Earlier this month we launched the AMD Center, a portal on AnandTech that aggregates all of our AMD content in one place. As a recap, the AMD Center features all of our independent content just as before but in an AMD sponsored wrapper. 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 kicked off our AMD Center giveaways with three Acer V5s. Today we're continuing with some more powerful notebooks for those of you looking for a little more punch. AMD is supplying three 15.6-inch HP ENVY TouchSmart Sleekbooks for this giveaway.

The ENVY Sleekbook features a touch-enabled 15.6" 1366 x 768 display, 8GB of DDR3 memory (up from 4GB on the V5s we just gave away, and expandable up to 16GB) and has an AMD A10-5745M Richland APU with Radeon HD 8610G graphics. The A10-5745 features four Piledriver cores running at a base clock of 2.1GHz and a max turbo clock of 2.9GHz. This is a 25W part, which is fairly low as far as Richland APUs go. The GPU features 384 Radeon cores (VLIW4) running at up to 626MHz with turbo (533MHz max non-turbo). Just as before, I asked AMD if they would be willing to swap out the hard drives for SSDs and they agreed - so if you win, your Sleekbook will ship with a 128GB Samsung SSD 840 drive.

The Sleekbook is 0.9" thin and weighs 5.6 lbs. 

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 Sleekbook. 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 Sleekbook 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 your entry from last time still applies, feel free to re-use it.

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!

Congrats to our three winners. Here's their feedback from using the systems for a few weeks.

Francis

The HP ENVY M6 Sleekbook certainly doesn’t feel like a bargain laptop. With a sleek metal exterior and soft touch plastic on the bottom, the Sleekbook feels solid in the hands. The build quality is quite impressive, especially compared to some of the other HP laptops I have come across in the past. The laptop is slim, and deceptively light considering its size. On the exterior, the laptop features a solid port selection highlighted by dedicated HDMI. Open the lid and one sees a well laid out backlit keyboard that is pretty nice to type on. The keyboard does have some mild flex, but the key travel is good.  The backlight is of the on/off only variety, while the wi-fi light on the f12 key is always on no matter what you do.

Turning the laptop on, one can appreciate the quickness of Windows 8 on an SSD. The laptop is snappy and responsive for your basic every day tasks and is well suited for multimedia as it handles HD video easily. I had no trouble with light gaming thanks to AMD’s A10 APU. The featured Beats Audio Speakers provide good sound quality at an impressive volume. That said, they are not anything to get too excited about. Where the Sleekbook really falls short is in its display and WI-FI performance. The 15.6 inch 1366x768 display is quite frankly, terrible. The low resolution may be forgivable at this price segment, but the screen’s brightness is just plain disappointing. Having the display at anything less than 100% brightness is not really an option. The Wi-Fi is another area of disappointment. The Sleekbook’s Wi-Fi range is limited compared to other devices I own.  With just a quick (and unscientific!) comparison to my Acer netbook, the HP might fail to recognize my router in an area where the Acer would report greater than 50% strength.

The Sleekbook has a lot going for it in terms of build quality and performance. However, it gets hung up by the two huge flaws of display quality and Wi-Fi performance. That said, the AMD platform shows promise here and I look forward to seeing it offered in more devices.

Jamy

The 15" HP Sleekbook comes in an attractive brushed metal package and is clad with a black island style keyboard. It feels higher up market than its price would suggest. AnandTech has said, AMD processors in notebooks allow OEMs to trade some of the silicon cost for higher quality components elsewhere. I can see some of that here with this Sleekbook. It has the best trackpad of any windows notebook Iíve ever used. Itís large, responsive, and handles gestures easily. Itís getting really close to a Macbook in trackpad quality. The screen is bright and looks good, but with the usual 1366x768 caveat. It came with Dragon Naturally Speaking, Box cloud drive space, and a nice temperature utility that uses sensors to keep the Sleekbook cool when it detects it is on your lap. My biggest complaint is, even beyond the wish for more pixels, it came with 600 MHz RAM. I almost couldnít believe it considering how dependent AMD chips are on being fed with fast memory. The A10 feels fast in most cases, but there are definitely times when you miss memory speed. I play quite a bit of Kerbal Space Program on this laptop, which it handles really well at native resolution. Yes, it does borrow some design, and cut some corners in some places I wouldnít have. However, this Sleekbook is aimed at people who are looking for value in a notebook form factor, and it delivers. 

