The Razer Blade Review
by Vivek Gowri & Jarred Walton on March 15, 2012 3:01 AM ESTThe Blade, by gaming notebook standards, isn’t a graphical powerhouse, but its GT 555M definitely doesn’t count as slow. There’s a number of different GT 555M SKUs using a variety of GPU cores. The Blade’s GT555M has a 144-core GF116 clocked at 675MHz, with 2GB of 128-bit GDDR5 vRAM at a frequency of 2500MHz. It’s one of the highest spec, highest clocked GT 555Ms out there, but compared to the GTX 560M (192 cores, 775MHz reference core clock, 192-bit GDDR5 clocked at 2.5GHz), it’s not nearly as powerful. And the gaming results reflect that—the Blade is solidly 35% slower across the board than the GTX 560M-based ASUS G74SX.
Again, we're still working on fleshing out our gaming charts with the updated gaming suite, but we're now at five laptops. Based on our previous gaming tests, we can extrapolate that the Blade is roughly 10-15% faster than the M14x, which runs a variant of GT 555M using the older GF106 core.
Razer Blade, Value Settings
Razer Blade, Mainstream Settings
In our standard Value and Mainstream tests, the Blade fares pretty well. Medium settings at 768p are dead easy, and high settings at 900p are mostly okay, with only BF3 and Civ5 falling below the 30fps mark. At 1080p, the results are pretty mixed. At medium (Value) settings, the Blade is generally fine, with everything being basically playable. Move the settings to high (Mainstream), and it gets a little tougher; of the seven tests we run, the Blade topped 30fps in four.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
GT 555M; sorry for the error.VivekGowri - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Yeah, sorry guys - I copied the table from a different review; I changed all the GPU specs but forgot to change the GPU title itself. This is most definitely a GT 555M, the text references it numerous times (Google Docs tells me it appears in the text 16 times).Articuno - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
And it's because putting a heat source almost TRIPLE that of your natural body heat on your lap destroys your sperm faster than you can blink. There's a reason why human males have external testicles, people, and it's because *34* degrees Celsius is too much for your sperm.piroroadkill - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Who cares. We've got too many people as it is.shriganesh - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
why? Are you going to bask your balls on ur brand new laptop?bennyg - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Use a ten buck cooler bro. Then you can have it lap-top for as long as you like.abscode - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Santorum to soon push for outlawing such computers.Granseth - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I really like how the dare do something different. And hope the mouse and shortcut buttons catches on even though it's expensive now, it might get installed in cheaper models in time.Hrel - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Maybe I'm wrong but I was under the impression if you're main intent for a display is gaming, where response time matters most, that IPS displays were worse than TN Panels. Since they have signficantly high response times. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought IPS was pretty much only useful for professional image editors, for pictures and video and the like. Things where color accuracy is of the highest importance.RoninX - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I have a Dell Ultrasharp IPS monitor with my desktop gaming rig (i7-2700k + GTX 570), and I don't notice any lag in response time at all...