Razer's signature gaming laptop has been redesigned for more power with no loss of portability
Best In Class award
In
both form and function, there's a lot to love about Razer's new 17-inch
Razer Blade gaming laptop. It's attractive, thin, lightweight, and
very, very fast.
Far and away, however, the feature everyone
notices first - and that you'll want to show off to your friends,
family, and fellow/random tech nerds - is first-of-its-kind Switchblade
touchpad interface. This unique new feature turns the Blade's touchpad
into a fully functioning second screen that allows you to check your
email, watch YouTube videos, or - best of all - amplify your gaming
experience.
This final point is the most important of all because
from the hardware to the battery life to the right-hand position of
touchpad, the Razer Blade is decidedly gaming-ready.
The question
is: Is it worth the top-shelf $2,500 (£1,500) price tag? Answer: If you
have the cash, the answer is yes. Consider this: At this point in time,
it's literally not possible to get this much power on another laptop
with a 17-inch screen in a chassis this thin and light.
We'll get to the Switchblade UI touchpad shortly. Let's start at the top.
Razer Blade lives up to its name
Even
considering the impressive Switchblade second-screen touchpad, we still
can't get over the size and shape of this system. At .88 inches thick
and weighing only 6.6 pounds (a touch under 7 pounds with the power
brick), this is an exquisite feat of modern engineering. Most laptops
with the Razer Blade's specs are literally twice as thick and weigh 10
percent to 20 percent more.
These dimensions felt even more impressive when we remembered that Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air measures .68 inches at its thickest point. It's not packing nearly half the power of this portable.
Aesthetically,
we immediately fell in love with the Razer Blade's sturdy black matte
brushed aluminum chassis, which sports Razer's distinct-looking logo
illuminated in green. The system's green backlit Chiclet-style keyboard
is impressively gamer-y as well.
The Razer Blade has a 17.3-inch,
1920 x 1080 display. It's not an IPS screen, but it has great viewing
angles and very nice color tones - enough so that we initially thought
it was an IPS panel.
The laptop measures 16.81 inches in width and
10.90 inches in depth. It has a full-size 6-row keyboard, and the
Switchblade UI touchpad can serve as a numerical keypad.
(And no, it's not yet time to talk about the touchpad. You'll have to keep waiting.) SpecificationsThe star of this new laptop is a brand new Intel Ivy Bridge CPU: the 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-3632QM.
The
successor to the 3612QM, the Core i7 3632QM is a high-end mobile part
containing 4 cores and 8 threads. The CPU, which like the rest of the
Ivy Bridge line, is fabricated on Intel's 22nm process, has a TDP of 25
Watt. With all four cores active, it's capable of turbo boosting up to
2.9GHz, and can also boost to 3.1GHz with two active cores and 3.2GHz
with a single core active.
Translation: This CPU is really, really fast - and power efficient.
The
CPU does have Intel's integrated HD Graphics 4000, but Razer taps
Nvidia's upper mid-range GeForce GTX 660M as the graphics workhorse.
DirectX 11.1 compatible, it's ideally suited in terms of power
consumption and output for the Razer Switchblade's ginormous HD display.
We
also like the hybrid 500GB drive, which is an ideal mobile solution
because it delivers a large amount of storage capacity, but also offers
rapid access of the most utilized data via an integrated 64GB SSD. Some
day, we'll play on laptops with 750GB solid state drives; until then the
hybrid is a welcome alternative. We experienced lightning-fast boot
times and the system comes out of sleep mode in a very snappy manner.
Also
nice: The dual-band Wi-Fi network adapter is capable of exchanging data
on both 2.4GHz and 5.0Ghz frequencies. That's a nice touch, given the
large number of performance routers that also operate on both
frequencies. At shorter ranges, the 5.0GHz is ideally suited for
high-performance data transfers.
Other key specifications include:
8GB RAM DDR3 1600MHz
Free upgrade to Windows 8
Bluetooth 4.0
60Wh battery
Performance3DMark 06: 14,422 Cinebench 10: 20,026 Battery Eater '05: 82 minutes
Given
the internal specifications above, we were excited to get the Razer
Blade out on the open road to see what it could do. The answer, it turns
out, is a whole lot.
