Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Pro Review: As stylish as it is powerful

Design and Keyboard

• Slim and lightweight for a 16-inch laptop
• Decent port selection 
• Slick keyboard and trackpad 

Samsung has changed the design of the Galaxy Book 6 Pro a tad with this new model, which I think makes it one of the smartest Windows ultrabooks you can buy today. The Apple-inspired space grey colourway remains for my sample, and it’s clear Samsung has taken some cues from a MacBook or two with the fit and finish of this laptop, with a smooth aluminium shell and a durable feel. 

The thing is, as much as this is designed as a ‘Pro’ level laptop, it comes without much of the additional heft at just 1.59kg, making it especially portable for a laptop of its power and its size. 16-inch machines can weigh a fair amount more in a lot of cases. 

The Galaxy Book 6 Pro is also just 11.9mm thin, making it even thinner than the latest Apple MacBook Air M4, which is ridiculous. This is easily one of the thinnest laptops on sale today, and it doesn’t skimp on ports, either. We’ve got a pair of Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, an HDMI port, a USB-A port, and a headphone jack. A second USB-A or a card reader would have rounded things off nicely, but this is still fine.

Opening the lid up reveals one of the bigger changes to this new model, with Samsung deciding to ditch the number pad on this larger 16-inch model, centralise the smaller 65 percent layout keyboard, and flank it with upwards-firing speaker grilles. It’s in this area where I’d wager that Samsung has copied Apple’s homework the most, as comparing it to my 16-inch MacBook Pro yields little difference. 

The keyboard itself isn’t much different from last year’s model, though, with very snappy, short travel that makes general typing feel almost effortless. Some may prefer a slightly longer travel, but I don’t mind the lower-profile nature of the Galaxy Book 6 Pro’s keyboard.

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
• Redesigned, richer speaker array

The Galaxy Book 6 Pro comes with a slightly upgraded Dynamic AMOLED 2x panel, as Samsung calls it, that now benefits from variable refresh rate tech, so it can go as low as 30Hz and as high as 120Hz when required. Otherwise, this is a slick and sharp 16-inch 2880×1800 resolution panel with solid detail across a larger area that’s a good choice for everything from general viewing to more creative endeavours.

As an OLED, the virtually perfect colour accuracy is no surprise. 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.

In addition, there are deep blacks and gorgeous contrast, with a measured 0.03 and 17690:1, respectively. The 6700K colour temperature is also pretty good, too.

Samsung has also boosted the peak brightness of the Galaxy Book 6 Pro’s screen over the old model, with a peak HDR brightness of 1000 nits against the older one’s 500 nits. There is also a bump up in SDR brightness, as I noted with my colorimeter, with a peak of 481.6 nits, which is some 25% brighter than the peak of the old panel, for even punchier images.

Owing to the move to a smaller layout keyboard on this larger 16-inch model, the laptop’s speaker array has been redesigned, with some speakers upfiring from the grilles adjacent to the keyboard deck, and it’s now a four-speaker array. This delivers excellent sound quality with more body than other ultrabook laptops, making it one of the best audio systems on a Windows laptop I’ve tested.

Performance

• Fast Panther Lake processor
• Much beefier integrated graphics
• Fast SSD and solid RAM headroom

In terms of processor choice, the Galaxy Book 6 Pro sample I have features the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, which is one of the top options available in the entire Galaxy Book 6 lineup, and in Intel’s new crop of Panther Lake processors.

It is, in essence, the follow-up to the potent Core Ultra 7 255H that impressed me inside the Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025), which provided very similar performance to its beefier brother, the Core Ultra 9 285H in spite of it being a theoretically worse chip by name.

The Core Ultra X7 358H features 16 cores and 16 threads, the same as the Core Ultra X9 388H, but is downclocked to a boost of 4.8GHz against the X9’s 5.1GHz. Plus, there’s the same Intel Arc B390 iGPU with its 12 Xe3 cores that make for a hefty improvement over the Intel Arc 140T and 140V integrated graphics in last year’s chips.

As a quick refresh, Intel’s new Panther Lake chips aim to blend the gains we saw in the last generation of Intel’s mobile chips with the power of Arrow Lake H and the efficiency of Lunar Lake in a new range. They’re also built on Intel’s new 18A process that makes some small but noteworthy changes to the way transistors are made to make sure the processor is using as much of its power as efficiently as possible, in basic terms.

