The Razer Blade Review
by Vivek Gowri & Jarred Walton on March 15, 2012 3:01 AM ESTIdle noise is generally silent (30dB noise floor), but even slight loads or heat can periodically trigger one or both of the fans to come on. A single fan spinning at minimum RPMs will bump the noise level up to 33dB for the CPU fan, or 34dB for the GPU fan; however, while those numbers are still quite low, they don't tell the whole story. The character of the noise is rather obnoxious and grating, with a higher pitched grinding whir even at minimum RPMs. What's more, if both fans come on, you often get a harmonic resonance that makes the perceived noise even worse, at least to my ears. It's not untolerable (says the guy who worked in a data center where the cooling system and servers generated over 70dB ambient noise 24/7), but when the fans come on you will most certainly notice them.
Once we start to put moderate loads on the system, the fans start becoming louder and increasingly annoying. Even moderate gaming loads will quickly ramp up the fan speeds until the Blade kicks out around 40dB from 18 inches away. More taxing games, particularly where the CPU and GPU are both getting a workout, will easily hit 43dB. Finally, in our worst-case stress test where we run Cinebench 11.5 with two threads and run any graphically intensive workload—it didn't matter whether we used Furmark, 3DMark06, or any of the games from our test suite—and the acoustic noise can break the 44dB level. After several minutes looping Cinebench 11.5 with Furmark, the maximum noise output registered 46.5dB, which is quite possibly one of the highest results I've seen from a notebook in the past four years!
Just by way of comparison, standing in the middle of my work area where I have several gaming desktops running, if I load up games on all of them so that the GPUs are pushing higher noise levels, the ambient noise level in the room registers around 46dB. Even in that environment, when I put a gaming load on the Razer Blade, it's audible above the other PCs in the room because of the higher pitch of the fans. In short, while Razer's design is certainly impressive and they've put a whole lot of performance into their ultrabook-thin chassis, the price they have to pay in noise from the fans is quite steep.
Temperatures from the system are equally unimpressive. Starting with our HWmonitor results, the internal temperatures on both the CPU and GPU can get very high. Actually, the CPU is worse off than the GPU, as we hit 95C on the cores compared to "only" 79C on the GT 555M. While both temperatures are still within specified limits, they're higher than what we usually see in laptops—again, the thin chassis is making its mark. Perhaps Razer should've waited for Ivy Bridge to introduce the Blade?
Exterior temperatures are also a concern, as the aluminum shell does a good job at conducting heat. The palm rest and keyboard area both get warm to the touch, but not uncomfortably so. This is no surprise considering the internal layout, however, as the CPU and GPU are both located near the back of the chassis, and that's where the heat is noticeable. On both the top and bottom of the Blade, the back three or so inches of real estate can get hot to the touch under sustained loads. We didn't have a thermometer on hand capable of measuring surface temperatures, unfortunately, but I'd peg them at >50C if you've been running games for 30 minutes or more.
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geniekid - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I will echo the general sentiment that this thing is both overpriced and inadequate for gaming, but at the same time it's nice to see a company really try and increase the overall build quality of a laptop.The problem is when you take big risks like this you have to get it right the first time, or you have to have enough resources in reserve (and enough faith from the powers on high) to iteratively improve the product until it's good enough. I hope Razer gets into the latter category and succeeds.
kenyee - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Cost unfortunately is too high. And what's with only 2 memory slots on a giant 17" laptop?The rest actually looks pretty cool. If Apple released something like this, their fanboys would be all over it, despite the price ;-)
Hopefully high res displays will drop in price and ivy bridge/kepler will make this a lot more interesting...
Felix_Ram - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I can't help but think that Razer is out too early on the market, and that they have the wrong cpu company in their machine. Their concept is good, it's just not competitive enough.If they were launched with the coming AMD APU, the topline trinity, and they at the same time managed to crossfire the APU with an AMD GPU, without changing the machines design, they might have a much more competitive product on their hand.
JarredWalton - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
No way. Trinity very likely won't even be as fast as Sandy Bridge for CPU tasks, the APU graphics won't be as fast as a GT 555M by a long shot (about 33% slower I'd wager, though I could be wrong), and AMD's switchable graphics and dual graphics still has serious driver issues in my experience. You don't spend basically $1500 on the industrial design and build quality only to ship it with a slower CPU and GPU.VivekGowri - Friday, March 16, 2012 - link
Agree with the "too early to market", disagree with everything else. If they had waited a couple of months, this could have Ivy Bridge and Kepler, and they could have used the extra month or two to fix some of the more pressing stability issues that plagued Switchblade at launch. It's a bit of a pity that they didn't, actually.tonyn84 - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I really, really like the form factor of this, I think moving the trackpad to the right side is brilliant (sorry lefties) and really hope to see this in future gaming laptops. The price though, I can't even get close to justifying for the performance. With any luck though they'll be able to have a couple different models at some point after ivy bridge is available. If they can get is closer to $1500 I'd seriously consider it, even with slightly less bells and whistles.Bees - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
What I'd like to know is why the facts that the keyboard and touchpad can both go unresponsive on their own wasn't treated in this review like the showstopping bugs they are. I've seen it firsthand with someone else's Blade, it's ridiculous that something so widespread (according to the support staff on the phone) made it past QC on such an expensive piece of tech.JarredWalton - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
I don't know if Vivek ever had this happen, but I certainly didn't encounter that problem in the several days of testing I did. Most likely it is a QC bug and your friend got bit, or else something else is going on. That said, I do not like the keyboard or touchpad at all. Vivek had more time to adapt so I left that to him to discuss, but I found the touchpad to be an expensive gimmick.IKeelU - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
Finally a company willing to invest in portability, good design and quality, that isn't called Apple. I would buy this without even thinking of it as a gaming laptop, if only they could reduce the noise level.Considering how many actually spend 2k+ on Macbooks, I'm astonished that it took a peripheral company to invent such a desirable high-end laptop. I hope this sells well, and I hope Dell, HP et al. take note.
FormulaRedline - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
This product is an early April fools joke, right? I saw "Gaming" and "1080p" followed shortly by "555m" and basically stopped reading. That is until I saw the almost $3k price tag...then I had to post.You can pretend Marketing screwed this up by claiming it to be a top of the line gaming product when it's really more a 17" ultrbook/MPB -like machine, but Razer is SUPPOSED to be high end gaming. 555m's belong in sub-$1000 machines that can do some gaming on the side at lower resolutions.
Meanwhile, it's got a great processor. Oh good, now we can bottleneck the @#*$ out of it. Has anyone at Razer ever even built a computer?