My Review of the Razer-Blade 14'' Laptop

Ladies & Gents, I decided to post a review of my brand new 512 GB Razer Blade 14' Laptop which I received earlier this week. IF anyone has any questions feel free to post below, I will do my best to answer them>


About the Reviewer

I would classify myself as more of a professional than a gamer, but still an uber dork by trade . I mainly enjoy playing strategy and single player RPGS. However I do still enjoy the occasional BF3 or Planet Side 2 game... and look forward to a MMO that appeals to me again. I have gone through 4 laptops in the past 2 years " MSI G70 "GTX 570m", Sager 9150 "7970m" Razer Blade R2 "660m, and Razer Blade 14'' ,


Style

off, ditching the Switch blade UI and packing all this power in a smaller sleeker package is much more visually impressive in my opinion.

Performance

Even coming from my 7970m, the 765m at the native resolution performs amazingly in games! With a doubt this is the fastest laptop for gaming I have ever owned. "The 7970m was plagued with so many Enduro issues, and this laptop is able to play games at much higher FPS than my 7970m ever would even tho I am compared 1080p to 900p which isn't exactly fair.

So far it has chewed about every game I have thrown at it, using almost max settings "Max Payne 3, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Shogun 2, Dirt"

Heat

Anyone who has had a Razer Blade will not be disturbed with the heat issues. I am able to have gaming sessions with this new laptop on my lap for long periods of time. Although it does get warm, I would say so far it does a much better job at keeping the heat away the user. I realize for some this laptop will get crazy warm, but for any Razer Blade user with previous models this one actually vastly improves on it's predecessors. An amazing achievement for it's size and form factor.

Display

Going from the beautiful Razer Blade R2 display to the mediocre smaller Razer Blade 14 display wasn't near as difficult as I thought. Everything the reviewers have said about the screen is true, I just think this issue has really been blown out of proportion. Using the screen just for yourself, the viewing angles are more than adequate. Also when I am gaming graphics still look amazing, especially given this laptop is playing at all the highest settings.

Where I would agree that I would like to see a better quality screen at the same resolution for the next version, the screen on this laptop is BY NO means a deal breaker.

My girlfriend has a macbook retina and for a gamer that's the silliest combination, a beautiful screen with hardware internals capable at running games at 1080p even at the lowest settings.

If I ever get the craving to play at 1080p, I hook up my laptop to my tv or 1080p IPS monitor. Which by the way I am able to do having the lid of my laptop closed.....

Battery Life

I have NEVER owned a laptop with anywhere near this good of battery life. I literally played Shogun 2 for 3 hours on batter last night. Also I played Metro Last Light earlier this week for 1 hour and 45 minutes on Maximum performance batter settings. Previously on my other blade for example I would NEVER try to game just on the battery, and if I did I would suffer from reduced performance and less than a hour of gaming.

With this laptop you can game on max settings for 2 hours + despite your power settings, no other gaming laptop has ever been able to come even close to this in my opinion. Arguably the battery life is one of the most impressive features of this laptop.

Conclusion

I remember many devices that I have acquired throughout my lifetime which have really made me appreciate how far our technology has advanced "MP3 Player, Iphone, SSD's, now this bad boy!". The fact that Razer has fit the 765m into this slim machine is nothing short of revolutionary, anyone who denies this simply doesn't appreciate the engineering that went into building this.

Is this laptop for everyone ? Absolutely not! If you are hardcore gamer who just need a machine you can occasionally move from desk to desk I would grab one of the various machines with a 780m.

If you are like me a professional who wants an ultra-book and all the portability that goes with it, but do not want to give up gaming performance this is the machine for you! I can seriously see this machine running games on medium settings 2 years from now, which is as good as performance from a laptop as you could ask for.

Don't get me wrong though this unit still is not perfect. Yes a better screen would be good "same resolution!", also the logo on the back could be done away with in my opinion.

If I was a product manager at Razer, my next product would be the Razer Blade Stealth... release it during the Christmas Season. Exact same unit with no Razer logo, and keyboard with a black under-glow. The only change to internals is they would offer two 512 gb msata's increasing the laptops storage to 1 TB. I argue they could change $2799+ for this unit with the SSD really the only additional cost. I know I would buy it....

 

How about some real review regarding battery life and temps?

Example, cpu temps using hwinfo while idle or when benchmarking/gaming with min/max results. How about battery life when doing productivity work or web surfing etc....

How about going into details regarding screen like contrast ratio levels, black level cdm, color gamut, if the anti glare has grainy/sparkly look etc....

 

Just went to staples and looked at a ton of sub-$600 laptops and a few $800ish laptops.

The blade screen is seemingly worse, but I lend that to the vibrant glossy screens more than the actual display quality of these Acer, Lenovo and HP cheap laptops.

But with that said, I'm not sitting here comparing displays all the time and I think the Blade screen is still pretty good, especially the resolution for this size. I think they made the right choice there, but I would definitely like to see an IPS quality display next gen with better viewing angles and black levels (whites are pretty good on this at least).