Jarrod

The HP ENVY TouchSmart Sleekbook has been my first experience using Windows 8 on a touch screen device. I was able to familiarize myself with navigating the operating system using the built in help menus and minimal internet searching. I primarily use the Sleekbook for web browsing, messaging, and light gaming. I am impressed by the almost instant boot time. The touch screen was calibrated well (for touch) from the factory and accurately responds to my input. I find the track pad difficult to use since it is a one-piece surface that incorporates the left and right buttons. Trying to click on anything without moving the cursor off of what you're trying to click is difficult without a light and deliberate touch. I am satisfied primarily using the touch screen. The keyboard layout is a bit spread out and works well for my larger hands although it may be less than optimal for someone with smaller hands.The AMD APU is powerful enough to handle casual games as well as some less demanding modern PC games. The sound quality is among the best I've experienced from laptop speakers. The Wi-Fi reception is the only aspect of the laptop I find substantially disappointing. This is the only device of several I use throughout my small house that must be in the same room as the wireless router to maintain a connection. Overall I am pleased with the construction and performance of the Sleekbook and would suggest it as a viable option for anyone looking to use Windows 8 on a touch screen device.  

 

Entries will be accepted from 9:00 AM ET on 9/23/2013 through 12:01 AM ET on 9/27/2013. We will draw 3 winner(s) who will be selected by 9/30/2013.

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NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN.  PURCHASE DOES NOT INCREASE CHANCES OF WINNING.

  1. Eligibility.  Promotions are open to entrants who are 18 years of age or older at time of entry, and a legal resident of the United States (excluding Puerto Rico).  Entries are limited to individuals only who are not presently banned from AnandTech’s website or comments section; commercial enterprises and business entities are not eligible.  Directors, officers, employees, contractors, and agents of AnandTech (excluding volunteer AnandTech forum moderators) and members of their immediate families (spouses, parents, siblings, and children) are not eligible.  Subject to all applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations.  Void where prohibited.  Participation constitutes entrant’s full and unconditional agreement to these Rules and AnandTech’s decisions, which are final and binding in all matters relating to a Promotion.
     
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  5. Prizes.  Winning a gift, prize, or other promotional item (a “Prize”) in a Promotion is contingent upon fulfilling all requirements in these Rules.  Winners will be selected in a random drawing of eligible entries received during the Promotion Period.  AnandTech will notify Prize winners using the contact information provided in the winning entry.  Failure to claim a Prize by the time or in the manner specified in the particular Promotion will invalidate any claim to the Prize.  Prizes are not transferable.  The odds of winning a Prize or the Grand Prize depend on the number of entries received by AnandTech.  TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, ALL PRIZES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND ARE NOT EXCHANGEABLE FOR FAIR MARKET VALUE.  TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, ANANDTECH DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE PRIZES, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. For this Promotion, 3 winner(s) will be selected by 9/30/2013 and will each receive a HP ENVY TouchSmart Sleekbook laptop described above (“Grand Prize”).  The Total U.S. Retail Value of the Grand Prize is $699.99.  The Grand Prize may not be substituted for cash.  The Grand Prize winner will be solely responsible for all applicable taxes, fees, and surcharges associated with receipt and/or use of the Grand Prize.  After the Grand Prize winner has been notified and has complied with all applicable Rules, AnandTech will post the Grand Prize winner’s name on this website.
     
