Razer Edge and Edge Pro Owner's Lounge

I know this is a tablet technically, but with its midrange gaming notebook specs thought I'd see if the powers that be here in the forums would permit me to start a new thread?

 

I approve if it counts for anything.

 

Would love to hear some user reviews on this, this has me intrigued.

 

Just got my replacement edge pro today, so can play with it... will have to do a bunch of downloading so bear with me. Have a large catalog of games to install

Thanks to razer support for all the follow up in replacing my unit: heath and glen especially...

photos and videos pending this weekend

 

Also, could you check to see if the Edge has Widi? I hope it does as that will help to make up for the lack of video out on the actual tablet.

 

uses a wireless n 2230 card, nothing super special about it really. updating the driver for it from intel, but no WIDI it would seem. you can use a pinnacle usb wireless hdmi adapter maybe?

 

Looking forward to the videos Johnnobts.

My friend wants to buy one and i want to mess around with his as well but im wondering are you guys getting the controller with the machine ?.

He does not want to order till he knows he can have both at the same time as just having the tablet alone seems pointless which i can understand.

 

I have the full setup - controller, tablet, dock, and today received my controller batteries as well as a StarTech USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

The battery slab (more like a wafer, it's very light) has no indicator lights on it. No traditional "push button to see how much charge" like you would find on a decent Dell or IBM battery. The tablet can tell you how much battery charge is on the battery, but that means you have to put the tablet in the controller to check.

The battery does charge in the controller when the tablet is not in the controller, so that's a plus. It requires a controller or keyboard accessory to charge as the connector is different than the one on the power cable going to the tablet. Haven't had a chance to play games on it yet to see if it drains the extra battery first or both at the same time. It charges both at the same time at least.

 

Excellent!
From the early reviews I have read it seems to be a winner.

Nice , controller seems too pricey for my wallet but would definetly get the dock and just use a regular 360 controller.
Would be great if you can describe fan noise when gaming or under load and interseting to see if you can OC the GPU a bit for a little added boost. Can you post temps when gaming if possible.
I'm really interested in what it has to offer. Congrats man!

 

Sorta defeats the purpose. A regular controller is more comfortable. Takes some getting used to the button and stick placement on the Edge's controller. 'Course you can't easily take the dock and controllers with you, and there's no facility to add a secondary battery while in the dock.

The fan is not as loud as a Gen 1 Blade under load. It has a low pitch. It is definitely audible, but the noise faces up and away. Gaming audio directed at you drowns it out.

No plans to OC anything. The GT 640 LE's DDR3 is its weak point. OCing the GPU won't help.

I'll have to see if GPU-Z can log it. eVGA Precision and mobile parts do not play well together. It ramped the CPU cores to 100% with three processes running at 33% each.

 

Loving my Edge Pro gentlemen. Really does what its supposed to do very well. I'm not using it for word processing or spreadsheets or anything practical at this point (though I do have a BT keyboard and mouse), pretty much strictly gaming and web-browsing. Xpadder is a must have app for the controller dock, as I can now play SimCity comfortably using the analog sticks to navigate. Also the new game Evoland (fantastic) is a great touch-supported game, and I have an xpadder profile for it as well.

Haven't found a game I can't comfortably play with the Edge thus far, my Blade is getting a little lonely at this point... I really will do some videos and more detailed gfx benchmark breakdowns at some point, been super busy. Also waiting for my HDMI dock to ship out (COME ON AMAZON! TEMPTED TO CANCELLLLLL). Finally just ordered a screen protector for my Edge, though I wish they had included one gratis, not to mention some form of carrying case. I would say the controller dock takes a few days to get used to but I'm finally there and have no problems using it, but I will say its definitely not a KB and mouse replacement for FPS gaming, and I'd venture to say still not as accurate as a standard controller b/c of button placement.

