Razer Blade 2016 Impressions/Review - First Time Razer Customer

Disclaimer: I purchased my 2016 razer blade from the MS store and have used it for the last several days before this review. I have never owned any previous razer products and have many years of experience using multiple laptops from HP, Dell, Toshiba, and lately the Surface Pro from MS.
TLDR at the bottom.

Design: Built like a tank, a stealthy slab of black aluminum. There are absolutely no creaks, no tarnishes, and nothing that shows any corners being cut (despite what the name may imply). If you've grown up using laptops from the HP and Dell's of the world (even their Envy and XPS lines) and wanted that Apple-like quality but in a PC, you are in for a treat. The aluminum is quite smooth to the touch, but definitely picks up smudges from your palms/fingers almost immediately. It's a bit lighter from what I read than last year's model, but not something I could appreciate. Lets be honest, this is very much copied from the general macbook pro design with some design flourishes, and unfortunately that means having the sharp edge where your wrists lie as you type. Other than those quibbles, it's absolutely beautiful to behold. If you want some extra design choices, there are skins available.

Keyboard & Sound: I had a chance to try out the chroma keyboard on the Razer Blade Stealth, and can happily say this keyboard feels considerably nicer to use. There is that extra bit of travel that helps make it very pleasant to type on, which I felt was lacking on the Stealth. It feels closest to using a 15'' macbook pro if I had to say what it fees like, but is just a bit louder. The keyboard backlit is very even, but unfortunately not all of the symbols on a key are backlit and are quite tough to read. For example, the function keys don't have the part of the key backlit for the sound up/down or brightness up/down, some of the grammatical symbols, etc. This isn't a deal-breaker for regular typing, but takes some time to learn what the function keys do so you aren't fumbling in bad-lighting.
The onboard audio is adequate, and certainly on par with other laptop speakers. It's lacking in bass, gets loud enough for a small room, and is well-balanced. Razer offers their premium Razer Surround Pro software for free to customers who purchase the Blade 2016, but I haven't really appreciated any difference in day-to-day use yet. Will update once I test this further with my KEF-X300A.

Display: It's a 3200x1800 resolution dispay and it's pretty much perfect for this size. I'm a fairly young guy, but I definitely had to use some text scaling to make it comfortable for daily use. Out of the box my unit had a strong blue shift, but after calibrating with a SpyderPro colorimeter it really begins to shine. The display certainly gets bright, and I find myself using less than the maximum brightness even when plugged in. If anything it'd be great to get a slightly dimmer setting for use in complete darkness. Using this for movies, photo editing, or anything else will leave you smiling. You will use a display nearly all the time with a laptop, and with the blade you are getting a very pretty and high performing model. One weakness of the panel is the viewing angles from the side, but I wasn't expecting miracles from a laptop panel. Happy to share my ICC profile if anyone else would like to try it out.

I/O & Trackpad: The blade comes with 3x USB 3.0, 1x USB-C with full thunderbolt 3 support, HDMI 1.4b(4k at 30hz max), audio jack, kensington lock slot, and a power input. The USB-C thunderbolt should support accessories like the upcoming Razer Core, or even 4k displays at 60hz with an adapter. You can output to dual 4k displays or a 5k display if you use a thunderbolt 3 dock that offers dual displayport support. There are very few laptops that offer the HDMI 2.0 spec (4k at 60hz), and unfortunately this laptop is not one of them despite the powerful internals. The other disappointing omission is the SD card slot. While I appreciate this is a gaming laptop, it'd still have been nice to have what is a fairly well used port to expand storage and use with a camera on the amazing screen.
The trackpad feels like glass, and has that same smoothness as the macbook pro or surface book. It works well, gestures have worked fine, but it is not a clickpad. There are 2 dedicated mouse click buttons that are plastic and a bit loud, which makes it easier to drag and drop/select text but that is a matter of personal preference. Personally I'd have preferred a clickpad like on the stealth, but this is still top notch in terms of quality.