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  • JaredC01 - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    My current setup was built in late 2009, and has had a few upgrades along the way. In it's current setup, I'm running an i7 920 paired to an EVGA Classified board, with 24 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz RAM, powered by an Enermax Revolution 1050w PSU, with an EVGA GTX670 FTW LE video card, six HDDs of the Western Digital variety ranging from 500 GB (in a RAID 0 array) up to 2TB (in a RAID 1 array), sound from a Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty card, and all thrown into a Corsair 650D case. The setup is mainly used as a gaming computer, but doubles as a graphics editing and video rendering machine.

    A long while ago I was an AMD fan, though since the introduction of the Core 2 line in CPUs and the GTX 400 series in GPUs, I've not even bothered with the AMD offerings due to the performance gap between the two manufacturers. With AMD now more focused on their APU offerings, I'm very interested to see how well their mobile platform stacks up to the Intel based setups, especially in graphics performance.

    If I had the Sleekbook, it would be used as a replacement for my desktop when rendering, and when not rendering, it would allow me to get away from the officer chair to browse, and play an occasional game or two.
  • Nintendo Maniac 64 - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    Simply put, the fastest PC that I own period has the following:
    - Athlon 64 x2 4800+ 2.5GHz (65nm, C2 stepping, 2 x 512KB L2)
    - Geforce 8800GS 384MB
    - Crucial M4 128GB SSD
    - 2x1GB 800MHz DDR2 + 2x1GB 667MHz DDR2

    And the fastest laptop I own period has the following:

    - 1280x800 LCD display
    - 2GHz T5800 Core 2 Duo
    - integrated Intel 965GMA
    - OCZ Onyx 32GB SSD
    - 2x1GB 667MHz DDR2
  • Nintendo Maniac 64 - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    And to clarify, that laptop in question isn't particularly light at all and is quite think too, and it's a 15" LCD. It's an Acer Aspire 5315-2639.

    The best mobile computer I have, that is, something that's actually not moderately heavy and has a battery life better than 1-2 hours, is the following Asus EeePC netbook:
    - 1024x600 LED-backlit LCD display
    - 1.6GHz N270 Intel Atom (1 core, 2 threads)
    - integrated Intel 945GMA
    - OCZ Onyx 32GB SSD
    - 2GB DDR2
  • emollient - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    Keep it!
  • designerfx - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    Currently, I have a mobile heavy/desktop environment. I have a high end consumer desktop serving as both a media and file server while powering both a TV display and a 1920x1200 display simultaneously. Usually all of the above is going at the same time, as I have separate hard drives for the media/file servers which don't impact the plenty of ram and graphics (HD 6970 3GB with an i7 920) for gaming. win7 x64.

    In addition to that, my wife and I have about 4 active mobile phones (2 work, 2 personal), a tablet (nexus 7", and are about to look into whether we purchase a laptop or a tablet to assist with couchsurfing/portable needs that are above what a mobile phone is capable of. Chromecast has its limits vs chromecasting a browser window. Our laptops are broken/not cost efficient and were traded for the tablet - except for our 2 work laptops.

    A sleekbook fits right into testing that capability with a touch screen to assess windows 8 vs another android tablet. This is as much about mobility (considering the laptop's radio range tested with an asus rt-n56u) as it is about just seeing how much a laptop like this can handle - whether the laptop could be an always-on candidate for offloading some of the file server functions or as more than a temporary storage place for DSLR photos, that's I want to see.

    It's hard to assess what can be done without a laptop, but that's my current environment.
  • Hrel - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    My entry: (modified for this entry)

    I currently have an older desktop I built, based on Nvidia's 650SLI chipset. At the time it was the only platform that officially supported DDR2-800Mhz. Currently the CPU is an E8400 and it has 4GB of DDR2-800 at 4-4-4-12. I have one GTX460 768MB GPU and a Hauppage TV Tuner/Capture card. I'm using a Thermaltake 550W PSU in an old Atrix case with a build in handle. It has one front Scythe 120mm fan, 2 side 80mm Antec Cool n Quiet fans with one rear 90mm Antec fan.

