Samsung Series 5 Chromebook Teardown Reveals Spartan, Efficient Design - Mobile and Wireless - News & Reviews - eWeek.com | eWeek

Samsung Series 5 Chromebook

Samsung Series 5 Chromebook
Written By
Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton
Jun 9, 2011
2 minute read
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Samsung Series 5 Chromebook

1

The Series 5 Chromebook comes in arctic white, pictured, as well as titan silver.


Left Side View

2

Behold the power connector, fan vent, rubber door for mini-VGA and USB ports, and a headphone/microphone jack. The SD reader is on the front left face of the machine. The right side sports a door for a USIM card and another USB port.


Inside

3

Like Google’s Cr-48 Chrome OS test model, the Series 5 offers a separate motherboard and I/O board layout with mini-PCIe cards for WWAN, WiFi. There is also flash memory as well as an Intel NM10 graphics card. However, the Atom N570 processor in the Series 5 includes 512K more L2 cache than the Cr-48’s Atom N455.


Battery

4

Series 5 uses a Samsung lithium polymer battery, which the company claimed is good for 8.1 Amp. With the Intel Atom chip, the battery lasts for 8.5 hours, fully charged. Interestingly, while the Cr-48’s battery is accessible from the outside of the machine, the Series 5 must be opened to swap out the battery.


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Connections

5

The Qualcomm Gobi2000 WWAN board includes Qualcomm MDM2000, Samsung K4X56323PI 32 MB Mobile DRAM, Qualcomm RFR6500 receiver and the Qualcomm RTR6285 UMTS transceiver with GPS.


WiFi Board

6

The Series 5 includes this Atheros AR9382 802.11n WiFi chip with XSPAN.


Solid State Storage

7

Here’s that lightweight SanDisk SDSA4DH-016G SSD card everyone was talking about as providing the minimum of internal storage Google asked for. Google told eWEEK it wanted to use even less, but computer makers Samsung and Acer declined.


Processor

8

Next, iFixit bares the brain of the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook: the aforementioned Atom chip and NM10 graphics card. Remarkably, iFixit said this chip combo produces such little heat that no cooling fins are used at the fan’s exhaust.


Motherboard

9

The Series 5 motherboard houses the Intel Atom dual-core processor, graphics card, Realtek ALC272 4-Channel High Definition Audio Codec, Samsung 2 GB DD3 SDRAM, clock generator and fan controller.


Speaker

10

Chromebook’s speakers are held in place by strips of tape, iFixit observed, adding: “No word on how they sound just yet but judging by their diminutive size and fabric domes, they probably won’t be popping eardrums anytime soon.”


TouchPad Controller

11

For those who hated the CR-48’s trackpad, the Synaptics T1320A Capacitive Touchpad Controller used in the Series 5 is reportedly much smoother and more responsive.

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