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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sivmac239 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Yeah I was going pick one up too, but I much have a uglier laptop with a better screen than a pretty one with a substandard one. I really dont want to go Mac but man the screen options are abysmal for most laptops.Aegrum - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
"Razer's designers made the Mona Lisa of gaming notebooks, and then drew a moustache, goatee, and monocle on her."Such a perfect description! Such a bummer - I was really looking forward to this system. Give it a better panel and ThunderBolt 2.0 in case I want to use an eGPU in the future, and you have, in my eyes, the perfect laptop. I guess I'll have to wait another year.
Bayonet - Thursday, July 4, 2013 - link
Nice Duchampian reference there Dustin, showing off your Art knowledge ;)MykeM - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
I think the photo of the internal design is based on earlier CAD drawing. I could be wrong but I saw a photo someone posted of the actual internal on the Notebook Review Forum:http://i337.photobucket.com/albums/n394/jpooner/pu...
mountcarlmore - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Now you know how I feel owning the MSI ge-40, a cheaper and slightly thicker competitor to the blade. Why do so much right, only to make such a boneheaded decision as pinching pennies on the display. I bet my ass Razer used the same pos AUO that is in my laptop.mountcarlmore - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Correction, mine apparently is a auo303e rather than razer's auo103e for whatever its worth. My spyder measured the contrast the same as in the review, 2 de, and I think around 72% of adobe rgb after calibration, which isn't terrible really.hfm - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
I wonder how hard it would be to put a different 14" panel in this thing? I would consider getting it just for the opportunity to do that down the road.Braincruser - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
The heat is not ok. 93C for a brand new notebook that hasn't seen dust at all is not OK. This thing will trottle and shut down in regular use all the time. Don't forget this is a gaming laptop, anything above 85 is trouble.karasaj - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Why on earth did they do that? Razer took the original blade, improved in almost every way, and shot themselves in the foot. They could have had literally the perfect notebook. I'd love to see a comment from them on this.Krafty1 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Fix the display...give me a Thunderbolt port for mild future proofing...I'll find the money.Otherwise...still waiting.