    Though I started with one 500GB hard drive ($160 at the time) it now has two in RAID 0 and the OS is on a 256GB SSD. I ordered a Crucial SSD, but they gave me $80 back since they sent me a VisionTek; it works well so I'm happy with the deal. Finally it has a USB 3.0 expansion card in the spare PCI-E x16 port; it's a x1 card though.

    My main laptop is a Clevo P151HM with Core i7 2630 and GTX560M GPU. 8GB DDR-3 1333 RAM with a Seagate MomentusXT 500GB hdd.

    My work laptop is a cheap HP with Core i5 and integrated graphics on a 1360x768 screen.

    I already won the V5 and am grateful. I really don't have a need for this level computing device. This class laptop is a role better fulfilled by my Clevo. However it would be really cool to have both this and the V5 for testing purposes. I'd love to run both of these through some benchmarks and testing scenarios just to see what happens. I work as an Engineer so I do performance testing and documentation all the time; it's just on Industrial level hardware. Most of which is built in house. It's much less exciting than consumer class hardware; at least most of the time.

    Once I was done testing this machine I'd likely give it away to the wife of one of my friends. They just got married and are struggling to get by. Someone gifting them something like this is really the only way they're going to have a nice computing platform for the foreseeable future. This is thin and light so she could carry it around easily enough and the specs should exceed her needs. The most taxing thing she does is put music to pictures and play flash games. I also don't expect the resolution would bother her and I know the SSD would make her very happy with it.

    I've never won anything before so that V5 was really cool. I figure maybe I can let some of my karmic momentum benefit someone else; if I should happen to win two give a ways in a row.
  • mrdude - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    I currently own a desktop - 955 Deneb and a 5870 with 12GB of RAM in a 770 ASRock motherboard. My laptop is an X220 with an i3 Sandy Bridge.

    I use the machines mainly for web browsing, media, minimal gaming (couple hours a week and only on the desktop as HD300 can't handle it), and AutoCAD for work. The desktop is still going strong, with more than ample power for my needs. The laptop on the other hand could use an upgrade, if only for the graphics. I love my X220, but the HD3000 appears to be a limiting factor in my AutoCAD work and therefore I'm restricted to 2D modeling on the field (and that can get slow too) while 3D is a nonstarter. I reckon this HP Envy would provide ample power to do both :)
  • laweijfmvo - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    i have a 11" macbook air (2010), which i use for casual stuff -- email, news, etc., and a desktop (i3 sandy bridge) that i use for work and tasks that require power. it would be great to have a notebook with a "big enough" screen that's powerful enough to replace the desktop, because desktops are inconvenient for my small apartment.

    i also have a nexus 4 and nexus 7, which serve strictly as a phone and ebook/bedtime device.
  • TheTick077 - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    Currently I have PC 2 systems (no tablets but both my wife and I have Android smartphones). One is my HTPC/Media server/(light)Gaming Rig (Intel Pentium G860 w/ Radeon 7770 GPU) that I have hooked into my main tv downstairs, and the other is a 15" Lenovo laptop (Intel i5). Both systems are currently running Windows 7 and I have a couple of Linux distros installed via VM on the laptop for some light development work I do on the side.

    If I were to win this laptop it would enable me to work on my existing laptop while my wife and kids use the new laptop. In addition, we home school our two oldest kids (2nd grade and kindergarten) and have been thinking of incorporating some light computer instruction and having the latest OS with a touchscreen would be a HUGE benefit for us. It would enable us to cross the gap they currently have when they go from using our phone to trying to use the Laptop - they always reach up and try to touch and manipulate the screen (especially the 2.5 year old). In addition, I have always been an AMD fan (first PC I built was a 1GHz AMD machine), but went with Intel on my latest HTPC build and laptop and would love the opportunity to go back to AMD and see how it stacks up with the Intel chipset.
  • Gunbuster - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link

    I've got a slow netbook that I would love to replace. Maybe this laptop would fit the bill. Apprehensive about a 1366 x 768 screen. Maybe winning one would change my mind?

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