Razer Blade 14-Inch Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on July 2, 2013 1:00 PM ESTSystem and Futuremark Performance
Despite being remarkably slim, the Razer Blade 14-inch is afforded remarkable capacity for performance thanks to its well-designed cooling system. The result is that despite fitting squarely in Intel's ultrabook category, there's a tremendous amount of horsepower on tap. Razer benefits from advances in Intel's Haswell design by employing the 37W Core i7-4702HQ, a quad-core processor which moves the chipset on package. Meanwhile, they can leverage the increased parallelism of an NVIDIA GK106 (as opposed to GK107 in the last generation of Blades) without substantially higher thermals.
Just how fast is the Blade 14? Fast enough. The i7-4702HQ is able to meet the last generation i7-3630QM's performance without much issue, and ensures that CPU bottlenecks won't be much of an issue during gaming sessions.
The Razer Blade 14-inch isn't knocking it out of the park in 3DMark, but it doesn't need to. What's impressive is how close it is to the GeForce GTX 675MX; that chip is a full GK106 with 960 CUDA cores and a 256-bit wide memory bus, but the substantially higher clocks on the GTX 765M help make up the difference. What you're going to see as we move forward is that the 765M is actually hampered only by its 128-bit memory bus; shader power is largely present for this chip, and the 1600x900 panel resolution in the Blade 14-inch may actually be the sweet spot for performance.
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Razorbak86 - Monday, July 8, 2013 - link
ROFLMAO! Thanks, Jarred. You just made my morning. :Dphoenixangel - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
hey guys don't worry about what just a few people say, me and most of my friends treat your reviews with great respect and appreciate your efforts. In fact we have gone through tons of review websites with heavy bias so much so we ditched them one by one, and we're left with yours :)Sabresiberian - Wednesday, July 3, 2013 - link
The problem with a lot of manufacturers is they don't get how much advertising even a mediocre review on a well-respected site like Anandtech gives them, and they don't provide sites with their hardware so they can review them. This isn't really Anandtech's fault, it's Lenovo's.EVERY major hardware review site gets the stuff they review from someone who sent it to them, almost always the company that made it. Very few can actually afford to buy hardware themselves, and those sites that can (Tomshardware, for example), don't.
And, seriously, implying that Anandtech is in any way beholden to those that provide the site with hardware is ludicrous. Dustin reams Razer a new hole over the screen provided with this laptop (rightly so), and he wouldn't do that if he was just being their "mouthpiece".
xTRICKYxx - Thursday, July 4, 2013 - link
When the Y580 came out, I convinced 2 of my friends to get it. It was $1000 for a 3 year warranty, 1080P display, 8GB Ram, i7-3630QM, GTX 660M, and pretty decent battery. Lenovo hit a home run with that laptop and they sold a lot of them I'm sure.PNN - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Y500's build quality is atrocious. Its nice and fast, but it feels like a cheap netbook.lordbannon - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
I picked up one of the y500s a month ago - right after the bump to 750s. Haven't been disappointed in it thus far for the price. Wish it had better battery life, but since it's main purpose it to let me play games from the hotel I can't complain. I do agree that it seems every windows laptop is missing just one bit keeping it from being awesome.Flunk - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
With this you're paying for a lot of things size, weight, performance, build quality so its not really a fair comparison. If you really want everything it's going to cost you. The Y500 has terrible battery life, SLI instead of a single card, is heavier and suffers from middling build quality. If you want a good value, yes they Y500 is better value but if you simply must have everything the Blade doesn't really have any competition.Flying Goat - Wednesday, July 3, 2013 - link
The big difference is form factor - the y500 weighs 50% more. Not many choices if you want a high end notebook under 6 pounds, and this weighs a mere 4.1 pounds. Only other such laptop I'm aware of is the 15" Asus 51vz, which doesn't have as powerful a GPU (But does have a comparable price). Thinking I may get a 51vz, myself, since I prefer the larger screen. Otherwise, I'd seriously be considering a Razer Blade.blanarahul - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
I think Apple pays each and every Windows OEM to make the best possible laptops and fuck one aspect of the hardware, so that they always build a flawed notebook.madmilk - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Indeed. There are so few ultrabooks that can match the 15" rMBP (Asus UX51Vz comes to mind), and this could've been one of them. With that screen though (200:1, seriously?), it's practically in junk territory.