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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geniekid - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I will echo the general sentiment that this thing is both overpriced and inadequate for gaming, but at the same time it's nice to see a company really try and increase the overall build quality of a laptop.The problem is when you take big risks like this you have to get it right the first time, or you have to have enough resources in reserve (and enough faith from the powers on high) to iteratively improve the product until it's good enough. I hope Razer gets into the latter category and succeeds.
kenyee - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Cost unfortunately is too high. And what's with only 2 memory slots on a giant 17" laptop?The rest actually looks pretty cool. If Apple released something like this, their fanboys would be all over it, despite the price ;-)
Hopefully high res displays will drop in price and ivy bridge/kepler will make this a lot more interesting...
Felix_Ram - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I can't help but think that Razer is out too early on the market, and that they have the wrong cpu company in their machine. Their concept is good, it's just not competitive enough.If they were launched with the coming AMD APU, the topline trinity, and they at the same time managed to crossfire the APU with an AMD GPU, without changing the machines design, they might have a much more competitive product on their hand.
JarredWalton - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
No way. Trinity very likely won't even be as fast as Sandy Bridge for CPU tasks, the APU graphics won't be as fast as a GT 555M by a long shot (about 33% slower I'd wager, though I could be wrong), and AMD's switchable graphics and dual graphics still has serious driver issues in my experience. You don't spend basically $1500 on the industrial design and build quality only to ship it with a slower CPU and GPU.VivekGowri - Friday, March 16, 2012 - link
Agree with the "too early to market", disagree with everything else. If they had waited a couple of months, this could have Ivy Bridge and Kepler, and they could have used the extra month or two to fix some of the more pressing stability issues that plagued Switchblade at launch. It's a bit of a pity that they didn't, actually.tonyn84 - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I really, really like the form factor of this, I think moving the trackpad to the right side is brilliant (sorry lefties) and really hope to see this in future gaming laptops. The price though, I can't even get close to justifying for the performance. With any luck though they'll be able to have a couple different models at some point after ivy bridge is available. If they can get is closer to $1500 I'd seriously consider it, even with slightly less bells and whistles.Bees - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
What I'd like to know is why the facts that the keyboard and touchpad can both go unresponsive on their own wasn't treated in this review like the showstopping bugs they are. I've seen it firsthand with someone else's Blade, it's ridiculous that something so widespread (according to the support staff on the phone) made it past QC on such an expensive piece of tech.JarredWalton - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I don't know if Vivek ever had this happen, but I certainly didn't encounter that problem in the several days of testing I did. Most likely it is a QC bug and your friend got bit, or else something else is going on. That said, I do not like the keyboard or touchpad at all. Vivek had more time to adapt so I left that to him to discuss, but I found the touchpad to be an expensive gimmick.IKeelU - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Finally a company willing to invest in portability, good design and quality, that isn't called Apple. I would buy this without even thinking of it as a gaming laptop, if only they could reduce the noise level.Considering how many actually spend 2k+ on Macbooks, I'm astonished that it took a peripheral company to invent such a desirable high-end laptop. I hope this sells well, and I hope Dell, HP et al. take note.
FormulaRedline - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
This product is an early April fools joke, right? I saw "Gaming" and "1080p" followed shortly by "555m" and basically stopped reading. That is until I saw the almost $3k price tag...then I had to post.You can pretend Marketing screwed this up by claiming it to be a top of the line gaming product when it's really more a 17" ultrbook/MPB -like machine, but Razer is SUPPOSED to be high end gaming. 555m's belong in sub-$1000 machines that can do some gaming on the side at lower resolutions.
Meanwhile, it's got a great processor. Oh good, now we can bottleneck the @#*$ out of it. Has anyone at Razer ever even built a computer?