The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro is a brilliant Windows ultrabook for those after a compact, lightweight choice that also packs a punch with excellent performance. It also sports a fantastic high-res OLED display, as well as a good port selection and brilliant battery life. It's only a little thing that lets it down, with a shallower travel keyboard that may not be for some.
Pros
- Lightweight, sturdy frame
- Lunar Lake chip provides good power
- Fantastic battery life
Cons
- Keyboard can be a bit shallow
- AI features may not necessarily be too useful if you don't have a Samsung phone
Key Features
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Intel Core Ultra 7 256V CPU: The Galaxy Book 5 Pro comes with one of Intel's new Lunar Lake laptop CPUs to offer beefy performance.
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Lightweight chassis: It also weighs just 1.23kg, making it especially portable thanks to a slim aluminium chassis.
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63Wh battery: The battery size may be modest against the competition, but the Galaxy Book5 Pro offers some fantastic endurance for long working days.
Introduction
The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro is the MacBook Air equivalent to the brand’s bigger and more flexible 360 model.
With this in mind, it carries a smaller 14-inch screen and slimmer chassis against the Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360, putting it more in line with the likes of the Huawei Matebook 14 (2024) and, with its £1499/$1549 price tag, the new Apple MacBook Pro M4.
I’ve been testing the Galaxy Book 5 Pro to see how well it performs, and as to whether it’s truly one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested. Competition is fierce, so let’s find out.
Design and Keyboard
- Lightweight and sturdy thanks to an aluminium case
- Solid port selection
- Keyboard travel is short, but tactile
The Galaxy Book 5 Pro warrants the same comparison against Apple’s new MacBook Pro as the 360 model, given the almost identical Space Grey colourway. Pitting it up against my own MacBook Pro finished in this colour prompted a lot of squinting, as the colours look virtually the same. They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it seems that’s what Samsung is going for, here.
The 1.23kg weight makes it surprisingly lightweight and portable for what Samsung is touting as a pro-grade laptop, and it feels more MacBook Air than Pro-like with this in mind. There haven’t been any compromises in build quality either, with an aluminium case that’s smooth to the touch and sturdy.
At just 11.6mm thick, it’s also beautifully slender, but doesn’t compromise too much on ports. There’s both an HDMI and microSD reader, which is similar to a modern MacBook Pro, as well as a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports on the left side, and a full-size USB-A and headphone jack on the right. It’s probably about as functional as you can get with such a svelte chassis.
The keyboard is fairly compact with arrow keys, a function row and a couple of navigation keys in the top right corner. There is a pleasant grippy finish to the keys themselves, although they do have quite a shallow travel. I don’t mind this, as it is quite similar to the last few years of MacBooks, although you may wish to have a bit more distance to traverse.
The trackpad here is quite large and feels excellent. It features a short, but snappy actuation to it, and comes with the same smooth, almost ceramic-like finish to it.
Display and Sound
- Smooth and detailed OLED panel
- Excellent black level, contrast and colours
- Speakers can get loud, but that’s about it
As with its bigger brother, the Galaxy Book 5 Pro utilises a marvellous OLED screen for deep blacks, virtually infinite contrast and brilliant colour accuracy. This smaller model comes with a 14-inch 2880×1800 resolution, complete with 120Hz refresh rate and touchscreen powers, too. All of this combines to make it a fantastic display for everything from productivity workloads to more intensive tasks too, with both lots of detail and silky smooth motion.
Getting out my colorimeter only backed this up further with virtually perfect colour accuracy across the board. There was 100% coverage of both sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, as well as 95% Adobe RGB, making the Galaxy Book 5 Pro suitable for standard and colour-sensitive creative workloads.
The measured 0.01 black level means we’re getting the deep, inky blacks that have become the calling card for an OLED screen, while its 27860:1 contrast ratio gives it some seriously impressive dynamic range.
The only element where this panel is let down, as is typical with OLEDs is the overall vibrancy. The 381.6 nits of peak SDR brightness still beats our target of 300 nits and makes this a suitable laptop screen for use indoors and out, but it isn’t as punchy as other ultrabooks we’ve tested.
