Razer Blade 14-Inch Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on July 2, 2013 1:00 PM ESTDisplay Quality
It's unfortunate that one of the hallmarks of Windows notebooks seems to be that the vendor can get almost everything right, and then have one massive, gaping flaw. Unfortunately this remains true of the Razer Blade 14-inch as well. While the Blade has incorporated some of the best elements of Apple notebook design, they neglected to include one of the biggest and most important reasons why people will buy MacBooks: display quality.
The Razer Blade 14-inch may be enjoying a 1600x900 resolution that's perfect for the gaming hardware included within, but the panel itself is atrocious. Razer was able to jack up the brightness to a respectable 453 nits, but it's a linear boost: the black level is a heinous 2.24 nits. There's just no excuse for this; Lenovo was able to get a 14", 1600x900 panel in their X1 Carbon that walks all over the Blade's. And Alienware is offering a 1080p IPS panel on their Alienware 14, a notebook that may be thicker but offers the same GPU, an optical drive, and a faster CPU. I was stunned by the Blade's beautiful design, and I was equally stunned by its dire screen quality, which suffers from the same nasty "no correct viewing angle" problem that cheap TN panels typically do.
Battery Life
It's hard to generate much enthusiasm for the Razer Blade 14-inch after discovering how poor the display quality on it is, but the flipside is that the battery life on it is pretty impressive. Razer was able to cram a 70Wh battery into the Blade, and leveraging the 37W quad-core and NVIDIA's Optimus allows them to eke out a healthy amount of mobility.
This is, without a doubt, a gaming ultrabook. Normalized power consumption is practically in line with full-on ultrabooks from the last generation sporting ULV processors, but Razer is able to do it with a full quad-core CPU and a beefy GPU (that turns off when not in use, naturally).
Heat and Noise
Razer was able to handle the balancing act of heat, noise, and chassis bulk with remarkable skill. I'm not sure they hit the absolute sweet spot, but they're awfully close to it. Fan noise is sub-40dB under load, which is actually pretty excellent for a gaming notebook. They're definitely playing "Thermal Chicken" with the surface temperatures, but unless you mash your giant hand down on the keyboard or keep poking the hinge with your fingertip (where most of the heat is), you're not going to be too uncomfortable.
The CPU temperatures definitely get up there and Razer is pretty close to playing with fire here, but in practice I found the system was ultimately able to handle thermals fairly well. If anything I feel like Razer has some room to improve here; I think they could spin up the fan on the CPU without having too negative an impact on system noise. Heat density is going to be much higher in the i7-4702HQ than it is in the GTX 765M; the 765M has 2.54 billion transistors on a 28nm process, and a good chunk of those transistors have been shut off. Meanwhile the i7-4702HQ 1.4 billion transistors on a 22nm process, and that's ignoring the marginal heat that's going to be produced by the on-package chipset.
I think there's still a little room for improvement here, and I'm never happy to see CPU core temperatures in the 90s, but it's not hitting throttling temperatures. Just remember that this notebook must take cool air in from the bottom. Other ultrabooks I'm a bit more critical of when they have bottom-intake cooling systems, but the Blade is handling 100W+ of silicon.
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n13L5 - Friday, July 5, 2013 - link
People already complained about their display panel at Computex, so I had filed a pre-sales ticket with Razer, regarding the display just before they started taking orders. This was their answer:I have read through your email and unfortunately we are unable to share this information, as we may make changes in manufacturing that will change the type and model of LCD panel in use. We can only point you to the product specifications page, which I'm sure you have visited. Once reviews start coming online from the various tech sites they may share more about their impressions of the panel.
