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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justaviking - Wednesday, July 3, 2013 - link
One thing I have always enjoyed and appreciated about AnandTech.com is the BLEND of ANALYTICAL ANALYSIS and OPINION... and their distinction between them.The AnandTech staff will often say share the bias they had coming into a review, and how it was supported or how they were surprised (in both good and bad ways). They also talk about how their usage pattern might affect their opinion.
This is by far my favorite tech review site.
Bobs_Your_Uncle - Saturday, July 6, 2013 - link
Brian Klug's review of the HTC One (April 5, 2013 - http://www.anandtech.com/show/6747/htc-one-review) stands out as truly singular in nature. It is the finest tech review I've ever had the pleasure of savoring.In fact, my labeling it as a "tech review" does both Brian & AnandTech a disservice: Brian's efforts are a distillation of literary excellence as applied through journalistic themes. Very Well Done One & All!
Now, what's for dessert?
Menty - Wednesday, July 3, 2013 - link
Why not leave the Apple hatred at the door where it belongs? An article about "Best Mac Laptops" is a) only going to contain information about Macs and b) will be appreciated by some readers of this site. It's not a "Best Laptops" article that only contains Macs, is it?Bobs_Your_Uncle - Saturday, July 6, 2013 - link
In reply to dsumanik (7/2/13):A person of intelligence & integrity is capable of holding a distinct personal preference for a given *Something* and simultaneously rendering a reasoned, well supported, & laudably fair critique on that *Something* or *Some-other things*. In fact, such figures in public forums were once respected, & were seen to be exemplars of an ideal worth striving toward.
Our current cultural climate, however, guides us to accept as our reference point the fact that, regardless of an individuals voice, there is always an undisclosed personal agenda being promoted. Essentially, no one but "ME" (read as, "You the Reader") is capable of anything that isn't hopelessly tainted by the poison of blatant self-interest, abject Fanboi-ism, or both.
An unfortunate consequence is that examples of intelligent, reasoned, critical thought are becoming quite rare. One example of such analysis is to be found here: The HTC One: A Remarkable Device, Anand’s mini Review; by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 21, 2013 4:49 PM EST - http://www.anandtech.com/show/6851/the-htc-one-a-r...
Okay, so, we can all agree that no one individual is "perfect". By combining our shared human fallibility with a shared assumption of good intent (until such trust is proved unwarranted), comment forums may become worth the time spent reading them.
PRO TIP: Not everyone can, or should be, immediately grouped in with the morally bereft Wall Street Ponzi Scheme Promoter, or the craven Supreme Court Justice voting to legalize unprecedented graft & corruption via Citizens United. Doing so only reveals a pathetic pattern of conveniently fact-free, wretched intellectual laziness that "The Ladies do NOT find appealing".
flyingpants1 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Dustin,I didn't say one word about how others review hardware. If you do something bad, the fact that everyone else does it too, doesn't make it OK.
The obvious problem inherent in reviewing what you're sent is you only have what the manufacturer wants you to have. They know how their product works and they probably won't knowingly send a lemon to Anandtech. Therefore they pretty much know a bit about what you're going to say on their behalf when they send you a package. So you are sort of a mouthpiece.
Another problem is that you actually miss a lot of good stuff, like the Lenovo laptop the OP mentioned.
Dustin Sklavos - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
You really don't understand how this works, do you? The industry operates the way it does for a reason, and if you think companies are just sending out their best stuff, you're giving them too much credit. They send out what they think will be the most compelling, but a lot of this stuff is going through PR companies.If you really think I'm a mouthpiece, I highly encourage you to go back and read my review of MSI's GT70 Dragon Edition.
ppeterka - Friday, July 5, 2013 - link
flyingpants1: Why don't you or the OP buy the aforementioned laptop, send it to Anandtech to review, then after it, just sell it off cheaper?kedesh83 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
You have a point there, but i have always come to Anandtech since it started for intelligent reviews about hardware i care about, and written by people who know what they hell they are talking about, rather then the snub nosed hipsters of Engadget and the likeJarredWalton - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Besides the fact that all told we have only had 13 articles in recent history dealing with Razer at all (http://www.anandtech.com/tag/razer), you might have also missed this:http://www.anandtech.com/show/6897/best-gaming-not...
OMG! What's that? Totally shameless, biased, and direct marketing material I guess, where we recommended the Y500 series as a potent gaming notebook for the price. Hmmmm...
flyingpants1 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Hah, I did miss that. Thanks Jarred.