Razer Blade Owner's Lounge

Playing Skyrim. Dialed down to 1280x720 resolution, getting 40-50 FPS, vs. 25-35 running at 1080p. Settings maxed out, no overclock. If I OC, could probably run 1080p at decent framerate, but I only OC for benchmarks, never for real world gaming.

 

What about 1600x900?

 

Are you running the latest Skyrim patch (1.4?). It has offered substantial performance improvements.

 

yes i am running 1.4. but also remember i'm running the 276.05 Nvidia Drivers which are a little stale. Confidet I can run back at 1080p if I dial down shadows or whatever, but 720p seems fine to me. 1080p matters more for me on RTS games and movies.

 

Hi john, any updates on the panel information?

 

Its an AU Optronics B173HW01 V5

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/577259-my-god-its-beautiful-b173hw01-v5-upgrade.html

somebody upgraded their Sager with the same screen, also some customized calibrations for it. I'll check it out later.

 

They also put in a very good panel..

 

I take it you can only install the drivers given by Razer?

 

yep. I expect good driver support from Razer though. Will email them about updating the driver.

 

Perhaps they are still optimizing the drivers. Looking forward to more performance details.

Oh and how do you like the touchpad so far? What games did you use it with?

 

OK, a little ballzy, but I opened up the bottom panel of the Blade, remembered where my micro-torx screwdriver was. Will show a couple photos later. Good news is the SSD is easily accessible and looks to be a simple (though expensive) possible upgrade. Only other thing fairly easy to get a hold of is the wifi card. Actually removed it (6230) and placed my 6300 inside it, until I realized the 6300 doesn't have bluetooth... Put the original wireless card back in grudgingly. Not brave enough to tamper with the rest of the internals at this point, such as flipping it over and removing heatsinks. Pretty sure Razer, unlike Dell and some other companies, knows how to apply thermal pads and/or paste. My temps are fine as is anyway. Only real thing I'd like to get a look at is the memory, to see if its removable/upgradable underneath... 16GB RAM couldn't hurt. And maybe one day putting another 35watt Intel CPU for kicks. Won't attempt any of that in the short term.

Hoarding pennies however for a larger SSD.

 

additional comment: It appears if you really wanted to you could probably fit a standard 2.5" laptop drive in here, if you remove the rubber bumpers.

 

nevermind on upgrading the CPU, think this is the most powerful dual core sandybridge available.

 

Not that it is practical or anything, but you could see if it can go quad.

 

any cpu upgrades have to be bios supported, doubt it will be possible to upgrade. also, quads use more power, dunno if the laptop/psu could do it.

 

(For anyone who knows how to mod drivers)

The Nvidia driver provided by Razer differs from the Verde drivers in that it uses a new .inf file, nvgb.inf and in the inf file, rather than using nv_disp.cat, it uses nvgb.cat. I tried modding the inf file to point to nv_disp.cat as well as inserting nvgb.inf to ListDevices.txt in 285.62 and 295.51 but according to johnnobts it doesn't work. I haven't really tried modifying any other inf files or .msi files a la AMD Radeon and that's what I'll try to do next, but does anyone have any idea what to try to mod other than these and the .cat file?

 

Very nice. That's a huge plus.

I'd do anything for a 90% gamut matte option.

 

Hi, I am really considering this machine due to its size. Would it run SWTOR on highest resolution with highest settings at a decent frame rate?

Thanks

 

Dunno. Don't own SWKOTOR. I did just pony up and buy Kingdom of Alamur last nite, will install it later today. Looks too fun to pass up. SWKOTOR is the only game thus far that has customized LCD icons that were sent to me via the Switchblade update. My guess is if the game runs smoothly on the M14X it will fare pretty well on the Blade. Sorry can't actually run the game myself at this point.

 

I actualy meant the new MMO Star Wars the Old Repubilc. Would be interested to know if anyone who got their hands on this machine plays that. GL with Kingdoms look like an awesome game.

 

i know you meant the Star Wars MMORPG. Actually I have KOTOR

 

wow, got a direct call from one of the Razer marketing guys wanting my opinion on the Blade so far. Really, really helpful guy. I've always been sent email surveys to fill out by Alienware or something, but never been personally called up andasked, "What would you like to see us do in the future with the Switchblade UI?" He also mentioned they are working on a new Video Driver release, should be out very, very soon. Again, I expect Razer to be pretty diligent with their driver updates.

