The New Razer Blade: Thoroughly Reviewed
by Vivek Gowri on October 3, 2012 5:40 PM ESTRazer Blade (late 2012) - Battery Life
As before, battery life is quite solid, due in no small part to the wonders of NVIDIA’s Optimus graphics switching technology. It's amazing that gaming systems like the Blade, M17x, and M18x are all capable of four or more hours of real world usage, when just a couple of years ago this class of system had the battery serve as a glorified UPS. It's good that AMD has caught on with Enduro, and the Clevo that Jarred tested with the latest Enduro drivers was almost as good as what we're used to seeing from NVIDIA based notebooks. [Ed: Not really, actually, but that's more the fault of Clevo and not a problem with Enduro.]
With the Blade, we saw just over four and a half hours in our internet benchmark test, which is usually a good indicator of real-world system usage, and exactly five and a half in our ideal-case scenario. We noted a few percent improvement across the board versus the original Blade, which is pretty good when you consider how much computing power was added in the refresh. Razer is using the same 60Wh Li-poly battery pack as before, so the efficiency numbers look pretty good—one of the best in the class and just ahead of the Samsung Series 7 when we normalize for capacity. The only one that beat it on our charts is the Clevo W110ER, an 11.6" notebook with an i7 quad and a DDR3 GT 650M. The signficantly smaller (and dimmer) display means that it has lower power consumption. Given the sheer size of the Blade, it makes for a surprisingly good portable companion.
Another power-related detail I completely glossed over last time around was the 120W power adapter—it’s significantly smaller than any other 120W adapter out there. It’s slimmer than most of the 90W AC adapters I’ve seen, too. It’s a 19V brick that can draw up to 6.32A, and it weighs roughly three-quarters of a pound. It’s pretty impressive when you compare it to the shoebox-sized adapters that come with some of the Clevo systems these days. I’ve heard estimates from within Razer that it costs about six times as much to manufacture as a typical 120W adapter, and is one of the many custom-designed and custom-made parts in the Blade.
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VivekGowri - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
rMBP + Windows?Flunk - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
I've considered it, a lot of people have told me that it has throttling and overheating issues while gaming in Windows. Also the native resolution is really inconvenient for running windows programs on.Imp@sse - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
Why didnt you compare the MSI GT70 ONE?JarredWalton - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
You mean the iBUYPOWER CZ-17? Or are you talking about a different GT70 chassis?AppleRules123 - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
I can't believe how much this sucks. This laptop is a blatant rip-off of the MacBook Pro from Apple. This is exactly the same as the MacBook Pro 2010 model, and the 2010 model is more powerful than this load of garbage. Who the heck do Razer think they are? Stealing Apple's designs for their laptops and making them worse. I'm getting sick and tired of industry clowns stealing Apple's innovations. Apple should definately sue Razer for this joke of a laptop.piroroadkill - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
If you're not a shill, I feel pity for you.Still, great comment.
VivekGowri - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
That comment made my day.TareX - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
This laptop is exactly what I want: A portable, good looking 17" laptop with enough horsepower to play most my games at decent fps. That's it. Of course I know it's no 680M, but there are currently no laptops with the 680M that aren't as thick as bricks. I'm buying this as soon as I can afford it, which should be within the next two months. If a similarly (or comparably, at least) thin laptop with a 680M makes an appearance, I'll get that one. I'm not interested in Switchblade UI or the extra panel (unless you can use it for foreign letter input, which Razer hasn't implemented yet), so I'm really getting this because of the extremely unique blend of good looks and good specs. The price comes with the rarity of this blend.NeBlackCat - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
Can we please have a 1920x1200 product please?AppleRules123 - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
Get a retina MacBook. It's way better than this load of garbage.