The 2014 Razer Blade Review
by Brett Howse on October 10, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Notebooks
- Gaming
- Laptops
- Razer Blade
Gaming Performance
The Razer Blade is first and foremost a gaming laptop, and the GTX 870M inside is a substantial upgrade over the previous Blade’s GTX 765M. With 1344 CUDA cores, 3GB of GDDR5, 941 MHz clock, and a 192-bit memory bus, the 870M packs a punch, but with four times the number of pixels to drive in this year’s Blade, will it be enough?
To test this, we will run it through our normal suite of benchmarks to see where it stands. As our benchmarks top out at 1920x1080, I will also run it through a couple of the games at 3200x1800.
This is marketed and sold as a gaming system, and there are no complaints here. The step up to the GTX 870M over the last model’s GTX 765M means a massive increase in performance. The Razer Blade obviously cannot keep up with the likes of the Alienware 18 with its two GTX 780M cards in SLI, but that laptop is also a 12 pound behemoth. In fact, the Razer Blade outperforms all of the 15.6 inch laptops currently in Mobile Bench, and only loses to the 17 inch gaming machines.
However the obvious point has to be made that while the GTX 870M is much more powerful, it also has to drive four times the number of pixels as on the previous version of the Razer Blade. If you are looking at buying one of these, it is very likely you would want to game at the native resolution of the panel. In order to find out what the gaming experience would be for gaming at the native resolution, I used the GeForce Experience to customize the game settings for 3200x1800. If you are curious as to the number of options you can enable for 3200x1800, it is fairly impressive. Here's what GFE ended up recommending for two games:
So, yes, you can game at the native panel resolution. You may not be able to enable every feature, but with GeForce Experience, you can custom tailor the settings quickly to get reasonable performance. GeForce Experience also has a slider where you can opt for more performance if you find the frame rate too low for your liking. By default, the slider is almost completely over to the Quality setting.
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wrkingclass_hero - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link
He didn't retire. You could say he left, he moved on, he departed, he resigned, he stopped working at Anandtech, he quit, he's following a new career path, he's pursuing other interests, following other pursuits, etc. I realize that you don't want to say that the review was shelved due to conflict of interest because he works at Apple, but you can be discreet without being deceptive.He and Brian are about as retired as Dustin and Vivek.
fabarati - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
Here retired means retired from Anandtech. Perfectly valid language.invinciblegod - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
So I guess they gave up on the Razer Edge?tipoo - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Wowza, didn't know the Surface Pro 3 was that efficient per milliwatt. What magic is going on there? Lower wattage, but doesn't the Yoga Pro 2 also have a ULV?Waveblade - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Probably one of the better binned CPUs? Or less turbo boostingtipoo - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
They perform pretty close I think. Could also be the display panel.Walkop - Saturday, October 11, 2014 - link
It's the display. It's stupidly efficient.Something like 3w. The iPad Air (10") uses 6w. Much bigger yet half the power. Normalized for brightness it's still twice as power efficient.
Flunk - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
They really rake you over the coals with those storage prices, especially because you have to disassemble it to change the SSD.XabanakFanatik - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
I can tell you from experience that replacing the SSD in this specific laptop is significantly easier than you think. The bottom must be taken off since it is one piece, and a ribbon cable over the drive must be removed. Takes less than 5 minutes, even with being very careful, to get access to the drive.XabanakFanatik - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
The issue is the price of M.2 SSD's and the actual offerings for SATA M.2 drives. It was cheaper to buy the 512GB model with the student discount from the microsoft store (10% off) than to buy the 128GB model without discount and replace the drive with a 512GB M550 M.2 drive.