RAZER BLADE
Sleek gaming on the go
MOBILE COMPUTING is full of form factors: convertible tablets, Chromebooks ( and a few netbooks), ultrabooks, lightweight notebooks, such as the MacBook and ThinkPad, full-featured notebooks, and weighty gaming laptops. The Razer Blade takes some of the gaming chops of a fullfeatured notebook or gaming laptop, and stuffs them into a form closer to that of a MacBook Pro. And damn, Razer did it well.
The 14-inch Blade has a smooth, black, powder-coated aluminum finish. No plasticky feel here. The lid features a green illuminated Razer triple-serpent logo.
The comparison to a MacBook Pro isn’t far off. The Blade comes with Intel’s Skylake Core i7-6700HQ, like many gaming notebooks. The 6700HQ’s base clock comes in at a respectable 2.6GHz, with a turbo clock of 3.5GHz. In contrast, the currentgeneration 15-inch MacBook Pro, at the same price as the Blade, sports a previousgeneration i7-4770HQ Haswell CPU, with a base clock of 2.2GHz and turbo of 3.4GHz.
The Blade also comes with a hefty 16GB of RAM, and either a 256GB or 512GB Samsung PM951 SSD; we’re reviewing the 250GB model here. The SSD capacities are the only real options you can choose from.
The pixel-pushing power comes from a GeForce GTX 970M with 6GB of VRAM. That’s an improvement over the previous Blade, which only had 3GB, like most gaming laptops with the 970M. In our benchmarks, the 6GB served the Blade well, giving us solidly playable frame rates in FarCryPrimal,RiseoftheTombRaider, and TheDivision at 1080p at Ultra settings (RiseoftheTombRaider is run with SMAA and Very High settings). You won’t hit 60fps at Ultra, but by tuning some effects back to High or Medium, it’s well within reach. You’re not going to see playable frame rates in these games at the Blade’s native resolution of 3200x1800, unless you scale the quality settings way back, but 1920x1080 on a 14-inch screen is more than high enough to make games look sharp.
While running games and benchmarks, it’s worth noting that the Blade got pretty damn hot. But what impressed us was where it got hot. Heat is concentrated near the hinge—the rest of the laptop stayed impressively cool, even under high loads.
The keyboard offers Razer’s Chroma RGB LED illumination, which can be controlled from Razer’s Synapse software. If you’ve ever used a Razer Chroma keyboard, all of the same options are there in Synapse. The keys are scissor membrane switches, but felt responsive. The trackpad is responsive, too, and has separate mechanical left and right mouse buttons—a thoughtful touch. The font on the faces of the keys has changed as well.
We left the Chroma illumination on for our battery test, and still managed 6 hours and 38 minutes while playing a 1080p movie on loop with Windows’ Power Saver mode enabled. We kept the screen at 50 percent brightness, which equaled about 150 nits, instead of the 200 we usually test at.
In terms of connectivity, the Blade offers a respectable array of options. There are three USB 3.0 ports, with two flanking the left side and one on the right. The right side also features a Thunderbolt 3 connector, as well as an HDMI connector, and Kensington lock. The left side has an audio jack, too. For networking, the Blade comes with Killer’s Wireless-AC 1535 802.11 a/g/b/n/ ac, which offers Bluetooth 4.1 for wireless pairing. Bonus points here, because Killer offers support for Debian and Ubuntu Linux via the ath10k kernel driver. (You need the firmware from Killer’s website, though.)
There’s no RJ45 connector, but that’s because it’s so damn thin. An RJ45 jack can range from 11.5mm to 13.5mm in height. At 17.8mm (0.7 inches) thick (including the lid), the Blade is just a hair thinner than the MacBook Pro’s 0.71 inches. The Blade is also thinner than the Asus ROG G752VTDH72 (0.8 inches thick). There is a tradeoff, though, as the thicker laptops have enjoyed better benchmark scores, likely due to the extra room for heat dissipation.
If you’re a gamer on the go who doesn’t want to carry around an eight-pound laptop requiring a backpack, we recommend you look at the Blade. If you’re a creative who likes the MacBook Pro’s build quality, but prefers Windows or Linux, this laptop offers the same premium feel and more power for the same price.