Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra Review: Powerful 16-Inch OLED Laptop

Samsung is one of the biggest names in smartphones, yet its share of the laptop market is far smaller — despite the fact that the Korean manufacturer builds genuinely excellent machines. The brand-new flagship of the Galaxy Book range is the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra, a 16-inch powerhouse that delivers top-tier performance in every discipline. Its biggest weakness is the hefty price.

Inside the tested configuration (model NP960UJH) sits the Core Ultra 7 356H, a seriously quick chip from Intel's Core 300 series, unveiled in January 2026 at CES in Las Vegas. The Panther Lake family spans 14 processors in total, and Intel has packed plenty of new engineering into them. Each chip is assembled from several smaller silicon dies — chiplets, or "tiles" in Intel's terminology — and the most important of them, the compute tile, is manufactured with traces just 1.8 nanometres wide. That cuts power consumption while allowing considerably more speed.

The Core Ultra 7 356H offers 16 cores but only a modest integrated GPU. The Ultra still has serious graphics muscle, though, because Samsung adds Nvidia's RTX 5070 Laptop chip alongside it.

With the brand-new processor on board, the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra posted excellent results across the speed measurements. For productivity work the Core Ultra 7 356H is fractionally slower than the Core 300 series flagship, the Core Ultra X9 388H, but the gap is so small that most users will never notice it.

The dedicated graphics chip keeps demanding games running smoothly: the test unit rendered 136 frames per second at Full HD (1920x1080) and 34fps at 4K (3840x2160). The two USB-C ports support USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4, and transfers to an external SSD reached up to 3.2 gigabytes per second.

For the screen, Samsung turns to its own AMOLED technology, and this OLED variant is thoroughly convincing. Colour reproduction is highly accurate, and the panel covers the entire DCI-P3 colour space used in cinema production — something far from every laptop manages. The high 2880x1800 resolution delivers a wonderfully detailed picture, which makes small text crisply legible and reveals extra fine detail when editing photos.

Anyone who likes working outdoors, or wants to view HDR photos and videos with extended contrast, is also well served: the display reaches an exceptional peak brightness of 1,123 candela per square metre.

Fast processors and a large OLED panel place real demands on the battery, and at 80 watt-hours it is only mid-sized for an expensive 16-inch laptop — Apple, for instance, fits a 100Wh battery in the similarly priced MacBook Pro 16-inch M4 Pro. Even so, the runtime is superb: 14 hours and 52 minutes in the battery test, a payoff from the especially efficient Core Ultra 7 chip.

The efficiency also means the fans rarely need to work hard. In normal operation they ran at an extremely quiet 0.3 sone, only spinning up under full load when the fast graphics chip generates real heat — yet even the 4.9-sone maximum is quieter than most gaming laptops. Recharging is brisk too: an empty battery is full again after roughly an hour and a half.

The tested machine is the flagship of the new Galaxy Book 6 series and was so new that no street price existed at the time of testing. Samsung positions it as a premium flagship, and it is very expensive — older laptops with comparable specifications but different processors, such as the Asus ProArt P16 with Ryzen AI 9 HX370, cost noticeably less. Two things usually soften the blow: retailers often sell Samsung laptops below the recommended price, and buyers who can do without the RTX 5070 for gaming can choose the Core Ultra X7 variant (model NP960UJG), which costs considerably less for otherwise near-identical hardware.

At the time of writing, however, the Ultra had not reached the UK. Samsung's UK Galaxy Book6 line-up currently tops out at the Book6 Pro, which relies on integrated graphics rather than this model's discrete Nvidia GPU, so the exact configuration reviewed here has no confirmed UK price yet. Anyone set on the RTX 5070 machine will, for now, have to watch for a UK launch.

The Galaxy Book 6 Ultra comes with a keyboard that can be subtly backlit on demand — a genuine advantage in dim surroundings — and typing feels pleasant. The touchpad is enormous, with an 18.6-centimetre diagonal that suits gesture control nicely. As a third input method there is a touchscreen with very precise cursor control.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra is a genuine top-flight laptop with top-tier performance in every respect: it is very fast — in games too — supremely quiet in everyday use and impressively long-lasting, all topped off by an outstanding OLED display in a sleek, solid chassis. The price is the sticking point, with similarly equipped rivals often considerably cheaper. One tip for buyers who mainly want to work: without the fast Nvidia graphics chip the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra costs far less, with otherwise near-identical equipment.