AMD Center Giveaway: Acer V5, 11.6" quad-core Temash Notebooks
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 5, 2013 6:30 PM ESTToday we launched the AMD Center, a portal on AnandTech that aggregates all of our AMD content in one place. Thanks to AMD's sponsorship you'll get a cleaner interface on all AMD articles, as well as reduced advertising on those pages. The portal will also serve as a way for AMD to reach out to you all directly as we're pulling in AMD tweets and have a feed of AMD's own blogs on the right hand side. AMD also wants to hear from you, and we've got some opporuntities to help with that going forward. Finally, the AMD Center serves as a destination for a bunch of pretty awesome AMD giveaways we've got planned. With AMD's support we've got better prizes and more of them to give away. We're kicking off the giveaways with three ultra thin 11.6-inch notebooks: Acer's V5.
The V5 features a touch enabled 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 IPS display, 4GB of DDR3L memory (2GB on board, 2GB in a single SO-DIMM slot, expandable to 6GB total) and normally ships with a standard SATA hard drive. I asked AMD if they would be willing to swap out the hard drives for SSDs and they agreed - so if you win, your V5 will ship with a 128GB Samsung SSD 840 drive (you can thank me later ;)).
The 2.65 pound Acer V5 features AMD's quad-core A6-1450 APU. That's four Jaguar cores running at 1GHz (1.4GHz max turbo) with a Radeon HD 8250 GPU. It's a nice little system with a very power efficient APU.
Here's the deal. To enter, simply post a comment below (US residents only, please only make a single post, contest requirements below) explaining your current PC setup and why you want, or need to win a V5. What I'm looking for here is an understanding of what you currently own in terms of computing devices (PCs, notebooks, tablets, etc...), how you use them and how winning a V5 would change/improve your current setup. Make your entries good as they may come in handy for some other stuff we've got planned in the future.
If you win, AMD wants your feedback on the machine after you get it. You'll be asked to provide a short review (a paragraph or two) talking about your experience with the system. Do a good job and your feedback may even be featured on AnandTech.
Good luck!
Entries will be accepted from 6:30 PM ET on 9/5/2013 through 6:30 PM ET on 9/9/2013. We will draw 3 winner(s) who will be selected by 9/10/2013.
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jaylen269 - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
I currently have a laptop which I use everything for, but it is so old that it has many performance issues, and could die out any minute. I would like this so I can have an update to date machine that wont give out within the next month or so.fmillmd - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
I own one Pentium box currently in the shop getting a new hard drive and OS and failure, a relatively new Lenovo Pentium All in One replacing the box for the time being, two older Toshiba laptops one of the distant Centrino generation, both now being used by my last two kids in the home for their homework since their charter school's curriculum is now online. I have one of the original Toshiba "netbooks" which is so underpowered I only use it for correspondence online when I travel and have not upgraded Windows on it from xp to even Win7 but have always liked its form factor and size the best. I have one 15 standard ASUS laptop with an i3 chipset and use it for travelling. I am a teaching psychiatrist based in a state hospital and do a good deal of psychiatric teaching at my primary place of employment, the state hospital where I am based in one part of my state or residence. I travel to another state hospital several hours' drive away and to one other medical school and teach in those psychiatric residency programs as well. I use the 15 inch laptop for these jaunts, those its older hard drive is filled with many years of lectures, I have come to shift all of my voluminous teaching files to two well known cloud services for fear that this machine will suffer a hard drive failure on me at an inopportune time and leave me stranded without access to my needed files. In the past I have had made and put together myself several ATX and miniATX AMD chip based boxes because of value for the money, i.e., the cost of the AMD compatible chips heavily tilting my MOBO and chip choices to AMD. But I gave them away to relatives, now younger nieces and one grandchild a preteen and they have all kept working in good order and served my extended family well.I now primarily need a small very capable machine that will hold my files, permit me to carefully transport it to my teaching destinations and venues easily and I prefer the small form factors as my setup is always to set the laptop on a podium in a medical settings teaching auditorium and hook it up to a projector system and then lecture away. Ordinary laptops are, embarrassingly too heavy for me as a year ago I suffered from the onset of multiple myeloma with the sudden appearance of several broken ribs and three fractured vertebral bodies literally overnight. I knew right away what the diagnosis likely was and in two days had this confirmed and faced the rigors of 10 months of chemotherapy preparing me for an autologous stem cell transplant (meaning my own stem cells) at a southeastern nationally known university medical center. I was "virtually" cured as the chances of recurrence with this near miraculous treatment are in the single digits. But I have been left with chronic backpain from the poorly healed vertebral fractures that is now a constant presence in my life. My orthopedist and oncologist have limited me to carrying the weight of no more than "two medical textbooks." And even this weight occasionally redouble my pain to levels that even with my stoicism and avoidance of "pain meds" that are addictive, are nearly intolerable and interferes with my stamina in my teaching rounds.
