an RTX 5070
• Fast SSD and sensible RAM capacity

The Galaxy Book6 Ultra can be specced as high as the top-end Intel Core Ultra X9 388H Panther Lake chip if you’ve got a bottomless pit of money, although my sample is a little more stripped back in terms of its processor choice.

Here, we’ve got a 16-core/16-thread Intel Core Ultra 7 356H, which is designed to be the follow-up to the Core Ultra 7 255H Arrow Lake-H chip that powered some of my favourite laptops from last year, such as the Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025).

The performance in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 didn’t move the needle much against this chip’s predecessor, although it was still immensely strong for a pro-grade ultrabook. It’s in the multi-threaded scores where the extra cores count, making the Core Ultra 7 356H a powerful chip against AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with fewer cores but more threads, and pulling even further ahead of the Core Ultra 200V chips.

To help the graphical capabilities of this laptop, the Galaxy Book6 Ultra can be specced with up to an RTX 5070 discrete GPU, which my sample has. This aids in this laptop posting a solid 3DMark Time Spy benchmark score, and increasing its credentials for more graphically intensive workloads such as video editing and gaming.

With this in mind, the gaming numbers aren’t as strong as other RTX 5070-powered gaming laptops such as the Medion Erazer Deputy 15 P1. For instance, at 1080p, we’re seeing 73.55fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 82fps in Returnal, which are around 20-25% down on fully-fledged gaming laptops, although the 121fps in Rainbow Six Extraction is enough to max out the 120Hz refresh rate of the display.

Moving up to 1440p, results drop down to 46.13fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 60fps in Returnal, the latter of which is much more playable. The lighter Rainbow Six Extraction remains decent at 81fps.

Adding DLSS in Cyberpunk 2077 put it up to 84.35fps at 1080p, and also took the gruelling RT: Ultra preset from 32.73fps without it to 55.56fps with it, making the game rather playable even at tough settings. Ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 at this laptop’s native resolution did turn things into a slideshow, though.

Being a 50-series laptop also means this Galaxy Book6 Ultra can benefit from Nvidia’s clever multi-frame-gen tech with the 5070 that’s present. With this, it adds up to three ‘fake frames’ for every ‘real’ frame rendered to increase your FPS to play well with high-refresh-rate screens. The results are reliant upon there being a high enough base frame rate to prevent displayed images from being choppy or there being horrible latency.

For whatever reason, running this test on RT: Ultra at native resolution didn’t yield any real return, although at 1080p, it took Cyberpunk 2077 to 163.28fps. Likewise, on the Ultra preset used otherwise and the maximum 4x frame gen, Cyberpunk 2077 went all the way up to 234.53fps at 1080p and 140.25fps at native resolution.

My sample of the Galaxy Book6 Ultra came with a solid 32GB of RAM plus a very generous 2TB SSD at this mid-range price. It’s also a decently brisk SSD in my testing, with reads and writes of 7071.93 MB/s and 5855.31 MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Windows’ typical AI functions are all present and correct
• Some handy extras, including webcam effects
• Lots of integration with Samsung Galaxy phones

This Galaxy Book6 Ultra also has the usual AI features that its contemporaries have, and is a Copilot+ PC, as the Panther Lake chip inside has enough AI horsepower. This includes image creation features in Photos and Paint, as well as the clever blurred background, auto framing and eye contact tools with the Windows Studio webcam effects.

Samsung’s laptop also naturally comes with some of the brand’s own software, including Galaxy Book Experience, which is a central hub of sorts for accessing features such as SmartThings control for any smart home devices, or Live Wallpaper for keeping your desktop fresh with a new wallpaper every two weeks. There is also Samsung Studio inside the Galaxy Book experience app, which gives you access to a decent video editor, and an AI Select tool that can be used for everything from translation to identifying things in pictures.

Naturally, you can also hook up a Galaxy handset to reap even more benefits with the Galaxy Book6 Ultra’s software, including handy features such as Transcript Assist, which can convert recorded meetings into written summaries, and Chat Assist, which can provide quick replies to conversations to keep things easy. These only work when your phone is connected to Microsoft Phone Link, which turns the laptop’s panel into a large phone screen.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 15 hours 34 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two working days

Samsung is very optimistic about the rated endurance of the Galaxy Book6 Ultra, rating it to last for up to 30 hours on a charge while video streaming. From a laptop with an 83Whr battery and a beefy CPU and GPU combo, that’s virtually unheard of around here.

Nonetheless, for testing the laptop’s battery life, I took the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and streamed a 1080p video until it conked out. In this test, Samsung’s candidate managed half of runtime it claimed – some 15 hours and 34 minutes. As much as that is only half, it’s still a fantastic result for a laptop with a discrete GPU, and means you’ll be able to get through two working days before needing to charge the laptop back up.

As for recharging, this is where things get a bit funny. Owing to new EU laws (which the UK has signed up to), the Galaxy Book6 Ultra doesn’t come with an included charger, although it should come with a 140W USB-C power brick if you’re in a place where it comes supplied. Luckily, my MacBook Pro charger is 140W, and with it, it took this Samsung laptop just 30 minutes to get back to 50%, while a full charge took 75 minutes – that’s very speedy.

Should you buy it?