The Razer Blade Review
by Vivek Gowri & Jarred Walton on March 15, 2012 3:01 AM ESTThe matte display is beautiful. Razer specced the Blade with an AU Optronics B173HW01 V.5, one of the higher-end 17.3” display panels found in gaming notebooks today. The contrast ratio is pretty stellar at 806:1, trailing only the ASUS G74SX, and the maximum brightness of 250nits is decent. The color gamut is also excellent, exceeding the sRGB color space at 84.6% of the AdobeRGB 1998 color space. The one issue we found in our testing was the color accuracy, which was slightly poorer than average.
The decision to spec the Blade with a matte display is one that should be commended highly—the matte screen finish trend is slowly but surely re-emerging in notebooks, and it's a change that can’t start happening quickly enough. My only real complaint is that in a notebook of this caliber, it would have been nice to see an IPS display. We’re seeing a lot of tablets get IPS panels, as well as some of the smaller thin and lights or ultraportables, but other than relatively specialized models (the Sony SE16, HP Envy 15, etc.) and workstation models, we haven’t seen the kind of widespread shift to IPS technology that we would like to.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
GT 555M; sorry for the error.VivekGowri - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Yeah, sorry guys - I copied the table from a different review; I changed all the GPU specs but forgot to change the GPU title itself. This is most definitely a GT 555M, the text references it numerous times (Google Docs tells me it appears in the text 16 times).Articuno - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
And it's because putting a heat source almost TRIPLE that of your natural body heat on your lap destroys your sperm faster than you can blink. There's a reason why human males have external testicles, people, and it's because *34* degrees Celsius is too much for your sperm.piroroadkill - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Who cares. We've got too many people as it is.shriganesh - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
why? Are you going to bask your balls on ur brand new laptop?bennyg - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Use a ten buck cooler bro. Then you can have it lap-top for as long as you like.abscode - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Santorum to soon push for outlawing such computers.Granseth - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I really like how the dare do something different. And hope the mouse and shortcut buttons catches on even though it's expensive now, it might get installed in cheaper models in time.Hrel - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Maybe I'm wrong but I was under the impression if you're main intent for a display is gaming, where response time matters most, that IPS displays were worse than TN Panels. Since they have signficantly high response times. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought IPS was pretty much only useful for professional image editors, for pictures and video and the like. Things where color accuracy is of the highest importance.RoninX - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I have a Dell Ultrasharp IPS monitor with my desktop gaming rig (i7-2700k + GTX 570), and I don't notice any lag in response time at all...