A week ago, we reviewed Toshiba's 3D Qosmio X870, which we found to be an astoundingly powerful gaming machine for the remarkable price of $1,900.
We're
not surprised that the Razer Blade holds its own in head-to-head
benchmarking comparisons. In our 3DMark test, which inflicts DX9 pain
and suffering on the graphics processor, we were quite pleased with the
results.
The same goes for our Cinebench 10 test, which soaks all
four CPU scores. The Qosmio's 100MHz advantage gives it a slight 4
percent performance advantage there. Both systems' performances, it must
be said, are top notch.
So, what does this mean in terms of real-world performance? We stretched the Blade out in our current obsession, Borderlands 2,
and at 1920 x 1080 with no antistrophic filtering on, saw decent frame
rates in the high 20s and occasionally low 30s. At lower resolutions
such as 1280 x 1024, the frame rates improved considerably.
We saw
similar results with other DX11 games. Bottom line: You're not going to
get 60 frames per second with current-gen PC titles at 1080 resolution,
but you'll be pleased with the results.
The upside of the new
Intel CPU, which boasts some new power efficiencies, is that it results
in surprisingly solid battery life. In our Battery Eater test, which
continuously hammers away at the hard drive, graphics processor, and CPU
until the battery completely discharges, we saw an eye-opening result
of 82 minutes.
It's worth noting that, in normal use, the Razer
Blade's battery performance is commendable. We were able to go almost 6
hours while typing and browsing away. That's impressive. Switchblade Touchscreen Trackpad
It
is finally time to discuss the Razer Blade's fancy, newfangled
touchpad, dubbed the Switchblade User Interface. In short, the
Switchblade is amazing, innovative, and remarkable. In a lot of ways,
it's kind of like having a touchscreen phone embedded onto your laptop.
The
Switchblade UI is comprised of a multi-touch track panel that is also a
4-inch, 800 x 480 LCD screen, ten backlit soft keys that Razer calls
Dynamic Adaptive Tactile Keys, and the Synapse software utility that
allows you to customize and program the UI for games, general usage, and
more.
The Synapse utility requires a log-in to use, but in
exchange it stores all your settings, add-ons, and customizations online
for you, including mouse sensitivity, keyboard lightning, key bindings,
and more so that if you ever upgrade to a new system or
Synapse-compatible keyboard, you'll be able to take all your settings
with you.
Some of the ways you can use the 10 keys above the touchpad include:
A numeric pad
A gaming mode that locks out the Windows key and Alt-Tab
The ability to launch a web browser in the display in order to search for cheats, tips, or anything else
YouTube - you can watch a game walkthrough without having to leave the game
A clock
Game timer that allows you to create countdown timers
Facebook, of course
Twitter
One-press screen capture utility
Macro recorder for capturing game actions
Gmail
The Switchblade UI also comes with some game-specific applications and settings for Star Wars: The Old Republic, Battlefield 3, Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike.
The
Switchblade UI and Dynamic Adaptive Tactile Keys automatically update
when you play games that have pre-loaded settings, like the above. With
these games, you'll have a bunch of actions available at the press of a
button.
As an example, in Battlefield, you can use the touchpad to quick-switch between weapons and use context-sensitive controls. In SWTOR, you can access all sorts of data on the second display.
Over
time, we should see support for more and more games. The rub is that
because this is such a unique feature, we may never see a high volume of
game customizations for the Switchblade UI. (Razer also makes a
DeathStalker keyboard as well as a SWTOR plank that both feature a
second screen.)
If you want to take full advantage of this
next-generation touchpad, you're going to have to spend some time
learning how to fully customize the soft keys to function in the manner
you like using the Synapse software utility. It's not the quickest
procedure, but assigning functions and mapping macros to the keys is
fairly straightforward.
You can even access a library of images that you can assign to these custom in-game functions.
Finally, you can also customize the touchpad wallpaper with whatever image you'd like.
Switchblade UI will continue to evolve
We'll
admit to being initially skeptical about the Switchblade touchpad, but
after spending a considerable amount of time playing games and operating
on it, we came away impressed.
