The Razer Edge Review
by Vivek Gowri on March 28, 2013 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Mobile
- Razer
- Razer Edge
Battery Life and Mobile Gaming
This is the section that probably will garner the most scrutiny. The Edge comes with a 41.44Wh battery, and in normal usage situations, it does about as well as one could expect from an Ivy Bridge-based tablet. Surface Pro comes with a similarly sized battery, and we saw pretty similar runtime from the two tablets (Surface Pro, on average, had about 15-20 minutes more life in any given test). Considering that IVB ultrabooks don’t fare too much better (or, in some cases, significantly worse – looking at you Acer) I guess it’s hard to complain here; until we see Haswell and its significant idle power reduction later this year, ARM and Clovertrail tablets are going to slaughter IVB tablets in this category.
There’s an additional wrinkle with the Edge – the mobile gaming aspect. I broke down the typical gaming power draw in the introduction, and it’s worth bringing back up: pair a 17W CPU and a 20W GPU, consider that almost no reasonable workload will peg both at the same time, toss in loads for the display, SSD, RAM, WiFi, chipset, and all the other auxiliary components, and a 40W total system draw estimate in gaming workflows is pretty reasonable. If you’re using the Edge in the gamepad controller with the extended battery, there’s a total of 82.88Wh of battery power onboard. This sets up a pretty simple equation to estimate the gaming battery life: 82.88Wh/40W = ? hours. Do the simple division, and you’re looking at a hair over two hours, which is where Razer’s “two hours of gaming battery life” claim comes from. (I had John Wilson, Razer’s VP of System Engineering, walk me through the math here, and he confirmed that 80 divided by 40 did in fact equal two.)
Naturally, a good amount of testing was in order, so I unplugged the Edge, went to a nearby coffee shop, and played Dirt 3 until the battery died. I did this multiple times in the interest of generating as much data as possible (I love my job.) I was initially planning on using a timedemo or looping a benchmark, but I thought it would be more fun to actually game on the Edge – I also needed some real world mobile gaming experiences, so it killed two birds with one stone.
I spent most of my time in Dirt 3 and Need For Speed: The Run. The latter isn’t part of our benchmark suite and it’s not the most recent NFS title (it was a holiday 2011 release), but the Cannonball Run-esque storyline intrigued me and I’ve been meaning to play through it for some time without ever getting the chance to do so. The Edge review just gave me the excuse I needed to get into it.
The two hour estimate is pretty fair, depending on brightness levels, power plan, and graphics settings I saw anywhere between 1:45 and 2:30 in the newer games. I also fired up Quake III: Arena for curiosity’s sake, to see how much less strenuous a 12 year old game would be, and got 3:12 of playing time out of it. It’s worth noting that I wasn’t hitting network at all, either, so that’s another thing to consider.
In the “Balanced” power plan and a brightness of 200nits (55%), playing Dirt 3 with medium settings at the native 1366x768 resolution, the Edge lasted for 136 minutes (2:16) before running out of juice. That’s pretty much in line with what we expected, and lowering the brightness can help extend that. I wouldn’t recommend high or ultra settings due to the additional power draw, while the Power Saver profile throttles the GPU far too aggressively for smooth gameplay even at medium settings. The Balanced power profile and medium settings made for a nice compromise in mobile use cases.
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A5 - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
It seems like the 2nd generation of this will be way better, if what half of Intel is saying about Haswell and GT3e is true.VivekGowri - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
That's something I wanted to touch on in the conclusion but ran out of time/forgot: GT3e will make the second generation of this really, really interesting. Haswell/GT3e is going to be an awesome combination, but like Anand tweeted, it'll be a while (14nm in 2015) until we get a real best of both worlds solution.A5 - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
Yeah, it seems that way. Thanks for the reply.tech.noob.fella - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
isnt gt3 only for desktops?? i thought gt2 was for portables like this machine...not sure thoughKristian Vättö - Friday, March 29, 2013 - link
GT3 is for laptops too (and even the GT3e). Intel has always focused the best IGPs to mobile CPUs because those systems are the most likely to only feature integrated graphics. Desktops often have a dGPU because there's no heat/space/battery issue, especially if the system is geared towards something graphics intensive (IGPs, even lower-end ones, are fine for basic use).TerdFerguson - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
I find this review to be overly generous. Hardware should be reviewed on its merits, not on whether or not you approve of the concept. Asking nearly $2k for this monstrosity is utterly unreasonable.VivekGowri - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
It starts at $999, and the most reasonable configuration is $1499 - this honestly isn't that much more than Surface Pro or any of the other high-end Windows 8 tablets. I'd much, much rather pay $1499 for Edge Pro + gamepad than $1199 for the ATIV Smart PC Pro + laptop dock. Surface Pro plus Type Cover for $1139 is probably an equally decent value, but significantly slower (i5/HD4000/4GB vs i7/GT640MLE/8GB) and plays in a completely different market.andrewaggb - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
The docks are still the killers for me. At a desk I want to run 2 monitors at 1080p each minimum, preferrably with both 1920x1200 or better. And a usb keyboard and mouse. I could have a dock setup like that at the work office and home office and just drop the tablet in wherever I'm at. Wouldn't care if the tablet screen was disabled when docked running 2 external displays.I would also like a transformer style keyboard dock so I could use it as a laptop.
When I can do all that, with an i7/8gb/256gb+ ssd, it will be sweet. It sucks because I'm sure it could be done now and nobody seems to have done it. Hopefully with haswell... but everybody keeps talking about haswell like it's the second coming, I'm worried it's not going to live up to our expectations.
zanon - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
Vivek mentioned Tb, and what you describe is one of the few areas where it'd be really interesting. The dock could itself have a standard graphics card, and thus drive multiple large screens and more powerful gaming while still allowing the tablet part to get away with much less graphics power.15th Warlock - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
I have to agree with Terd, while $999 may be the prize of entrance for the Edge experience, the review doesn't actually test the default battery configuration (regardless of it being the pro or non pro version).What this review shows us is a best scenario, using the $250 gamepad attachment and $70 extra battery, that's $320 over the original MSRP, so, even in this scenario you only get 2 hrs of gaming when not plugged to the wall.
The review fails to mention that out of the box this tablet offers only one hour of gaming, and perhaps, less than 3 hrs. of regular use, if razer offered the extra battery with the gamepad attachment it would be a more tolerable proposal, but nickel and diming gamers for the privilege to play for two hrs is way too much, not even Apple limits the user experience in such a way with their overpriced toys...