The Galaxy Book 5 Pro’s speakers are downwards-firing, although offer solid clarity when placed on a harder surface such as a typical desk. They can also get quite loud, although lack some detail and bass – you’re much better off with either some dedicated separates or a good pair of headphones./
Performance
- Intel Core Ultra 7 256V offers solid performance
- Can even game at 1080p
- SSD is quick at reading, but writing not so much
The Galaxy Book 5 Pro comes with the same chip as its larger, 2-in-1 brother, with one of Intel’s Lunar Lake processors inside – the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V. This comes with eight cores and eight threads, with the core count split equally between Intel’s P and E core types.
Intel has made a lot of these chips’ combined oomph and efficiency against their Meteor Lake predecessors, and the Galaxy Book 5 Pro offers a solid blend of both in our testing.
Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 single-core performance is strong against the similarly-sized Huawei Matebook 14 (2024), although modern M3 and M4-powered Macs clean house, at least in single-core performance against this high-power Intel chip. Both are ahead of the Core Ultra 7 256V in multi-core loads, arguably given their higher core and thread counts against that Intel chip.
| Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro | Huawei Matebook 14 (2024) | Apple MacBook Pro M4 | |
| Geekbench 6 Single Core | 2696 | 2187 | 3767 |
| Geekbench 6 Multi Core | 11045 | 11574 | 14955 |
| Cinebench R23 Single Core | 1887 | 1462 | 2187 |
| Cinebench R23 Multi Core | 10003 | 13264 | 13830 |
| PCMark 10 | 7425 | 6826 | N/A |
| 3D Mark Time Spy | 4401 | 3743 | N/A |
| CrystalDiskMark Read Speed | 5017 MB/s | 5222.82 MB/s | N/A |
| CrystalDiskMark Write Speed | 2818.08 MB/s | 4952.91 MB/s | N/A |
Graphical horsepower isn’t lacking with the Intel Arc 140V 8GB iGPU within the chip, which blitzes any number of the Snapdragon X-Elite or Plus-powered ultrabooks within the Galaxy Book 5 Pro’s price range, and it can even play some games, too. That comes with the caveat that you will need to turn some settings down to get especially playable frame rates, but it can still game.
For reference, at max settings, Returnal and Rainbow Six Extraction posted respective figures of 31fps and 41fps respectively at Full HD, with Cyberpunk 2077 offering a 22.06fps at its Ultra preset natively at the same resolution.
That’s about as far as the Galaxy Book5 Pro goes, though. Going up to QHD pushed Returnal down to 20fps, and Rainbow Six Extraction to 25fps. Cyberpunk 2077 fared even worse at 13.20fps at Ultra settings at 1440p, and turning on ray-tracing there gave even worse results.
The 1TB drive inside is at least quite generous in capacity and offers decent read speeds of 5017MB/s, even if writes are a bit sluggish at 2818.08MB/s. There is 16GB of speedy DDR5 RAM headroom here for intensive workloads, too.
Software
- Windows’ typical AI functions are all present and correct
- Some handy extras, including webcam effects
- Lots of integration with Samsung Galaxy phones
The Galaxy Book 5 Pro, as with seemingly every other Windows-based ultrabook, is a Copilot+ PC. This means it comes with Microsoft’s Copilot AI functionality thanks to its dedicated key on the bottom row of the keyboard that acts as a wake button for Microsoft’s AI assistant. It brings up a window where you can ask the AI all manner of things, such as to write text, for information, or virtually anything else that comes to mind.
You also get generative AI in system apps such as Photos, where you can add filters or an interesting background to your photos. The app also has an Image Creator function, where you can give the system a prompt and it’ll generate an image for you with reasonable accuracy.
Microsoft Paint also has similar smarts, where AI can help you add detail to images using the CoCreator tab where it can turn your image into everything from pixel art to an oil painting.
The Galaxy Book5 Pro’s solid webcam also benefits from Windows Studio webcam effects to keep you in frame, as well as to offer convenient features such as background blur, which works a treat for conference calls. There are also useful extras including a way of adding live captions to videos directly within Windows, which is handy.