 

This is mainly a question for john, but i guess for anyone else who has one. aside from the over heating, what has been your impression of the edge? I believe you have an edge pro? and Ive been looking at the 128 or even the 256gb model if i can swing the price. I am almost there with it which comes to about 1600 after tax here in Washington. Its steep i know but aside from the price, do you find that its been worth it? Im mainly looking at it for gaming and possibly for work as it looks like it will have a eth to usb dongle for it, and thats one of two things i cannot do with my ipad. I work at a data center so the ability to have a tablet with ethernet would really help out with checking switchports and our kvm switches use java which i cannot access via ipad either so running windows would be great as well.

my main contender at this point is a surface pro which i believe is a bit thinner than the razer edge which i think is just shy of an inch thick? but im not 100% sure they have eth out or a dongle for the surface pro. plus the price is fairly close and i would be getting a great gaming tablet as well with the edge pro.

 

I have not played with the Edge yet but I do have a Surface Pro. I really want to get a Edge but I can't justify the price yet since the Surface (on paper at least) does everything I need in a tablet even better than the Edge. I'm a student so I write all my notes with the Wacom pen. I honestly don't use the keyboard much although it is cool having it at least as a cover for the screen. The only reason I can justify the Edge is because it can play games rather well and I have a huge steam library to get through. If Razer can drop the price by a couple hundred bucks and throw in a free controller, I may end up picking one up anyway.

Do you think someone could actually get good enough with the controller to play competitive games or is it better used for just casual playing? I do know that a controller will never be as precise as an mouse but it would be nice to play something like BF3 online with the controller without going 0 and 26.

 

I think mine might be defective, it reboots way too often. Is the vent on the left side supposed to do something? Only the right side pushes out air on mine.

 

The left vent is intake for cool air, the right blow warm air out. U may want to call about it rebooting.

here's the thing, i don't play competitive multiplayer fps games on pc, b/c I'm not that great with a mouse and KB, so I use my XBOX 360 for that. I do love to play FPS shooters single player campaigns on my PC with a gamepad. So to answer your question, I think yes, you can after a couple of days get pretty darn good using the edge controller dock, but I know from experience its not the same thing as a mouse/KB setup when playing BF 3 or whatever. BUt I'd say I can play BF3, Crysis 3, whatever using my controller dock perfectly fine now. Still a little different than using a standard 360 controller, but don't feel like its a handicap anymore.

just came home from best buy, had my razer edge pro in tow. geek squad, the mobile phone guys, the apple guy, and the new samsung store guy were all geeking out over the edge. It was hillarious, they wouldn't let me leave till i showed them tomb raider on the device. I was in there just looking for a case that would accomodate the tablet and controller dock, but no luck...

 

Thanks! I don't wanna send it back, maybe I can exchange it at best buy.
It seems stable in Prime95 and Kombuster, and I ran the Arkham City benchmark a few times without problem. Couple minutes of Civ5 and it locks up though.

Anyone find some touchscreen games for it? So far I only know of Civ5 and "Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery". I guess there are some good free ones from Microsoft in the store, but I didn't buy this thing to play minesweeper and solitaire, lol.

 

strange, when you say locks up, does it power off? does the screen freeze? blue screen of death/reboot on its own? does it only lock up during civ 5 play? mine was definitely a gpu overheating issue. also, not likely to be able to exchange with bestbuy since they don't have the blade in stock yet, you're likely to get it swapped out very quickly via razer support if they can't walk you through an over the phone fix.

 

I've seen it BSOD, or whatever the win8 equivalent is called, at least twice. Also at least 2-3 times it froze up without rebooting. I disabled it from going to sleep when plugged in now, I think at least some of the problems were caused by that. I don't think it has crashed outside of Civ5. I verified the game is not corrupt with Steam. I would really like to see it crash in something else before I try to exchange it though. It just crashed again when I left the room to write this reply on my desktop, but it worked for about an hour before that. I already updated the video driver and installed all the updates, so am not really sure what else is worth trying.

 

I have a question... could I install and run games off a USB flash drive with the Razer Edge?

