The 2014 Razer Blade Review
by Brett Howse on October 10, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Notebooks
- Gaming
- Laptops
- Razer Blade
Speakers
The Razer Blade comes with two front facing stereo speakers. Unlike a lot of laptops that are this thin, the speakers are not down firing so you do get a better sense of stereo space. As with most laptop speakers, they do not have very good low end output, with a pretty sharp drop off below 200 Hz. At maximum volume playing some music, the Blade was able to achieve right around 80 dB.
Needless to say, I would not replace my home theater with this laptop. The front facing stereo speakers are great if you are watching a quick video, but if you want better quality sound it's best to pair the laptop with some headphones, which will also help when gaming to keep the fan noise subdued.
Software
Razer has done a great job by not including any of the software you often see from other OEMs. For many of us, the first few hours with any new device is spent removing all of the unwanted trial-ware that gets shipped. On a system with this price tag, it is good to not see any of that. They do however have some of their own custom software that you can use to customize the keyboard functions, create macros, enable Gaming Mode, and adjust the lighting. It's simple, it looks good, and it works well.
My only complaint with the software is that it requires you to create an account with Razer in order to use it. If this was optional, it would be fine, but it is not, which is disappointing.
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TiGr1982 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Indeed, as a new buy, the unit with Kepler-based GTX 870M became instantly obsolete at the day of release of Maxwell-based GTX 970M.Only an uninformed buyer will buy this now. Or, alternatively, a large discount may help.
TiGr1982 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
And 8 GB of RAM for this kind of pricing is not a good offer either.Niavlys77 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Would be great to see a comparison to the Lenovo Y50 - I know it's 1080p screen is terrible, but I'm wondering how the 4k screen holds up to this IGZO panel.Friendly0Fire - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
I'm fine with my current laptop (Asus UX51), but in a year or two I could see myself upgrading to this. Nvidia's Maxwell will probably make a significant difference on battery life and heat on a machine like this, so I'm excited to see the 2015 refresh.dmunsie - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
For the gaming performance section, would it be possible to get the rMBP in there as well? Perhaps not OS X, since there is a lot not available on the OS X side. But certainly running Windows 8.1 would be doable and nice to know.frostyfiredude - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
It has a GT750m, expect around 60% of the performance gotten by the 2013 Blade 14.aferox - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Would like to see this compared with the Gigabyte Aorus X3 Plus.frelledstl - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
I just don't get the fascination with these higher than 1080p displays on a gaming notebook when the hardware just doesn't support that resolution with playable frame rates in newer games. At minimum if you are going to benchmark at 1080p, we need some kind of analysis on how the display handles scaling down to the lower resolution. 14 inches to me is the best size for a portable gaming laptop, but I can't help but think that something like the W230ss is just a better value for the money by far with its still nice 1080p IPS screen.. You can get a decent configuration of that for $1200-$1400 with a nice sized SSD and since the SS version is there 2nd gen version of that laptop, they have included some nice power optimization improvements. I think 2k-4k gaming is great, on a desktop that might stand a chance at actually providing decent frame rates at high detail settings.XabanakFanatik - Sunday, October 12, 2014 - link
I'll tell you from personal experience that I have played games accidentally set to 1080p and did not realize I was not at native resolution. A more thorough analysis of scaling would be nice, but I have no complaints.synaesthetic - Monday, October 20, 2014 - link
I raised this point myself but I noticed the non-standard resolution of 3200x1800. That's exactly four times 1600x900, which *is* a standard resolution. The performance figures at 1080p suggest that this laptop would run most games extremely well at 1600x900 and since the resolution is divisible four times into the native resolution, it shouldn't have any fuzziness or loss of sharpness from interpolation.