Unsurprisingly, the bad commentary on a bad panel isn't showing any signs of changing. Facts are facts (except for the marketing departments of the world)
Hrel - Sunday, July 7, 2013 - link
Idk, I still feel like this style of gaming laptop won't be a... comfortable proposition until we get another manufacturing shrink. Which just depresses me since it means AMD is right out. Intel's pricing has been getting absurd over the years. I really like what Razer is doing here though, I don't think it's bad now, but I still wouldn't call this platform "mature".Hrel - Sunday, July 7, 2013 - link
Also, not having 802.11ac at this point, ESPECIALLY at this price point, is simply unnaceptable.I agree completely with your laments on the LCD. I'd still pick Alienware if I were to spend this kind of money. Especially since how thing/light it is has no bearing on my decision at all. I'm a man though, not a girl. So I can't even tell the difference between 5 and 15lbs, much less 4 and 6. As long as it's under 50lbs in the bag with everything I'm good.
geniekid - Monday, July 15, 2013 - link
Looks really good. Well done AT/Boxwindsor83 - Saturday, September 14, 2013 - link
I think Razer chose a lesser resolution display to minimize the power. Displays are known to be very power hungry, take retina display for instance, mac get super hot when working on maya, for instance, for very long time. But again, why do we need a stunning display to play games?? isnt the fps and portability more important than the display? We didnt have hd 4 years ago. Honestly I just bought an alienware 14 and display is stunning and design is solid but the font size is way too small by default, then it becomes ugly if i increase the font size. I have to squint my eyes to see what i am typing on gmail or msdoc. Then the edge just press my wrist so hard that I now fear getting a carpal tunnel syndrome. So is my alienware really worth it if it gives me ailment problems? I am boggling my mind whether to return my alienware and get the razer instead sacrificing the display. Please comment on my question, is the display really that important?NimbusTLD - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I just got my Razer Blade 14 last week after being on the fence about it due to the screen's notoriety amongst the press. I have to say it's not that bad. I can see how having a higher resolution would give me the same squinting issues that you write about - Windows just isn't ready to handle high PPI (not that 1080p at 14" is even that high...). 900p seems to give a perfect readable font size at native scaling for me.The viewing angles and colours don't seriously bother me either - sure it's a bit annoying, but the rest of the laptop makes up for it. I wanted a laptop now, and the Razer Blade 14 is the one which is closest to my preferences: powerful enough for games and image editing, and thin enough to be carried around during my travels. Until Windows dramatically steps up their scaling, or Razer release a similar model with an IPS panel, I don't see myself buying anything else :)zhouse17 - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
I think that this review was unnecessarily harsh. I've had my razer blade 14" for about 5 days now, and I love it. I was trying to decide between the razer blade 14" and the macbook pro retina 15" for a long time, and was leaning towards buying the macbook after reading this review. I fit into the niche that this laptop is designed for as I really value portability since I'm a grad student and carry my laptop everywhere, but I also want to be able to play games. This review really threw me off, since they trash the screen so hard, because I have a lot of respect for Anandtech. I spend at least 8 hours a day looking at my computer screen, mostly taking notes and studying, so a lousy screen would really be a deal breaker for me. In reality, though, the screen on this thing isn't bad at all. My last computer (a dell latitude e6500) had a matte TN screen, and you get used to it really fast. In my opinion it’s totally worth having a TN panel just for the faster refresh rate, since everything still looks so good. The pixel density on this 1600x900 screen is about the same as for a slightly larger 1080p screen, and it’s actually the perfect resolution for the video card. The viewing angles aren’t great, but that’s completely a non-issue unless you want to play split-screen multiplayer games on your 14” screen, in which case you should just buy an hdmi cable and use a TV or an external monitor. Everything looks sharp, and the color and contrast look great to me, but I’m not a photo editor. As for the rest of the computer, this thing is truly a feat of modern engineering. It packs more power into a smaller package than I even thought possible, and runs insanely fast. It boots up in like 8 seconds, and the battery life is good (I can make it through 4 hours of taking notes/browsing the web in class without plugging it in). Plus this thing crushes games, at least for a laptop. I’ve been playing through bioshock infinite the last few days on “very high” graphics settings at 40+ fps and it looks amazing. The keyboard is the best I’ve ever used on a laptop, and the trackpad is awesome. Finally, this is overall the sexiest laptop I have ever seen. It looks and feels exactly like a macbook pro retina 13”, but with a much better color choice (black looks so much better). Obviously this laptop is aimed at a niche user who’s priorities are portability and gaming, but as a member of that niche I couldn’t recommend it more highly.