S&S Tech Review: Razer Blade Gaming Laptop

I've gotten a ton of time with the new Razer Blade gaming laptop, and I was pretty impressed by the power of the laptop.  There were a lot of things I loved about the laptop, and there were a few things I didn't like.  If you're looking for a good gaming laptop, and you've got the cash to drop, you may want to look into the Razer Blade gaming laptop.


Features and Design:
The first thing I noticed when I unboxed the system was how massive, yet sleek the system is.  It's a beautiful piece of hardware, and the massive screen impresses just as well.  The Blade is built into a chassis just 0.88 inches thick, weighing in at 6 pounds, 10 ounces, and an almost even 7.5 pounds when you add in the miniature power brick.  The system looks very similar to an all black Macbook Pro, especially when you close the lid.  When you open the lid, the first thing you notice is the trackpad next to the keyboard.  The small, 800 x 480 pixel color is a full multi-touch pad, with a ton of functionality.  I'm used to using the standard Macbook trackpad, so it took a lot of time to get used to having the pad on the right of the keyboard.  When you first start the laptop up, the keys populate with a default set of macros, which include Facebook, Twitter and Gmail keys. When you press the Twitter key, for example, your Twitter feed appears on the display built into the trackpad.  You can program other macros for the trackpad, for games like Battlefield 3, Team Fortress 2, and Counter Strike.  It's a nice feature to have, especially for the hardcore gamer.  The 17 inch screen is a beauty, and it'll definitely leave you in awe when you play some of the more visually proficient games.

Performance and Quality: 
The laptop and all of it's aesthetics are great to look at, but when you actually begin using the laptop is where things start to head in the wrong direction.  The first being the keyboard, it's not as responsive as I hoped it would be.  When you're gaming, you probably won't notice it much, but if you're blogging or typing up documents, I had a lot of issues with it.  The keyboard design is a little iffy as well, both the Delete and Backspace key are the same size, and since they're so close to one another, I found myself frequently pressing the wrong button.  The same with the arrow keys, the left and right keys are nicely sized, but the up and down keys are half the size.  It's an odd design choice that takes a lot of time to get used to.  The screen performance from the 17 inch LCD display is great, whether you're watching HD videos or playing HD games, the screen definitely impresses.  The audio is great as well, The included Dolby Home Theater v4 does the job just fine. Most people will be using the gaming laptop with headphones anyway, so the audio was never an issue for me.  The connectivity options are solid as well.

The Blade includes three USB 3.0 ports, a combo audio jack, a gigabit Ethernet connector and an HDMI video output port.  The CPU is an Intel Core i7 3632QM quad core mobile processor, with a base clock speed of 2.2GHz, but can push one core up to 3.2GHz using Intel's Turbo Boost technology.  The system has an initial base of 8 gigs of Ram, with a 500 GB, 7200 RPM Hitachi hard drive to handle all of your storage needs.  It would be nice to have a terabyte for the bigger games, but 500 gigs is still nice to have.  Hard drive performance is accelerated by the presence of a 64GB SSD, which greatly speeds up the hard drive's performance.  Game graphics chores are handled by an Nvidia GTX 660M mobile GPU, with 2GB of frame buffer.  The specs offer a bit of mixed bag.  Games like Minecraft run beautifully, while Far Cry 3 barely ran at medium settings.  Crysis 2 ran fine, but the sequel didn't fair to well.  Battery life is actually very impressive for a gaming laptop, the average lifespan of the battery is 4:51, which is not bad at all.

Pros:

• Beautiful Design
• Intuitive Trackpad
• Impressive Specs

Cons:

• The $2500 Price Tag
• Unresponsive Keyboard
• Runs Hot

Final Thoughts:
The Razer Blade is a great gaming laptop, it has one of the more sleeker designs out there, and it's probably the most aesthetically pleasing gaming laptop out there.  The game performance is solid, unless you want to play the most high end games around, that's where you're going to have performance issues.  If you got the cash to drop, I would easily recommend the Razer Blade.

S&S Rating: 8.5/10

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