I purchased this laptop at a perhaps promotional price from Amazon and as such it was a simply stunning buy, but even at around 400 GBP this machine is still a 5 stars, although the version based on the AMD A8 chip may be an even better buy in the 400-500 pounds price range.

Built and look
The laptop feels very solid and extremely stylish thanks to a very well made construction and an impeccable metal cladding finish. I am not particularly keen on many such laptops but this is very nice looking. There is very minimal or no flexing for neither the chassis nor screen. It is quite thin for a DVD equipped laptop and it is fairly light for a non ultra-portable machine.

Features
It has all the right features for a modern work and media laptop, except I would have preferred a higher resolution webcam. However it include HDMI and VGA video ports, 4 USB ports (two of which are very fast) Ethernet and WiFi, the latest bluetooth which is fast and supports all recent services, a card reader slot and the analog audio IN/OUT plugs. I used it with my iMac bluetooth mouse running both Windows and Linux with identical results in operation to the iMac.

Screen
It is excellent especially for a budget/mid-market machine. It is anti-reflective (a very good thing), bright and with good resolution. Colours are vibrant and with a good fidelity (I am a keen photographer). However the angle of view does affect greatly the contrast (which in turns affects the perceived colours) especially for vertical angles.

Keyboard
The keyboard feels solid and not cheap (although not top quality either). I found it easy and responsive to use. The touchpad looks and feels nice, although the buttons do feel a touch loose. I operation though it is not a real limitation.

Sound
Sound is a little bright and thin but basically it is on par or better than Beats Audio machines which is not a bad thing.

CPU and graphics processors
It is based on the latest AMD 64 bit APU architecture. A single chip includes a dual integer-core (with a single floating point core) and a Radeon HD 7520G Graphics Processor. Basically the latter is on par to the Intel HD 4000 graphics, whilst the CPU matches the best i3 and some of the i5 Intel processors. Extensive benchmarking exists for comparison on the web. Samsung fitted 6 GB of RAM in this unit which is very professional, as modern laptop with embedded graphics chips do share RAM between GPU and CPU and 4 GB is not that much these days.

Performance
Windows benchmarks (range from 1 to 7.9)
CPU 5.5, RAM 7.2, Graphics 6.6 Gaming 6.6 HD transfer 5.9 - Overall 5.5

Linux (in bracket the relative performance compared to an AMD E-450 based machine)
Blowfish 8.64 (160%), Cryptoash 198.46 (257%) Fibonacci 3.15 (142%) QUEENS 7.88 (315%) FFT 3.8 (178%) Raytracing 5.10 (329%)

Performance experience is excellent especially in Linux for day to day work.
I ran Mathcad 2000 in Linux using Wine virtual machine and it runs extremely fast. Big spreadsheets or large presentations load and perform very quikly.

However the graphics driver used by Ubuntu are not the latest (as often the case with AMD chips) and the graphics performance is impacted in some applications. VLC runs less smoothly than in Windows, whilst BBC HD iPlayer ran in Chromium (or Chrome in Windows) is equally fluid on both OSs.

Overall this feels as a very balanced machine, especially in Windows.

Battery and power
The chipset is energy efficient and the battery life is very good. I used it for more than 4 hours on heavy duty work in Windows and it showed still some 20% of battery charge. I believe that the 8 h claim is only doable on a extremely light use, although 5-6 hours will be typical. This is not bad.

Finally the sleep mode in Windows is worth noticing. The unit takes about three seconds to turn OFF and ON from sleep. I haven't tested how long the machine can stay in sleep mode running on battery.

All in all I am extremely pleased with this laptop.

I purchased this computer from Amazon, It was advertised at such a special price, and even though I was given a 2-3 week wait for delivery< I decided I couldn't go wrong. I am so glad that I did, it was ordered, on the 10th September and delivered on the 16th, I saw this model being sold by a famous computer store for