For gamers, the ability to
program the 10 soft keys to access items and call up various powers and
abilities is a game-changer. More importantly, the right-hand position
of the touchpad (which we were initially bothered by) and the high
responsiveness of it make it fairly intuitive to game on this system
without an external mouse. We were even able to play Borderlands 2 on this thing.
However,
it's not perfect. While the touchpad itself is remarkable, its location
on the right-hand side of the keyboard will take some getting used to
for mundane tasks.
After several days of pounding away, we still
found ourselves trying to apply our thumbs and right forefinger to the
inches of empty space beneath the keyboard, only to remember that the
touchpad is in the odd and unique position of the right-hand side of the
laptop.
To be fair to Razer, the touchpad has to be there in
order to fulfill the promise of being an authentic gaming laptop. A
bigger problem is that the left and right mouse buttons, which are
positioned right below the touchpad, feel almost like an afterthought
and are poorly suited for gaming. In addition to having poor travel when
pressed, these buttons are so thin that it's easy to miss them.
Furthermore,
the positioning of the Razer-function button is also in an awkward
position. It's close enough to the cursor keys that we found ourselves
frequently mistaking it for the right-cursor button. The good news is
that there's no harm done when you hit. And that you'll get used to it.
Remember hitting the Windows key on the first keyboard/laptop that had
one of those? (Yes, we're old. But along with that age comes gobs of
experience, right?)
Finally, we consistently found ourselves
wishing that we could somehow use the touchpad to continue to navigate
Windows while simultaneously using it to watch Gangnam style on Youtube.
That's a pipedream, we know, but the beauty of the Switchblade platform
that it will be upgraded over time. Maybe some day?
For now, this
feature is way ahead of its time. In coming months and years, we fully
expect to see more and more keyboards with embedded second (and even
third) screens.
All this said, if you're not a hardcore gamer,
you'll probably find the Switchblade UI superfluous. Truthfully, if
you're not a hardcore gamer, you're probably not thinking about spending
$2,500 for a laptop.
We liked
Let's wrap this review up.
The
best thing we can say about the Razer Blade is that it is very fast
indeed. The third-gen Ivy Bridge Intel CPU is a real workhorse in terms
of performance and power consumption. And we like the decision to eschew
Nvidia's highest-end mobile gaming part in favor of a more modest (but
still powerful) high-mid-range 3D adapter for the same power-performance
reasons.
The second best thing we can say about the Razer Blade
is that it's easily one of the coolest-looking gaming laptop TechRadar
has ever seen or tested. It's the kind of system you can show your wife
or girlfriend and actually elicit some oohs and ahhs. That counts for
something, right?
It would be easy to write off the Switchblade
touchpad UI as a gimmick, until you see it in action. Not only is it a
boon for gamers, but its customizable nature should allow for some
fantastically unique uses in the future. We're excited to see if and how
this evolves.
This is clearly a UI platform to build on, and the
fact that the Switchblade is based on your log-in information means that
if you upgrade laptops in the future, you won't have to set everything
up again from scratch.
Even the audio quality—delivered via a
soundbar in the center of the laptop—is ideally suited for gaming,
delivering crisp highs and a surprising amount of thump at the low-end.
We disliked
Finding
things to dislike about the Razer Blade is fairly difficult. It's easy
to get grumpy over the $2500.00 price tag. But if you're searching for
portable power in a chassis that won't make you feel like you're
breaking your back, this is the high point. And the high point always
costs a premium.
Other negatives include the keyboard, which feels
a little too stiff for our tastes, and the mouse buttons, which lack
the responsiveness we like for gaming. The first complaint is fairly
subjective—a stiff keyboard isn't the worst for gaming. And because it's
highly likely you'll be playing games with an attached mouse the second
point may not be that relevant. (Using the touchpad itself for
mouse-clicks during standard computing is perfectly fine.)
Perhaps
the most noticeable shortcoming is that it does take some time to get
used to the location of the touchpad during normal day-to-day computing
tasks if you aren't using an external mouse.
Even four days after
beginning to use the Razer Blade, we found ourselves twiddling our
thumbs below the keyboard in vain to move the cursor around.
This
said, the position of the Switchblade touchpad is important because it
enables laptop gaming in a way that most systems—Toshiba's
lightning-fast Qosmio X870 included—do not.
No comments:
Post a Comment