The synthetic benchmark scores in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 put this Core Ultra X7 chip as being marginally slower than the Core Ultra X9 388H found in the Asus Zenbook Duo (2026) in single-core loads, although it’s on par in multi-threaded benchmarking.  

These numbers are higher than both Arrow Lake H and Lunar Lake-powered laptops, not least owing to gains from the new architecture, I imagine, plus it beats out some of the Strix Point laptops and trades blows with the AMD Strix Halo chip inside the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025).

As mentioned previously, the real gains of Panther Lake are more on the side of its integrated graphics, rather than its modest increase in raw grunt.

The Intel Arc B390 iGPU found in the top tier of these new Panther Lake chips features 12 of Intel’s new Xe3 cores with a major boost in raw power over last year’s offerings, resulting in a virtual doubling of the 3DMark Time Spy score over last year’s laptop model. Here, the Galaxy Book 6 Pro managed a score of 7546.  For reference, last year’s Arc 140T and 140V laptops fell in the 3000-4500 range.

It pushes this Panther Lake chip closer to the Strix Halo chips from last year, even if Intel isn’t quite on par with AMD in this regard. Nonetheless, this is a chip designed for a fully-fledged ultrabook, rather than a mini PC or gaming tablet, as it were, giving it a different appeal entirely.

With the same iGPU inside as the beefier Core Ultra X9 388H, it makes sense to expect similarly impressive gaming numbers. In some instances, that was the case, with Returnal serving up 50fps at 1080p, although for some strange reason, Cyberpunk 2077 took a hit down to just 30.70fps – that’s some 25 percent lower than the Zenbook Duo (2026)’s results.

Going up to 1440p, Cyberpunk 2077 still suffered the same issue, dropping down to just 18.51fps. With this in mind, Returnal remained unaffected at 33fps, providing an identical result to the Zenbook Duo (2026).

Of course, there are limits to the power of the B390, and the 12.88fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at RT: Ultra at 1080p demonstrates that it isn’t playable like this on integrated graphics just yet. Drop some settings down and apply Intel’s improved XeSS 3 upscaling, and you’ll see the FPS numbers climb to much more playable levels. On RT: Ultra, it doubled the FPS to 25fps flat.

With the move to XeSS 3, Intel has also added Multi Frame Gen powers in a similar vein to Nvidia’s move to DLSS4 (and now DLSS 4.5) with the RTX 50 series of discrete cards.

This is operated differently to DLSS, utilising a multiplier override in Intel’s graphics software rather than the game itself, and requires the game’s graphics to have XeSS Frame Generation enabled before restarting after enabling the chosen multiplier (2x, 3x, or 4x). There is likely to be a latency hit with Intel’s MFG as with Nvidia’s, and it’s common sense to aim for as high a base FPS figure as possible to minimise latency and for a smoother experience.

Intel has said that if a game already supports XeSS 2, then it’ll automatically support XeSS 3, which was the case with Cyberpunk 2077, where I tested it. It was as easy as enabling XeSS Frame Gen in the game’s settings, shutting it down, choosing the 4x multiplier in Intel’s software and rebooting Cyberpunk. At 1080p, it took rasterised Ultra Cyberpunk 2077 up to 168.30fps, and RT: Ultra to 95.74fps. For an iGPU, it’s very impressive.

My sample of the Galaxy Book 6 Pro came with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM and a decent capacity 1TB SSD, which also proved to be one of the brisker PCIe Gen 4 options you’ll find. That came with tested read and write speeds of 7069.62 MB/s and 5893.75 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 Book 6 Pro 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 Book 6 Pro’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 with Microsoft Phone Link, which turns the laptop’s panel into a large phone screen.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 19 hours 50 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for between two and three working days

The Galaxy Book 6 Pro comes with a beefy 78Whr cell, which is perhaps needed to power a beefy Panther Lake chip and the larger OLED screen this laptop features, although how Samsung has gotten it into a laptop this thin is impressive in itself.

The endurance I measured in the PCMark 10 video loop battery test at the requisite 150 bits was excellent, with a total runtime of 19 hours and 50 minutes. That’s virtually four hours extra than the Galaxy Book 5 Pro, plus is up there with the likes of the Dell Pro 14 Premium and LG Gram Pro 16 for some of the best endurance on any laptop we’ve tested.

It also comes with a tiny 65W USB-C power brick that’s more in line with Samsung’s phone chargers, and puts juice back into the laptop decently quickly. It took 44 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 92 minutes.

Should you buy it?