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I’ll be brutally honest: I didn’t expect to be super impressed by the Samsung’s Galaxy Book 6 Pro. On paper, it’s essentially a toned-down version of the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra, a slightly more powerful laptop I reviewed earlier this year.
However, after spending time with the Pro model, I realized how wrong I was. The Galaxy Book 6 Pro is a highly capable machine in its own right. In fact, I would recommend the Pro over the Ultra if you want a premium PC experience without paying over $2,000.
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Thin frame, big sound
Because the Galaxy Book 6 Pro shares so much of its DNA with the Ultra, it has some of the same flaws. The keyboard is, once again, mushy. Typing feel is not great. Plus, the sharp edge along the wrist rest can dig into your skin. Apart from these relatively minor complaints, it’s a solid laptop. Samsung gets the fundamentals right.
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Even though I wasn’t a big fan of the keyboard, the haptic touchpad is thankfully better. It’s large, responsive, and offers precise fingertip controls for smooth web browsing. It’s hard to put into words how great it feels; it’s one of those things you have to experience yourself to fully understand.
Other design differences are small but meaningful. The Book 6 Pro is slimmer than its big sibling, measuring 0.46 inches (11.9mm) and weighing 3.5 pounds. For comparison, the Ultra measures 0.6 inches (15.4mm) and weighs 4.1 pounds. It sports the same AMOLED touchscreen complete with a 120Hz refresh rate, up to 1,000 nits of peak brightness, and a Corning Gorilla Glass panel. There isn’t a quality gap between the two displays — both have equally fantastic screens.
It also supports Samsung’s Vision Booster. According to the tech giant, this feature analyzes ambient lighting and on-screen content to improve visibility and color accuracy when outside. It does work to some extent, but the display still struggles to maintain clear visibility under direct, harsh sunlight.
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Audio performance is equally impressive. The six-speaker system delivers room-filling sound with excellent instrument separation. Listening to jazz tracks felt like the band was in front of me, nature videos sounded lifelike, and rock music had a satisfying punch and presence. I did notice some distortion occurring with certain dance tracks, although that may have been more of an issue with the YouTube videos themselves.
Ultra-level power
The most notable difference between the Pro and Ultra models is the hardware. My review unit housed an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor, 32GB of RAM, and the integrated Intel Arc graphics card. That’s a solid setup, but not as powerful as the Galaxy Book 6 Ultra, which comes with a dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series GPU. There is a performance gap between them, though it’s not large.
Below is a comparison table showing how the Galaxy Book 6 Pro stacks up against the Ultra model, another laptop with released this year with the same processor: the Acer Swift 16 AI, and the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 — a high-end 16-inch laptop from 2025.
As the numbers show, all three laptops performed about the same in the single-core tests. That means web browsing, office work, and general multitasking will feel just as fast on the Book 6 Pro as they do on the other machines. The real separation appears in the multi-core performance, where the Pro model falls slightly behind the higher-end chip.
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This implies it’s not as well-suited to the most demanding tasks like 3D animation or video editing. However, that doesn’t mean the Galaxy Book 6 Pro is low-power by any stretch.
Quite the opposite; it’s still a high-performing laptop. Look at the multi-core scores, and you’ll see that the Book 6 Pro doesn’t trail far behind the others. In 3DMark Night Raid, a benchmark focused on integrated GPUs, the Pro scored 37,234, which is close to the Ultra’s score of 40,615. These are all solid results, confirming that the laptop is highly capable at handling content creation among other demanding workloads.
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That strength showed up in my hands-on testing. I was able to edit multiple short 4K videos without issue and export large batches of photographs quickly. I was even able to squeeze in some light gaming. Indie titles like Hollow Knight and Mewgenics ran as smooth as butter.
Thermals are another bright spot. According to Samsung, the Galaxy Book 6 Pro is the first of its Pro laptops to feature a vapor chamber cooling system, and it works pretty well. During testing, the laptop would get warm under heavy workloads, but never uncomfortably hot.
Battery longevity is also quite solid. Because of its less powerful hardware, I expected the Pro to last longer than the Ultra, but the battery lasted the same amount of time: 20 hours on a single charge, which is a great runtime, make no mistake.
ZDNET’s buying advice
The Galaxy Book6 Pro is currently on sale on Samsung’s website, starting at $1,600. This base model comes with a 14-inch screen, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. You can equip the laptop with a 16-inch screen, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, at which point you’ll pay $2,100. If you want the best Samsung has to offer, the tech giant also released the Galaxy Book6 Ultra, which boasts even greater performance.
Source: www.zdnet.com
