Today 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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Upon entering any contest, sweepstakes, or promotion (a “Promotion”) offered by anandtech.com (the “Site”), a website owned and operated by AnandTech, Inc. (“AnandTech”), you must agree to the following Official Rules and Regulations (the “Rules”) as well as any additional rules governing a specific Promotion that AnandTech publishes on the Site.

BEFORE ENTERING A PROMOTION, READ THESE RULES AND THE SITE’S TERMS, CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY INFORMATION.   BY ENTERING THE PROMOTION, YOU AGREE TO COMPLY WITH THE RULES AND THE SITE’S TERMS, CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY INFORMATION. 

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.
     
  2. Entry Period.  Each Promotion will contain a specific time period within which entries will be accepted (a “Promotion Period”).   The Promotion Period for this Promotion shall run from 6:30 PM ET on 9/5/2013 through 6:30 PM ET on 9/9/2013.  Only entries received during the Promotion Period will be accepted. 
     
  3. How to Enter.  Each Promotion will describe an entry procedure.  AnandTech is not responsible for lost, late, illegible, stolen, incomplete, invalid, unintelligible, misdirected, technically corrupted or garbled entries, which will be disqualified, or for problems of any kind whether mechanical, human or electronic.  Proof of submission will not be deemed to be proof of receipt by AnandTech.  All entries must be in English. Individuals are automatically entered in this Promotion by signing up for AnandTech’s Comments at http://anandtech.com/Account/Register and posting a reply to this post. If randomly selected as a winner individuals must provide full name, complete mailing address, telephone number, AnandTech user name and birth date within 3 days of being contacted.
     
  4. Limits on Entry.  An individual may enter a Promotion once only.  The use of any automated launching or entry software or any other means that permits an entrant to automatically enter repeatedly or in excess of the entry limitations is prohibited. 
     
  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 9/10/2013 and will each receive a Acer V5 Notebooks described above (“Grand Prize”).  The Total U.S. Retail Value of the Grand Prize is $450.  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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  8. General Terms.  Any failure by an entrant, including any prize winner, to comply with any of the Rules or the Site’s Terms, Conditions and Privacy Information may result in disqualification from the Promotion.  All entries, whether they are eligible entries or ineligible entries, are the exclusive property of AnandTech.  AnandTech is not responsible for any typographical errors in the Rules or in any other communication surrounding a Promotion or for any technical malfunction or error relating to the Promotion.  AnandTech reserves the right to amend or interpret the Rules at any time, upon published notice to participants on its website.  Promotion participants agree to release, indemnify, and hold harmless AnandTech and its directors, officers, employees and agents from any and all liability regarding the Promotion, including any injuries, losses, or damages (compensatory, direct, incidental, consequential, or otherwise) regarding the use or misuse of any Prize, any event beyond AnandTech’s control resulting in the disruption, cancellation, or postponement of the receipt of the Prize, or any typographical errors or technical malfunctions associated with the Promotion.  AnandTech reserves the right to disqualify any entry that it, in its sole discretion, determines (i) to be in violation of the Rules, (ii) submitted by fraud or by tampering with the entry process, or (iii) contains inaccurate or fraudulent information.  ANY ATTEMPT BY ANY INDIVIDUAL TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE THE SITE OR UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THE PROMOTION IS A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAWS.  IN THE EVENT SUCH AN ATTEMPT OCCURS, ANANDTECH RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SEEK DAMAGES FROM SUCH INDIVIDUAL TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

 

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  • crispbp04 - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    I NEED to win this V5 so that I can write some sweet apps on an AMD machine. I think the APU design is great. I have a Phenom II X3 with a Radeon 6950 powering my home computer and the V5 is a perfect companion for it.
  • dangorn - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    I currently own an Althon Dual Core X2 2.6 Ghz desktop. I brought it early in 2009, so I’ve had this system for over four years. I’ve upgraded the memory (2GB to 4GB, max supported on my motherboard) and the graphics adapter (original one failed), but it’s still getting quite long in the tooth.
    I also own a Thinkpad T60 (Intel Core Duo T2300 processor, 1.66 Ghz) with 2.5GB of RAM. I bought this used (~$150) about 1.5 years ago because I started on my M.S. in Computer Science and desired to have a computer I owned that I could use outside of work/home.
    Some of my research has been in concurrent programming and scaling computational geometry algorithms to efficiently support GPU cores (and Hadoop clusters with nodes that contain GPU cores). I’ve finished working on that, and now I’m presently working on network simulations related to my thesis. Each simulation trial may eventually take a significantly amount of time to complete, so already I have considered parallelizing some of the code. However, about the best I can hope for (assuming my program is compute-bound) is a linear speed up with the number of cores, and at this time I’m still on the fence as to whether that would be worth the investment in time required to implement the concurrency, especially since I only have a dual core systems at my disposal.
    If I won Acer’s V5, I would choose to implement a concurrent design to try to speed up my simulation times. Right now, given the limited scale of my simulation, simulation times are tolerable, but soon I will be scaling it up to a more realistic size, e.g., millions of simulated computer nodes. At that point, I may be waiting days before I get any useful results from my simulation, so halving or, better yet, quartering, the runtime would be quite welcome.
    Moreover, I’ll be starting my PhD program at a different University in a little less than a year, and so this notebook would undoubtedly serve me quite well in that capacity, also.
  • dangorn - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    Sorry about the lack of spaces between paragraphs.
  • engrpiman - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    My current setup is packed with devices. I have two mac mini's (2010,2011) The 2010 is not in use and the 2011 is my dedicated banking computer. I have a Sandy bridge Gaming desktop as my primary setup and a new Mini ITX Intel Haswell media center PC. for mobile I have a Ivy Bridge Lenovo T430 notebook and S4 phone and a Nexis 7.

