Update 9/12/14 - I continue to be impressed with the Razer Blade. It's been used pretty heavily over the last few days and it's been working beautifully. The display is impressive. I wasn't sure about getting a 14 inch screen thinking it would be too small, but it's so crisp and clear and the resolution so high that it seems much larger.
I also wanted to tell you that unlike most computers you get these days, the Razer came with NO crapware, scamware, spam or other garbage installed on it! I was enormously pleased with that and it is a definite plus for Razer.
I had some qualms about buying the Razer Blade, not because of the tiny number of poor reviews, though. I immediately discounted most of those because they seemed to be written either by people who had an axe to grind, or people who didn't seem to know how to change settings, or other trivial reasons. No, I was put off by the price. This is NOT a cheap laptop. Unless you have a very specific set of needs as I do, you will not be spending your money wisely. You can get a perfectly adequate laptop for a fraction of the cost. But that being said, if you are a gamer, need the fastest laptop you can get your hands on for some heavy duty number crunching, video processing or other intensive task, this computer is definitely something you should be looking at.
This is not an in depth review. I've only had the Blade for a few days and the most stress it's been under has been running Skyrim, so I haven't yet come close to pushing it to its limits. I won't go into the specifications either. You can read those on the information page here at Amazon or at Razer's website. I am just going to talk about the computer.
It is surprisingly small and relatively light for the horsepower under the hood. It's about the same thickness as my new MacBook Pro, but it does weight a bit more. As for build quality, it is excellent. Fit and finish is superb. Everything is tight, sleek, well built and reasonably well designed. I'm not thrilled with the connector that goes to the power brick. It is, frankly, massive, a far cry from the sleek magnetic connector on the Macbook. The brick itself is surprisingly small and slim, far smaller than I'm used to seeing on most laptops.
External connection options are limited to 3 USB 3 ports and an HDMI connector, and that's it. I would have liked to have one or two additional USB ports because I use external hard drives, pointing devices, etc. Plus this thing is eventually going to be connected to my amateur radio equipment, and that is going to use two of the three ports all by itself. An SD card reader for importing video/photos would have been nice too. That can be dealt with by the use of an external adapter, but even Apple includes one these days.
Keyboard looks good, and the feel of the keys is decent, but not as good as the Macbook. Extremely short strokes on the keys and it takes getting used to.
The HD display is superb. I've never seen one as crisp and crystal clear on a laptop before. It is far, far superior to Macbook Pro. And I have no idea what one reviewer was complaining about when ranting about the small size of text. Totally wrong. Text is not too small to read, does not require magnification or zooming to read it. I don't know what their problem was. Possibly they had the settings messed up. The display is absolutely stunning.
It's also a touch screen and I'm still trying to get used to the fact I can use the display like a mouse or a tablet. I suppose it's nice to have, but I don't want to smear up the screen and I find it more convenient to just use the touchpad or a mouse.
Touchpad works about as well as any I've ever used. It's sensitive, very responsive, no problems at all. The only thing I don't like is that when I'm typing the sides of my thumbs will sometimes hit the pad causing the cursor to move where I don't want it.
Sound quality has been surprisingly good. The audio has been crisp, clear, with surprising depth and richness for such small speakers.
The video is simply stunning. I've been playing Skyrim with the video quality maxed out, and I've never seen anything quite so good on any of my computers. The combination of the HD screen and the Nvidia graphics card in this machine works beautifully.
It is breathtakingly fast, at least when compared to the MSI it's replacing. But with it's SSD, the Core i7 processor and Nvidia graphics it damn well should be. I'm not used to having a Windows machine booting this fast. It takes all of 10 seconds to go from complete shut down to ready to run when I hit the power button.
All in all, my opinion of the Blade is that it is a fantastic computer and well worth the money if you need this kind of speed and graphics.
Drawbacks? Sure there are some. I'm not fond of the keyboard, as I mentioned earlier. Oh, it works well and feels reasonable, but with the very short keystrokes, I wouldn't want to type on it for extended periods of time.
I'm not sure about the utility of the touch screen. I think I'd have rather saved a few bucks on the price and given up the touch screen. I doubt if I'll ever use it.
A couple of reviewers commented on the amount of heat it produces. I haven't had it reach the point of becoming uncomfortably warm, but it definitely does produce a significant amount of heat.
All in all, I'm enjoying the Blade enormously. If anything pops up up or I have other observations, I'll alter this review at that time.
| Standing screen display size | 14 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 3200 x 1800 Pixels |
| Processor | 2.2 GHz Core_i7_4702HQ |
| RAM | 8 GB DDR3L SDRAM |
| Memory Speed | 1600 MHz |
| Hard Drive | 512 GB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Nvida GeForce 870M |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 2000 MB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11a |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 3 |