If any of you guys in the forum have some ideas for the Switchblade, let me know and I'll call him back, i.e. Media, scrollable MP3 Player.

He also told me that they are working on the power supply (which I appreciate because of its very compact size and weight) and trying to make it even better.

 

Hey Johnnobts! I was wondering what kind of GT555m they use in the Blade? notebookcheck shows there are 4 v

 

Putting the Razer Blade Through Its Gaming Paces

This could improve with the new driver release John mentioned, but I would check back @ Kotaku for his updated reviews.

@johnnobts
Congratulations on your new toy! Just one thing though.

Spoiler

Those images are a little to big, add the spoiler command [spoiler*] before your 1st image url and [/spoiler*] after your last image url. (removing the asterisks).
http://forum.notebookreview.com/site-suggestions-help-announcements/109941-forum-rules.html

Sent from my SGH-T989 using Tapatalk.

 

Well going off of Johns review on the blade with skyrim and him saying that it played decent and then Kotaku saying it won't play on anything other than low, so I don't know what the deal is. I think once the drivers are revised it will run things great

 

I will agree with you clasak. I think once the new drivers are released it will fix performance issues.

Sent from my SGH-T989 using Tapatalk.

 

my bad on photos, will just do links from this point forward.

 

Nah bud no worries. I wouldn't have said anything if I was on my R2, but that hurt on my phone when I switched from tapatalk to the browser.

 

gotcha. playing Kingdoms of Alumar a little tonite. 720p, high textures but simple shadows. right at 30fps. really wanting that driver update though.

 

BF3 getting 35-45 FPS
720P, textures ultra, everything else medium, AF at 4x, SSAO

 

Try this in BF3:

Set everything to low (for now)
when you get in game open the console (~ key)
type:
worldrender.dxdeferredcspathenable
hit enter
turn off console (~ key)

Voila! Instant 5-8FPS at 1080p!

If you want to keep it just enter that in a notepad document, save as user.cfg and put it in your BF3 directory.

Now you can tune settings. Can probably crank textures to high, shadows to low, effects high/med, mesh med, terrain med, terrain decoration med, no AA (not really needed at 1080p), aniso 16x, ambient occlusion off.

The 555m is comparable to the 6750m in my laptop there's no reason you can't get 30+ FPS at 1080p.

 

Just post them like this:

>

/>

 

Thanks a lot. I will hold off for now. I really like the form factor. Tired of laging my asus around. Alas, performance is no good

 

Vantage Overclocked got 6936. Think I can break 7000. GPU temps hit high of 59degrees

 

probably hit well over that when the drivers are optimized to the fullest... Oc'ed I would say you can break it easily.

Also did you make sure your gpu was engaged.... I saw where they let one guy that was reviewing know that his gpu was not engaging and now Skyrim is auto detecting at ultra settings, so you might want to check that out also

 

gpu is engaging. i know the snowy parts of the game will have slowdown, especially with outdated drivers.

 

Gotcha was just making sure...
So hopefully on the 15th of this month they go back on sell it wont be as nuts and I will be buying one, unless you can tell me otherwise.
I will be buying it for school and gaming, but I only play mmo's nothing too taxing, I also will be buying it because it looks better than anything else out there and I love Razer products.
So any heads up would be greatly appreciated!!!

 

Hey just wondering what drivers are they currently using?

 

I see no reason to believe drivers will improve performance, as Nvidia was satisfied with the 555M's performance over 6 months ago.

 

They are optimizing the drivers for the laptop... That is why it will improve performance.

 

But how much can be gained from better drivers no matter what it's still a 555m It's not like it's going to be more than say 10% I guess only time will tell.

 

I'm more interested in driver updates for newer games obviously. Updates can improve performance for specific games, just read up on the update logs NVIDIA posts.

 

So how old are the drivers as of now what version are they thanks

 

OK, my bad on Kingdoms of Alumar. Had to add the game manually to NVIDIA 3D settings to run off the 555m. Now running at 1080p all settings maxed, getting 30+ fps

 

They are using Release 276.05, driver version 8.17.12.7605.

 

Thanks man +rep

 

It's not a Verde driver release however, it's different from the Verde releases and I haven't found a way to modify them to work yet

 

still working on my review