    If I won I would Review the PC. I work in IT so I have handled many brands of notebooks, Intel and AMD over the last year. When finished I would install a fresh copy of windows 8 and give it to my girl friend she is in desperate need of a computer. Her Atom netbook is on its last leg.
  • Avenger30 - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    What I use: A Sony Vaio Tap 20 (W8, i5-3317U, our family PC), a Thinkpad 2 tablet Atom (W8, Z2760, that's mine), a headless Mini-ITX (W8-Pro, AMD E1-350, LMS/Squeezebox, Plex server), an old Dell Inspiron 530 (W8-Pro, Core 2 Quad, used for... well, nothing, it's just there, I guess just in case...), an Acer Aspire One (W7-Starter, Atom N450, that's the basement PC).
    See the error? ...W8? ...Nope, love it actually. But this single-core Atom W7-Starter... it sooo slooowww... and no touchscreen! A new Acer V5? Great replacement!!!
    I don't believe in the universal-do-it-all PC, but I am more and more convinced with the W8 consistent experience from screen to screen.
  • IceClaec - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    I've tinkered around in the laptop market for a while. I started with an Asus G73, then decided to go a bit smaller and bought a run-of-the-mill 14" Asus laptop. I decided it was still too bulky, and switched over to the Asus Vivobook x202e. After that, I tried out an Asus ME400 tablet and finally ended up on my current machine, a 15.6" Asus s56ca. Common Theme: All Asus, all Intel. I'm ready for something new. I've tried to avoid both Acer and AMD in the mobile space, but both companies have really stepped up their game. I've been wanting to go back to the 11.6" form factor for a while; especially one with a touchscreen as I have neither a tablet or smartphone. The Acer V5 would be a great way for me to branch out and hopefully rebuild the faith I used to have in Acer and AMD. The fact that this model has an IPS display is a huge plus for me, and really makes me excited about the direction that Acer is taking with their products. Additionally, I cover tech products for my college newspaper, and I'm always looking for new things to try out!

    As a student, a good 50% of my laptop tasks are student oriented (word processing, etc.). The other 50% are divided pretty evenly between light gaming and internet browsing. The Combination of a ULV i3 and HD4000 has served me well, and I'm hoping AMD's jaguar can come close to the performance of that combo. The i3/HD4000 doesn't provide incredibly good battery life, so I'd like a machine that can make my tech more portable for a longer period of time.

    All in all, the Acer V5 sounds like it would be a good fit for my tech line-up.
  • Glory2God - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    I currently own a Lenovo Z575 that has horrible battery life. If I won this laptop I could actually write my sermons and bible studies on the go without having to worry where I am going to plug this thing in at.
  • cwt001 - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    I would replace my wife's rotten Apple MacBook Pro with this lovely piece of technology.
  • spe1491 - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    My main pc is an I7 920 based desktop tucked away in my "office" in the basement. We have a 4 week old baby so I'm not getting much time on it right now. I also have a old core 2 duo based laptop but the battery is shot, so it's not very mobile unless I bring the power cord. Needless to say it's not getting used much either. Most of my computing is happening on my phone lately, an HTC One. If I were to win one of these laptops it would allow me to be mobile around the house and not need to duck off to my office near as often to use the desktop.
  • anonymous_user - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    I currently own two old desktops with AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors and a LG Optimus L9 smartphone. My desktops are used for playing older games and doing my homework. The smartphone is used for reading news and mobile gaming (time killing). Winning a laptop would give me the perfect blend of mobility and power. Having an Acer V5 would perfect to take to school for note-taking and do homework. Then when I have some downtime I can use it to play games.

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