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Whether or Not to Purchase: Razer Blade Gaming Laptop

By VJ
Razer Blade Gaming laptop

Worldwide gaming systems provider, Razer has come up with the new edition of its popular gaming laptop, Razer Blade. The laptop is thin and extremely powerful. The technical specifications are as follows:

Processor 3rd Gen Intel Core i7 (2.2GHz-3.2 GHz)
RAM 8 GB dual-channel DDR3 (1600 MHz)
Storage 500 GB 7200 rpm SATA & 64 GB SATA III Solid State Drive for faster data transfer
Display 17.3 inch Full HD 1920x1080 px resolution
Graphics Intel GMA HD (mobile mode) and NVidia GeForce GTX 660 M with 2 GB GDDR5 video RAM
Operating System Windows 8 64 bit or Windows 7 HP 64 bit
Dimensions Width 42.7 cm
Height 27.7 cm
Thickness 2.24 cm
Weight 2.99 kg
Other features Razer Switchblade UI
Anti-ghosting keyboard
HD Webcam (2MP)
Digital 7.1 surround sound support (through HDMI)
Three USB 3.0 ports
Kensington lock
Bluetooth 4.0
Gigabit Ethernet port

These hardware specs make Razer Blade one of the most feature-packed gaming laptops in the industry today. However, when it comes to pricing, where does Razer Blade stand?

The Pricing


In the US market, Razer Blade now retails for 2499.99 dollars. That is a whopping amount of money, of course. With some really cool ultrabooks and tablets that come with amazing fast hardware at less than half the price, is it really justified to ask for such high price?

We looked through the prices of some of the popular gaming laptops in the market today. Here they are:

Alienware M17x: $1699.99
Toshiba Quosmio X870: $1400
MSI GT70: $2000
Asus G75VW: $1399.99
Falcon Northwest DRX: $3061
Origin Eon17-S: $1590

As you can see, except for the Falcon Northwest DRX, all others are fall much below Razer Blade. In terms of technical specifications, you cannot go wrong with any of these laptops.

The Features


The design of this new edition of Razer Blade is commendable. The specialty of the laptop is a multi-touch LCD panel beside the keyboard, in place of a regular laptop track pad. This LCD panel uses Razer Switchblade user interface that provides you with buttons giving important information about the game you are playing.

LCD screen on Razer Blade

With this LCD track pad, gamers can now enjoy browsing and social media connections while the game is being played on the main screen.

The default OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, while you have the option to upgrade to Windows 8. The laptop comes with a number of apps prebuilt, including Facebook, Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, etc., and some game-specific apps.

The Performance


There is no question about lag on this Razer product. One of the major requirements of all gaming laptops is the presence of a fast processor that compensates for a slower graphics card or a higher end graphics card compensating for a lower end processor. In Razer Blade, both the processor and the graphics card are on the higher end of the spectrum.

Also, with RAM of 8 gigs and dedicated graphics memory of 2 GB, it is not an overstatement to say the performance is stellar.

Razer itself has shown us graphs of the laptops’s performance over a given ‘baseline’; the baseline probably is Razer’s first version of the Blade. According to Razer, Blade performs 2 times faster on Diablo 3, 1.7 times faster in Battlefield 3, and it gives a 3D Mark Vantage score of 1.8 times the given baseline.

Data transfer rates on Razer Blade will be much faster, thanks to the presence of 3 USB 3.0 ports on the side.

However, the one thing they could improve on was the battery life. It is expected to give around 3 hours of backup. A larger battery would be against Razer’s design strategy for a ‘thin’ gaming laptop. Also, I don’t believe gamers would be compelled to work the laptop on battery. One thing to note is your processor will work at its lower clock rate while working on battery.

Intel TurboBoost technology that increases the speed of the processor in real time while demanding applications are running turns processor slower to 2.8 GHz in Blade’s case, while the laptop is on battery. This is a technique to save power. However, on a gaming laptop, this will decrease the speed.

Conclusion


Based on hardware features, Razer Blade is at the high end of gaming laptops in the market today. Now to the important question: Is it worth to buy this laptop? You can purchase this one if you have the budget, and it will be a very good purchase indeed.

Razer Blade’s secondary display is going to help you a lot in serious gaming. This is one of the reasons why we believe this laptop is worth the money you pay for it.
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