Battery Life/Cooling: This is a gaming laptop, so don't expect miracles in the battery life department. It's got a 70wh battery inside and it actually so far has been doing a great job I think, easily hitting 5-6hrs at about 50% brightness with about 20+ tabs open running the power hog that is chrome. As always with battery life, YMMV. The synapse software gives options for a quiet mode vs cooling mode, and using the quiet mode makes this nearly completely silent. So if you wanted to take this to school or work, rest assured your fans won't be screaming at full blast - unless you are playing a game. Once you turn on maximal cooling and fire up a game, it's like this thing is getting ready to liftoff, Thankfully those fans at least appear to keep things fairly cool. Will retest with my IR thermometer and update the review accordingly.

Performance: You are getting a quad-core processor, 16gb of DDR4 RAM, and a 6gb 970m. While the CPU still is very much relevant/current in the product cycle, the 970m is definitely now an older part. The 3gb of extra VRAM in this years model honestly makes no difference with games and it has benchmarked just slightly ahead of last year's model. It's still a very powerful performer, and as long as you are willing to bring down the resolution & settings for more demanding and recent titles you'll be very happy. There are plenty of youtube videos out there on the 970m performance if you want to see it's performance on a specific game. The synapse software is quite comprehensive and handles all the performance tweaking tasks, including analyzing keystrokes to help you improve your game.

Additional Thoughts/Pascal Woes: As most of us know by now, Nvidia launched the next generation Pascal desktop cards recently. It is likely we will hear more news at Computex 2016 on new laptops and new Pascal mobile GPUs then and will put the 2016 blade behind the curve. As for how soon we would see a 1070m on the market, that's still unknown, but one that the Razer Core tries to solve to some degree. With the core you have a viable, albeit very expensive and IMO overpriced, way to keep up to date with the graphics card release cycle. Does it suck that the blade doesn't have pascal, sure. Does that make it any less of a powerful & portable laptop, absolutely not.
If you want to play the waiting game, feel free to skip past the 2016 blade. It's very possible Razer will put in the Pascal mobile chips for next years model and you'll get what you want. I bought this computer to play some games on the side and use it for all my foreseeable work needs and in that capacity this years model is a huge upgrade. You get legitimate 4k and 5k 60hz display support & external GPU support via thunderbolt 3, a chroma keyboard, a cheaper price, and a laptop that still performs like a champ. There's always going to be something better, but right now the 2016 Razer Blade is it. It is very likely that once Apple refreshes their macbook pro models with thunderbolt 3 there will be more peripheral support, and possibly cheaper external GPU enclosure options as well if you wanted to go that route.

TLDR; At this point in time you cannot find a better built high performing computer in this slim thin and light form factor. If you want something as well built as a macbook pro, but a good deal more powerful and running Windows - this is it. This is easily the best windows computer I've ever used hands down and will leave you with a big smile on your face. If you're looking for absolute power and don't care about form factor, keep holding out for those pascal high end mobile chips that are surely just around the corner (see the ASUS announcement on a 24'' behemoth).

 

Congratulations on getting the new Blade and thanks for your impressions. Very interesting. Was very curious how Chroma keyboard on Blade compared to the Stealth and you answered that. +1 for ya!

 

No problem, happy to help! Let me know if you have any other questions. I've been enjoying the blade immensely so far.

 

how do you find the noise levels when gaming? I'm looking to replace my desktop with a powerful laptop (need the space for soon-to-arrive baby), but I'd rather not have a really noisy machine, my wife has hearing like a bat...

I've been considering this, with eventually a razer core attached for newer graphics cards in future, but now it seems like you need a short cable for the core TB3 link, which would preclude hiding the core in a cupboard to mute the noise, anyone know if this is true/will change?

