I tried Samsung’s Galaxy Book6 Ultra. Panther Lake makes a big difference

Samsung’s 16-inch Galaxy Book6 is the first Panther Lake-powered PC I’ve had the pleasure of using outside of a demonstration. Combining an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 CPU with discrete Nvidia graphics hardware, the Galaxy Book6 Ultra is an impressive premium machine. Samsung gave Galaxy Books a redesign for 2026, and this PC has a more modern feel to match its updated internals.

Samsung hasn’t announced pricing or availability for the U.S. yet, this machine is a premium laptop that shows just how promising Intel’s Panther Lake hardware is. It’s a laptop with discrete Nvidia graphics that gets over 24 hours of battery life and delivers solid multithreaded performance. That would’ve been impossible just a year ago.

Samsung redesigned its Galaxy Books for 2026

I’ve reviewed past Samsung Galaxy Book laptops, and this year’s Galaxy Book6 has a redesign that will appeal to most people.

This 16-inch laptop ditches the number pad of last year to provide a centered keyboard and trackpad with more space for speakers on the left and right side. It looks sleek and modern, and it’ll appeal to everyone who isn’t looking for a number pad. The keyboard still feels snappy and responsive. It’s perhaps a tad shallow, but there are no surprises here — it’s exactly what you’d expect on a machine like this one.

Samsung’s Galaxy Book6 models are smaller and more compact than previous generations. Previous Galaxy laptops I’ve reviewed, including last year’s Galaxy Book5 Pro, felt like big pieces of metal with a tapered design at the edges, while this year’s model ditches the wedge-like edges for something more squared off and compact.

Despite this, Samsung says these machines have re-engineered fan and vapor chamber systems for more optimized cooling. My colleague Mark Hachman showed off the internal thermal system when he wrote a preview of the Galaxy Book6 Ultra at CES.

I didn’t mind the previous-generation Samsung Galaxy Book design, but those laptops always felt a bit utilitarian, big metal laptops packed with powerful hardware. The design here just looks more modern and minimal — shrinking the footprint a little bit and omitting the number pad makes a huge difference in how this machine comes across.

Even the trackpad feels more modern: Samsung chose a haptic touchpad this time around. I’m a big fan of haptic touchpads. However, there’s no IR camera for Windows Hello here, just a fingerprint reader.

The machine looks and feels great, although it appears to pick up fingerprints easily, as you can see in some of the photos. It weighs just over four pounds, and it feels svelte compared to what you get here — after all, this machine even has discrete Nvidia graphics! It should be able to handle nearly everything you throw at it.

24+ hours of battery life in a laptop with Nvidia graphics

Samsung has a variety of Galaxy Book6 models. The laptop Samsung loaned to me is a gray Galaxy Book6 Ultra (16-inch) PC with an Intel Core Ultra 7 356H CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 2 TB SSD.

The display looks great, too: It’s a 16-inch touch AMOLED display with a 2880×1800 resolution and up to a whopping 1,000 nits of HDR peak brightness plus 500 nits of SDR brightness. It’s got an adaptive refresh rate from 30Hz to 120Hz.

The port setup is solid, with two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports, a USB Type-A port, HDMI 2.1 out, an SD card slot, and a headphone/microphone combo audio jack. This machine charges via USB-C, but, unfortunately, both Thunderbolt 4 ports are on the left side. It would’ve been nice to see a charging port on the right side, too.

Despite the Nvidia GPU and big, bright display here, this machine exceeded 24 hours of battery life in an initial battery life run-down test — around 25 hours or so while looping a video. That’s a lot of runtime on battery given the performance here, and it shows how strong Panther Lake is. Samsung’s Galaxy Book6 Ultra is a high-quality package that delivers on the strengths of Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs.

Foundry / Chris Hoffman

As always, you won’t get 24 hours of battery life in real usage. But this is incredibly power efficient for a machine that can run PC games and professional apps with solid performance when you’re plugged in. It’s a real “do it all” machine as long as you’re fine with a 16-inch laptop that weighs four pounds. Previous generations of Intel CPUs made you choose between Lunar Lake‘s battery life and Arrow Lake‘s performance, but Panther Lake seems to offer both.

Samsung also promises super-fast charging: Up to 63 percent of battery life restored in just 30 minutes. And this machine did seem to recharge fast.

Panther Lake’s multithreaded CPU performance is great

I was impressed with 2025’s Lunar Lake machines, but they had a massive problem: Intel’s last-generation battery-efficient processor struggled when it came to multithreaded performance. These machines were great thin-and-light systems for office workers who never ran demanding apps, but they struggled when the CPU really needed to deliver performance. For an Intel-powered Windows PC, that was not ideal. Many people passed up Lunar Lake for this reason. If they went with Intel systems, they lived with laptops that were less power efficient and didn’t deliver serious battery life.

This time around, Panther Lake promises to deliver the best of both worlds. We were impressed by the high-end Intel Core Ultra X9 388H CPU, but the Intel Core Ultra 7 chip here is more representative of what people will get on the average Panther Lake laptop in the real world.

I ran some initial benchmarks as a test. Here’s a quick comparison:

2025’s Galaxy Book5 Pro with its Intel Core Ultra 7 256V Lunar Lake CPU completed a Handbrake encode in an average of 1,433 seconds — that’s nearly 24 minutes.

2026’s Galaxy Book6 Ultra with its Intel Core Ultra 7 356H Panther Lake CPU completed the encode process in an average of 671 seconds — that’s just over 11 minutes.

That’s over twice as fast when serious multithreaded CPU performance is called for. And 2026’s faster Galaxy Book6 Ultra delivered a little more battery life, too.

The multithreaded CPU performance here is the biggest leap, but performance is up across the board and battery life is up, too. I’m impressed.

Foundry / Chris Hoffman

Panther Lake delivers, and so did Samsung

Samsung’s Galaxy Book6 Ultra is a serious premium laptop, and I’m a fan of the redesign. It feels like a more modern take on a Samsung Galaxy laptop, although I do wish it had facial recognition sign-in support for Windows Hello. That omission is unfortunate.

That said, the real story here for me are the internals. This is my first time sitting down with Panther Lake hardware. And the initial benchmarks are just what I hoped to see.

My first impression is that Panther Lake lives up to what Intel promised. I’ve reviewed so many Intel laptops over the last few years. I’ve repeatedly said “Lunar Lake gets great battery life, but has poor multithreaded performance. Arrow Lake delivers great performance, but it has worse battery life and generates more heat.”

That’s been the Intel trade-off, and there’s been no escaping it — until now. I was more of a fan of AMD’s Ryzen AI CPUs, which delivered what I felt like was a better balance, not as much battery life as Lunar Lake, but more performance.

This time, Intel’s Panther Lake is delivering the complete package. I’m sure this laptop isn’t perfect, and I’m sure Panther Lake has its quirks — I’ve only had my hands on it for a few days! But Intel has its mojo back.

One open question is what this machine is actually like to use in the real world. Does battery life dive with real day-to-day web browsing and productivity app usage? I won’t know for sure until I have a few days with this machine.

Still, in many ways, the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra appears to be one of the best laptops I’ve ever used. It’s also the first Panther Lake laptop I’ve ever used, and that’s no coincidence: The combination of performance and long battery life here is incredible.

And you’re getting it all with a traditional x86 Intel CPU, no Arm CPU necessary, so this is compatible with all your traditional Windows desktop software and old hardware drivers. The Nvidia GPU here will deliver solid gaming performance while plugged in.

The Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra is impressive, and so is Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3. I look forward to spending more time with both of them.