The form factor represented by this machine would help me in many ways, giving me a capable machine, take me back to my favored AMD chips from my tinkering days and give me a lightweight machine that will permit my continued medical teaching comfortably. After all I do not need a 15.6" or 17" laptop screen to see my slides when I have a projector to prompt me of my teaching points and text that covers a "movie screen" sized area in front of me and my academic recipients.
Dracono - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
I use my systems for content creation and some gaming. At home I use a 2008 custom home build, consisting of Intel Q9450, GTX 560TI and 8GB of memory running Win7. Often I need to get away from the desk to join some meetups and tablets are not my thing as they feel too aimed at being a content consumption device (I like a keyboard), nothing more then what my phone (Nexus 4) can do already.My notebook solution is an older '05 HP L2000 14" notebook running on a first gen AMD Turion 64 ML-40. Still has the original 80 GB HD and later was upgraded to 2GB of ram. It's dated single core and slow, but it works. I found new life for it with Linux, so I use it more now. Granted I always wish it was more up to date, portable and battery friendly. I took a chance on AMD's first mobile chip and this is exactly what the Acer V5 with a AMD A6-1450 would be replacing in my life.
Dracono - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
And FAIL to read the rules too ;)epi117 - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Book en dano and hand over the laptopChilliConCarnage - Saturday, September 21, 2013 - link
I value portability most of all, so I have an (under-powered) AMD C-60 based notebook (or is it a netbook) now. I use it for business, and it gets great battery life, but it's simply not powerful enough.lyssword - Saturday, September 21, 2013 - link
GIVE ME I WANT IT. Ok pretty simple, don't give this laptop to other guys, just me. Thanks for understanding, you're a true gentleman.lyssword - Saturday, September 21, 2013 - link
I currently use a intel G630/ati 5770/4gb 1tb wd black desktop for most of the stuff, but I feel like I need a laptop for my college classes, most of the people there have a laptop for computer science courses.yer_momma - Sunday, September 22, 2013 - link
I currently own a decent i5 desktop with SSD/GTX770 etc.. a Macbook Pro and an Asus K55n A8 Laptop. I find myself using the desktop most of the time since it's attached to an 24" IPS monitor and it's just nicer to look at. The macbook pro comes in 2nd thanks to the awesome touchpad and IPS screen. The few month old Asus A8 Laptop basically just sits around since it's a cheap TN style LCD screen and is made from cheap plastic and just isn't nice to view or use. I'll trade you the crappy Asus laptop for this strait upIt would be nice to see an AMD processor paired with a good IPS screen and multi-gesture touchpad made from quality materials where the keyboard doesn't bend when pressing a key. Typically you only see the AMD chips in the cheapest models which gives AMD a bad rep, this looks like it might be a refreshing change.
zobisch - Sunday, September 22, 2013 - link
I have a 6 Core i7-3930k watercooled to 4.7ghz, 32gb of DDR3, Intel 520 240gb, with 2 660's in SLI and a gts250 for Physx that I built. A Macbook Retina 15in for my serious laptop that gets a little warm on my lap. A Samsung GS4 with CM10.2 nightly on it.I've used several tablets but find that I'm really wanting a small touchscreen laptop with decent graphics. Up till now there hasn't been much from AMD mobile that I was interested in but with Jaguar I'm starting to see real graphics progress. The first thing I'll probably do if I win is to put ddr3 1866 ram in it to improve the GPU speed. I'll also set up dual boot Mint Linux for some development and software work...