Razer Blade (2017)
Is this middle-child in Razer’s laptop family ‘just right’, or does sleekness come at too great a cost?
It’s hard to believe that Razer’s Blade line of portable gaming laptops only launched back in 2013, with this main 14-inch model now in its sixth hardware refresh. What’s also a bit perplexing is that no other company has managed to match Razer’s premium unibody design, which makes the Blades about as close to a ‘gaming MacBook’ as you’ll find. The build quality is undeniable, with first-rate trackpad and keyboard and a chassis that can take a lot of punishment.
This unit is the ‘just right’ sibling in the Blade family — it’s bigger and more powerful than the 12.5-inch Blade Stealth (thanks mostly to it having a dedicated Nvidia GPU, the GeForce GTX 1060), but it’s not as huge or pricey as the 17.3-inch Blade Pro, which packs a GTX 1080 and starts at $5,899 Down Under, with the top-end option costing a bracing $7,299.
Razer doesn’t offer a heap of customisability in the 2017 Blade, opting for just a single high-end CPU/RAM config (a speedy quad-core i7-7700HQ paired with 16GB DDR4), with either a glossy 4K-touchscreen or a mattefinish 1080p (non-touch) display, as well as three choices for SSD size (256GB, 512GB or 1TB). We tested the bottom 1080p/256GB model, which goes for a fairly reasonable $2,799.
Those specs ultimately get you a very good all-rounder that can tackle any task you’d need, including playing most games at Ultra detail settings, as well as editing high-res images and video. It’s also relatively sedate when it comes to gaming bling — the only marginally offensive element is the rainbow-backlit keyboard, which by default is set to a seizure-inducing, fast moving colour spectrum wave. You need to sign into Razer’s Synapse software to change that, but once done, this is about as innocuous as dedicated gaming laptops come.
The matte-black unibody aluminium chassis is, as always, as tough as a pair of steel-capped boots, although there are a couple of areas where the Blade design is looking a bit dated. The 14-inch display’s bezels, for example, are quite wide at about an inch on all sides, making them gargantuan next to the 5mm ones on Gigabyte’s Aero 15, opposite.
While we’re comparing, Razer’s slightly slimmer design (17.9mm vs 19.4mm) means its cooling system isn’t quite as efficient as the Gigabyte’s, with the Blade’s GPU get about 10ºC hotter while gaming, reaching a peak of 90ºC. The conductive nature of the Blade’s allmetal chassis means that heat spreads out and warms up the palm-rest area — though, thankfully, that’s only to a comfortable ‘kitten on your lap’ level.
This unit got moderately loud when gaming. While the fans can take 5–10 minutes to really ramp up, once they kick into high-gear, you’ll clearly hear them if you’re in the same room, so grab some headphones if you’re gaming. Mercifully, the Blade’s pretty quick to switch those fans off when you’re not gaming.
The overall value here isn’t quite as impressive as on other gaming laptops around this price, as you get less storage and fewer expansion ports. So you’re paying extra for the Razer brand name and the Blade family’s highquality components, although as this one’s thermal numbers show, even quality parts don’t always stand up well in the face of cold hard physics.