HP Pavilion TouchSmart 15z-b000 Sleekbook review: A budget laptop with touch, and a few trade-offs

After bemoaning the lack of laptops at any price with both a touch screen and discrete graphics, my attention was caught by something from HP. The $649.99 HP Pavilion TouchSmart 15z-b000 Sleekbook is slim, especially for a 15-inch midsize laptop, and certainly one of the sharper-looking Windows 8 laptops I've seen in this lower-end price range. The kicker is its included AMD Radeon 7600G GPU.

7.5

HP Pavilion TouchSmart 15z-b000 Sleekbook

The Good

The AMD-powered <b>HP Pavilion TouchSmart 15z-b000 Sleekbook</b> is a slim, midsize laptop at a very reasonable price, and includes a touch screen.

The Bad

Battery life is disappointing, and budget-priced Intel laptops are still faster.

The Bottom Line

With a great design for the price and some better-than-expected graphics power, the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 15z-b000 Sleekbook may justify overlooking its shortcomings if you're on a tight budget.

Despite the slim profile, the price is so reasonable because this is not exactly an ultrabook -- instead it belongs to Hewlett-Packard's proprietary Sleekbook line, which is a similar-sounding category HP invented to promote laptops that are similar to ultrabooks, but don't meet the official Intel requirements (Ultrabook is a trademarked Intel marketing term).

It's pretty clear why this isn't an Intel-approved ultrabook -- the CPU is actually a quad-core AMD A8-4555M. AMD calls its product an APU for "accelerated processing unit" rather than a CPU, because it combines a CPU and discrete-level graphics into a single package. In this case, the graphics chip is the previously mentioned AMD Radeon 7600G, which isn't a gamer-level part, but should outperform Intel's integrated HD 4000 graphics (at least on paper).

For $649, don't expect the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 15z-b000 Sleekbook to outperform Lenovo's recent 15-inch gaming laptop, the excellent IdeaPad Y500 (which can be found for under $900), or even any standard Core i5 ultrabook. It's not going to be your main gaming rig, but it can handle most current games at lower settings, especially as the screen resolution will be capped at a low 1,366x768 pixels.

I'm always a fan of laptops that look like they cost more than they actually do. While the 15z-b000's appearance is not going to convince anyone that this is a $1,000-plus high-end machine, it feels like it offers excellent bang for the buck. Just be warned, one of the reasons you don't see more AMD laptops is that they can't touch Intel on battery life, and this highly portable system ran for less than 3.5 hours in our tests.