I refer to this USB drive in particular... Amazon.com: SanDisk Cruzer Fit CZ33 32GB USB Flash Drive (SDCZ33-032G-B35): Computers & Accessories

 

You can but it would be slow. Better to spend 5 min and copy the games from/to the memory stick.
Get a faster usb3 one like this instead either way.
Newegg.ca - Mushkin Enhanced Ventura Pro 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Model MKNUFDVP64GB

 

For console work in a data center, a real ultrabook would be better. There's no nice way to add a keyboard at this time and I can see using the touchscreen instead of a trackpad to cut and paste as being problematic.

If your Edge is rebooting/locking up, exchange it or send it in for RMA. I had similar issues with my first Blade. Arkham Asylum was fine, Half-Life 2 was not. It's entirely possible for something to go sideways such that something that stresses the system works, but something that doesn't crashes it.

 

Nice...thanks!

 

Can you remove the MS sticker off the back? Looks really stupid and out of place.
Would be great to hear or see some game reviews on how the run on it.

 

You can remove it carefully, though I have not yet. If you do, keep it somewhere safe in case you need to re-activate or if you decide to sell it or something. I will do videos...

 

I'm not sure how to get the cpu temp but i got the GPU up to 85 degrees celcius so far when stress testing it, charging it, and running prime 95 at the same time. Needless to say, it's not really comfortable to hold when it gets that hot, but the fan is very quiet at least.

I managed to get Arkham city to crash when playing for about 15 min so am gonna return this one to best buy or RMA it if they still have no stock.

Normally I'd say use a heat gun, but I think just play a game for 5 min and it will get hot enough for that label to be removed easily

 

Does the Razer Edge have temp issues or is this just a lemon?

 

Mine is a lemon. None of the reviews mentioned instability, so it's unlikely to occur frequently. If you buy one, make sure you actually play some games on it and verify that it works properly.

 

Just a request ...to all new razer edge owners ...could you please run FRAPS while gaming ....so even though if you dont have time for benchmarks .....you could just give us an approximate idea on the performance ....and congratulations to everyone ..........for the first time after my m18x ...have i drooled over another laptop (a tablet that can game in this case)

 

Run fraps with all my games so far at full resolution. Will let I know. Still waiting on the hdmi dock that I preordered over a month ago, would like to run tests at 1080p as well....

For most games running at high textures and medium everything else.

 

I was notified by amazon that the dock has been further backordered until the end of May at the earliest.

 

Got a new one and it's a lot more stable. I did get a single crash after playing civ 5 for a few hours. I will have to keep playing to see if this one is a keeper. What did you guys want benchmarks in? I can get 50-60 fps in Batman: Arkham City on high settings, The Witcher 2 gets about 25 on the lowest settings.

 

crash or just a power down? two different things. also, my hdmi dock apparently shipped this weekend so i will have it monday or tuesday i guess

 

Good to hear the new one is better, so tempted to get one...so tempted

So how does the Witcher look on low settings?

 

I got this message "whea_uncorrectable_error" and it shut down. The last one did that a few times too.
BestBuy didn't have the dock or controller, but they have it on display. Stupid store.

Crysis 2 is getting about 40-50 fps now. I have everything on the "lowest" settings ("high") and DX11 and detail textures enabled. It was getting 15-20 fps until I changed the texture filtering to high performance in the nvidia control panel. Enabled FXAA too. Looks pretty good. The graphics chip keeps throttling like crazy though, it's hitting around 90 degrees and the back of the tablet is about 60 This causes it to hit 15-20 fps for 3-4 seconds every 15 seconds or so.

Deus Ex HR is working pretty smooth so far. I'll try putting the witcher 2 back on and lowering the texture settings in the nvidia control panel, it was too slow to play before.

 

So I noticed that alot of people have mentioned that the Edge gets pretty hot. Would it be too hot to play for about an hour while in bed (with the controller attachment of course). Also, is the fan noise loud enough to wake someone sleeping or is it it pretty quiet under load? I like the idea of being able to lay in bed playing BF3 but I'm sure my wife would complain if the fan noise is too loud.

