HP’s latest laptop, the Envy 6,
aims to bring Ultrabook luxury to the budget end of the market – and it
does so by opting for one of AMD’s Trinity chips.HP calls its AMD-powered Ultrabook rival a “Sleekbook” and, at first
glance, there’s little difference between this £499 inc VAT machine and
many of the Ultrabooks we’ve seen. The brushed-metal finish and red
detailing lends the Envy a sense of style that’s up there with many more
expensive Intel-powered rivals. Its 15.6in display means that it isn’t
as svelte as many of its Ultrabook rivals, but it isn’t far off: at 20mm
thick and just over 2kg in weight, this is as impressively honed as any
£499 laptop we’ve seen.Behind the scenes, it’s AMD’s Trinity platform that takes centre
stage. AMD prefers to describe its processors as accelerated processing
units, or APUs, and HP has used the A6-4455M – the lesser of two
low-power APUs – in the Envy 6. The dual-core CPU architecture runs at
2.1GHz, and uses AMD’s Turbo Core to dynamically overclock to 2.6GHz.
That sounds impressive, but the HP’s modest benchmark score of 0.37 is
way behind the Intel-powered Ultrabooks – by comparison, Asus’ Zenbook UX31E scored 0.62.As ever, though, it’s the graphics performance that buoys the AMD
APU’s appeal. A Radeon HD 7500G core has been crammed into the A6-4455M,
and the GPU contains 256 stream processors with stock and Turbo clocks
of 327MHz and 424MHz.We couldn’t get Crysis
