The Razer Blade Review
by Vivek Gowri & Jarred Walton on March 15, 2012 3:01 AM ESTRazer decided to go with a dual-core Core i7 instead of a quad, a decision that makes sense given not only the smaller power envelope, but also because of the higher frequencies of the dual-core parts, which should result in better gaming performance. The only configuration of the Blade comes with the fastest dual-core part that Intel ships, the i7-2640M, which has a base clock speed of 2.8GHz and turbo clocks of 3.5GHz and 3.3GHz on one and two cores, respectively.
At one point, Razer planned to ship the Blade with a 320GB 7200RPM drive. Thankfully they switched the platter out for the 256GB Lite-On SSD, because a system this expensive without a standard SSD would be a travesty. Razer has taken advantage of the fast SSD and tuned the Windows install for the fastest possible boot. And it’s pretty blazing—this is the only time I’ve ever seen a system finish booting Windows before the animation finishes. The quantitative representation of the word blazing? 15.6 seconds. It’s quick.
The general application performance is pretty solid and lands about where we expect—it won’t match the quad-core stuff in heavily mulithreaded workloads, but it’s faster than all the other dual-core parts. The SSD gives the Blade a huge boost in PCMark 7, though we’re not huge fans of putting a lot of weight on synthetic benchmarks like Futuremark’s various suites.
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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...