Also, for the guys who got it from Best Buy, did you get it in store or online? Both of the online links still say preorder.....

 

not too hot with controller dock, you'll be fine. fan runs high but wouldn't stop someone from sleeping, but headphones or earbuds would be helpful for quiet gaming.

 

I got it online, but in Canada bestbuy's website says it's in stock... on the other hand, no mention of the 64 or 256 model on ours.

 

Thanks. I keep trying to take myself out of getting this but it's just so dam cool lol.

 

Yeah, I was considering a surface pro; windows tablets are good for a lot of things besides gaming. This is an easy tax write off for me, so I don't really mind the expense. I honestly don't think I will ever pay the $250 for the controller, though. I have lots of xbox 360 controllers. All I have to do is prop it up somehow...
Come to think of it, both Razer xbox controllers I bought have really bad analog sticks, they stop working accurately after a year or two. I'm tempted to duct-tape my razer hydra to the tablet as a joke, though.

 

I have a Surface Pro and if I do get the Edge, it would only be used for gaming. I have a very nice gaming pc at home but I rarely have time to game on it since I have small children. I like the idea of being able to play full pc games at odd areas of the house such as the bathroom or the play room. I've been so tempted to order now but I've been hoping that someone releases a bundle that includes the controller and extended battery since those are pretty much required IMO.

 

Best Buy just updated my ordered status to "backordered" with no estimated ship date. Should I cancel my order and try my luck with some place else or is the Razer Edge going to be backordered everywhere?

 

Only place I could find in Canada was best buy, but a few of the local best buy stores had them in stock... Maybe try calling them directly, I don't know why it's available here and not in the US??

 

Hmmm so mine just crashed again, but I also realized it's using the integrated graphics in civ5 for some reason. I forced it to use the Nvidia one now. If it crashes again I'm taking it back...

 

Like a BSOD? Or did Civ5 just crash?

 

BSOD, the same one as before. It just did that twice in an hour before I switched the GPU on explicitly for Civ_5_tablet.exe (or whatever) in the Nvidia control panel. Hopefully it was just the Intel drivers causing that particular error all along. Usually their stuff is pretty stable though. The first tablet did shut down a lot more (no BSOD, it just reset itself) so I still think that one was worse for whatever reason.
-edit-
well, it worked without crashing for a few hours now. Will have to keep testing.

 

Did any of you go with a protection plan for your Edge? Is SquareTrade a viable solution?

 

Trying to update the intel video driver now, looks like you need to grab the zip and do the 'have disk' thing since they haven't "validated" it on the edge. Really stupid imo.
Also installing Defense Grid now, supposidly it has touch controls. You can grab it from Steam or the intel store. I wonder how many other unique touchscreen games are in the intel store, meaning ones that aren't in the standard Windows store. Btw I tried the witcher 2 again, but can't get the framerate to stay above 30 without turning everything off, and I don't see any reason to play it like that. Arkham City gets 60 fps with everything turned up all the way. I am going to try some other games soon, let me know if you have any suggestions or requests...


-edit-
haha omg don't install the intel driver, now my screen is upside down and the touchscreen controls aren't.

 

Your tablet sounds REALLY messed up. Are you sure it's not hardware issues?

I really hope I don't have issues like this when mine ships at the end of the month.

 

playing sim city, crisis 3, tomb raider, bioshock infinite, transformers fall of cybertron, civ 5, assassins creed 3, resident evil 5, street fighter 4, all with no problems. dock works very well, but frustrated I will have to buy a second ac adapter for it. also wish it had an Ethernet port, bought one for $20 (usb/Ethernet cable) and works fine. I know I said I'd do videos, just haven't had the time (spend what little I have actually playing this thing); also really need to find a tripod or something since I can't really show the device one-handed.

 

far cry 3 runs well, as does BLUESTACKS, meaning I can use my android apps on the thing (plenty of touchscreen games)