 

The blade gets very loud, easily sounds like the fan is getting ready to take-off when put into the maximal cooling mode and is being pushed hard. With the quiet mode it's quieter, but definitely still audible when it's pushed. I was impressed with how quiet it is outside of gaming, but it makes itself known when gaming. To be fair, my local weather has been getting into the 90's and I have not tested the blade with the use of any additional cooling via a pad or anything, so there's room for improvement. I don't know if you will really be able to find any gaming laptop that won't make some noise when pushed hard unfortunately, and certainly not one that's this thin.

With regards to the TB3, if it is using the standard TB3/USB-C cable to transfer data there's no reason I can see that you can't just buy a longer one from a reputable manufacturer to use with the core and put it somewhere else quieter. Keep in mind that you do want to give the core (and the blade) some room to put out the hot air if you are going to hide it away.

 

thank you for the quick reply. I'm fairly sure I read on a review of the Razer Core that it only came with a 60cm TB3 cable, due to latency issues or something, I'm trying to remember where that was, it might have been ultrabookreview.com.

My desk is right next to a large cupboard that the previous owner already drilled some holes in, and oddly has power sockets inside, so it's perfect to conceal and muffle pc components whilst allowing some ventilation, but I do need cable lengths close to 2metres...

I've been dithering over a Razer Blade for years, but living in the UK, they aren't yet available and are crazy overpriced, we get brutally overcharged for electronics here I'd import one if I wasn't frightened of the warranty implications.

 

I mentioned this in my review/post. Indeed, so far I've only gotten the Core to work with the included cable. I even tried the Type-C from my Nexus 6p and it did not even turn on.

 

Seems as though KillerFry already tested the cables as you mentioned so I'll defer to someone who has the core for more info about using it. As for getting around warranty issues, you can try to purchase it from other retailers like through the Microsoft Store or through Amazon. I don't know about Microsoft but I imagine you could get Amazon to maybe ship it to you. If you're worried about support after the fact, perhaps you can look into third party warranty coverage like squaretrade.

 

This might be because the Nexus 6p, while using the USB-C format, is not a USB 3.1 device. So it likely is not a USB 3.1/Thunderbolt 3 rated cable that comes with the phone.

There are relatively few quality USB-C cables on the market today, with lots of reports of bad cables frying devices and phones. There's a google engineer who's been testing USB-C cables, so I'd look at his recommendations on which brands are reliable and specifically look for a thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 supported cable and try that out if you need a longer cable. I don't have a core myself, but if you get a chance to test it out KillerFry I'd be interested to hear about your experience with it.

 

Very nice review, thanks for sharing!

I think I'd spend far too much time playing with the Chroma keyboard settings if I got one of these ...

Charles

 

I've bought a 2015 Blade off B&H Photos 7 months ago since they offer SquareTrade international warranty and I'll have to send in the notebook next week for screen bright clouds; Razer is gonna fix it and ship it back in Italy at no cost, while they want me to send the PC to their offices in California at my cost.
SquareTrade also covers shipping fees, so I'll get my notebook fixed for free and SquareTrade will pay 300 euros of shipping costs.
Doesn't look so bad, in the end, but I'll let you know once I get my PC back.

 

As a quick update I thought I'd share two ICC profiles after calibration with my spyder pro 2. I will be getting a new colorimeter to test with hopefully in the near future, but these are the two profiles that have addressed by concerns about the blue-tint on the panel out-of-the-box. The first profile is my calibration on day 1, and the 2nd profile is one I made today after running my laptop for several hours. Let me know if you have any issues downloading the profiles.

http://www.filedropper.com/razerprofile1_1

http://www.filedropper.com/razerprofile2

 

No problem, happy to share my experience.

With regards to the chroma keyboard, that's what I have been having fun with so far for sure. It's a good thing that Razer's been so far putting out updates for different color schemes. I've grown to quite like the "fire" theme, just like having a fireplace on the keyboard.

 

Great to hear your review - I'm waiting for both this and the Gigabyte Aero 14 to become available to me - it will be a tricky choice!