Microsoft is still touting its controversial Recall feature with these Copilot+ PCs, and even if it isn’t on the Galaxy Book5 Pro at the time of writing, it is labelled as ‘coming soon’. The idea of it is that it takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds so you can look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you haven’t manually bookmarked them or used the Snipping Tool to take a screenshot. Due to privacy concerns, it remains for Windows Insiders, and it seems to need some ironing out before it gets released into the wild.
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.
Naturally, you can also hook up a Galaxy handset to reap even more benefits with the Galaxy Book5 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.
As an x86-based system, this laptop also doesn’t have anything in the way of compatibility issues with any games or VPN apps for instance that have befallen Snapdragon X Elite-powered alternatives with this higher price tag. That’s a small, but important, win for the Galaxy Book5 Pro.
Battery Life
- Lasted for 15 hours 28 minutes in the battery test
- Capable of lasting for two working days
Samsung rates the Book 5 Pro to last for up to 21 hours on a charge from its modest 63Whr battery, which would make it one of the longest-lasting ultrabooks I’ve tested in 2025. In dialling the brightness down to 150 nits and running the PCMark 10 battery test, the laptop lasted for 15 hours and 28 minutes before dying.
That sits well against the likes of the Matebook 14 (2024) and Asus Zenbook A14 and means you’ll comfortably get through nearly two working days with the Book 5 Pro before needing to charge it up. That result is still behind Microsoft’s own Surface Laptop 7, which lasted for nearly a full 24 hours.
You also won’t be waiting around for too long for the Galaxy Book5 Pro to recharge either, thanks to its 65W USB-C charger. Going from dead to having 50% in too just 36 minutes, which is in line with the competition, while a full charge from zero took 90 minutes. Not bad at all.
Should you buy it?
You want a powerful and lightweight ultrabook
The Galaxy Book5 Pro provides a compelling choice with a laptop that’s equally lightweight and powerful, giving beefy performance in a portable chassis.
You want more keyboard travel
It’s only the little things that let the Galaxy Book5 Pro, such as its shorter key travel. If you want a more defined keypress, then some of the competition can offer that.
Final Thoughts
The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro is a brilliant Windows ultrabook for those after a compact, lightweight choice that also packs a punch with excellent performance. It also sports a fantastic high-res OLED display, as well as a good port selection and brilliant battery life.
You can’t ask for much more than that, and Samsung’s choice is definitely food for thought against the likes of the Huawei Matebook 14 (2024) and Asus Zenbook S 14 (2024), coming as quite the excellent all-rounder. After all, it’s only a little thing that lets it down, with a shallower travel keyboard that may not be for some – that seems like a small price to pay for an otherwise outstanding laptop. For more options, check out our list of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested.
Trusted Score
How we test
Every laptop we review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key factors, including build quality, performance, screen quality and battery life.
These include formal synthetic benchmarks and scripted tests, plus a series of real-world checks, such as how well it runs popular apps.
- We used as our main laptop for at least a week.
- We test the performance via both benchmark tests and real-world use.
- We test the screen with a colorimeter and real-world use.
- We test the battery with a benchmark test and real-world use.
FAQs
The Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro weighs just 1.23kg, making it lightweight and portable.
Test Data
| Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro Review |
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Full Specs
| Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £1549 |
| CPU | Intel Core Ultra 7 256V |
| Manufacturer | Samsung |
| Screen Size | 14 inches |
| Storage Capacity | 512GB |
| Front Camera | 1080p |
| Battery | 63 mAh |
| Battery Hours | 15 28 |
| Size (Dimensions) | 312.3 x 223.8 x 11.6 MM |
| Weight | 1.23 KG |
| Operating System | Windows 11 |
| Release Date | 2025 |
| First Reviewed Date | 19/02/2025 |
| Resolution | x |
| HDR | No |
| Refresh Rate | 120 Hz |
| Ports | 1 HDMI 2.1 (Supports 8K@60Hz, 5K@120Hz) 2 Thunderbolt™ 4 1 USB3.2 MicroSD Multi-media Card Reader 1 Headphone out/Mic-in Combo |
| GPU | Intel Arc 140V |
| RAM | 16GB |
| Connectivity | WiFi 7 |
| Display Technology | OLED |
| Touch Screen | Yes |
| Convertible? | No |