Razer's Second-Generation Blade Notebook Review: Focusing On The Z

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
[citation][nom]Metroidam11[/nom]This is the start of next generation gaming laptops. Really looking forward to seeing the performance grow as processors become more efficient. Will never replace my desktop though.[/citation]

Yep haswell will really put this on the map...
 
[citation][nom]pcperson7[/nom]Yeah the blade is WAAAAAAAAAAY too overpriced for what you get.[/citation]
Like an aston martin is compared to a Skoda... If your comfortable with a 2" thick 10lb+ piece of plastic that will generally discolour and fall to bits and after the initial weeks of fun you will never see outside your home as you will need a crane company to lift it on to a pallet so you can take it around your mates house, you might as well buy a desktop? also you will need to buy a disguise when using it in public places, these costs all add up to make the razer cheap at the price...
 


There are far cheaper laptops that don't have a ridiculous 2" thickness nor a 10lb+ weight. Your extreme exaggerations do not help your argument.
 
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]There are far cheaper laptops that don't have a ridiculous 2" thickness nor a 10lb+ weight. Your extreme exaggerations do not help your argument.[/citation]
For Example?
 


Several pf the laptops mentioned in this thread make good examples and there are literally dozens more. The weight and thickness of this laptop are not at all special for its performance and all of those factored in make it's extravagant price seem extremely excessive. As was stated earlier, this laptop's pricing is based more on mere style and such than on what it presents to you in a practical way.

From a performance, size, and weight standing, this laptop is mediocre with a huge price tag. Not even it's battery saves it from that. One of the few possible good practical features would be the display, granted that's still debatable.
 
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Several pf the laptops mentioned in this thread make good examples and there are literally dozens more. The weight and thickness of this laptop are not at all special for its performance and all of those factored in make it's extravagant price seem extremely excessive. As was stated earlier, this laptop's pricing is based more on mere style and such than on what it presents to you in a practical way.From a performance, size, and weight standing, this laptop is mediocre with a huge price tag. Not even it's battery saves it from that. One of the few possible good practical features would be the display, granted that's still debatable.[/citation]


Name me one 17" laptop that is more powerful than the razer blade but is the same weight and battery power?
 
[citation][nom]Wask[/nom]Name me one 17" laptop that is more powerful than the razer blade but is the same weight and battery power?[/citation]

http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_customed&model_name=NP6370
Customized to comparable specs to the laptop in the article here, this one has similar size, weight, battery, and such with the same performance, all for about half the price. It can further be customized to be somewhat better at a still much lower price.

Similar situation here:
http://www.xoticpc.com/force-1756006-msi-1756-msi-ge70-barebones-p-5036.html?wconfigure=yes

And here:
http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np6370-clevo-w370et-p-4796.html?wconfigure=yes

A few more at somewhat higher prices, but still much cheaper than the laptop in this article:
http://www.xoticpc.com/msi-ge70-0nd213us-p-4983.html?wconfigure=yes

http://www.xoticpc.com/samsung-series-np700z7cs02us-preorder-p-5482.html?wconfigure=yes

I'll also add that most of these examples have much better battery life, among other advantages.
 
Clevo are very cheap looking but you defo get bang for your buck, the msi is down right ugly and twice the thickness i did fancy the samsung but it is under speced on the cpu and the gpu and not really a gaming laptop more a mac book pro competitor their gaming series versions are twice the thickness and use the 675 which is the old non 22nm chip which is a battery killer...
 
If you fully read this review it does come to the conclusion, that the blade is not an ordinary laptop in a nice dress, the cpu is special 35w that performs like a 45 watt the 660 is more like a 670 both top of the yield parts the attention to detail is in a league of its own. Having two screens on a laptop 1 for your game and 2 for your windows stuff for me is worth $400-500 easy how many times even on your desktop have you had to come out mid game to go to windows and the game crashes or the gfx mess up. all the above mentioned laptops don't give you the weight size of the power brick look at the comparison photo in the review this is valid if you really are going to carry your laptop about. 90% of the negative views on the comments are the people look at the cpu and gpu and price and think that could be a lot better. they are not seeing what the blade is about because its the first of its kind as they say the first true gaming 'laptop'...
 


The Samsung did not have inferior specs.

22nm is lower than any GPU available today. You've got your numbers mixed up.

You've proven my point in most of your post, this Razer is selling a style, not a good performance/size/ whatever.
 


35W performing like a 45W isn't really important here. It doesn't stop this laptop from having inferior battery performance to most of my suggestions.

The 660M (don't forget that M) improvement here is hardly noticeable. A 10% boost is not noticeable for the vast majority of people.

Several of my suggestions had the option of a second screen and it was a lot cheaper than your supposed price worth of it.

All of the laptops that I suggested have a similar weight and a different power brick doesn't matter in this.

I saw the blade for what it was. I simply don't care about that and made my point there, a point that you seem to have almost completely misunderstood the words of. Furthermore, the Blade isn't the first of its kind either. I don't even need to bring up other examples because it's literally a second generation product.
 
28nm sorry, The samsung has a GT650m not a GTX660m it isnt even enthusiast range and a i7 3615 again inferior . Second screen? i am on about the 4" screen No other laptop has that! 35 w that can perform like a 45w. what you think haswell is about? a 3lb power brick has no significance to a 10oz one? what planet are you living on? I think i disproved your points completely you just dont want to admit it.
 
oh, you keep going on about battery life, for one its a gaming laptop you are not going to get away from the fact you are going to have to take the power brick with you! The razer which actually can run games off the battery without throttling and 4hrs+ on normal settings isnt shabby considering virtually every other gaming laptop cannot run their gfx unit unthrottled without the power cord...
 


GT 650M GDDR5 is a GTX 660M- they're the same card, just with a somewhat different average GPU frequency range and occasionally also memory frequency.

No, a different power brick weight is not really important. I'm not going to lug it around unless it's in a bag, at which point the weight is nearly irrelevant since a few lb is nothing. You didn't disprove my points and I don't need to admit anything beyond what I have and are. My point this whole time was that the Razer is selling a style, not a good level of performance even for its weight and size. You even pretty much agreed to that yourself! Other than for its style, it has an extremely high price for what it does.

My mistake on what you meant about the screen, but that itself isn't particularly important nor is it worth much money. I admit that it may be very practical when used properly, but it's not an expensive component.
 


I never said that it was bad about battery life, only that some of my other suggestions had better battery life.

The article blatantly states that there is throttling from being off the battery. It's not very bad at all, probably not even noticeable, but it is throttling.
 
[citation][nom]Wask[/nom]hehe you buy your samsung mate i have no more time to be part of your deluded world...[/citation]

What delusions? I've explained everything quite clearly. There aren't any delusions, at least unless you find Nvidia to be delusional.

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/notebook-gpus/geforce-gtx-660m/specifications
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/notebook-gpus/geforce-gt-650m/specifications

In fact, the GT 650M can actually be faster than the GTX 660M. Don't tell me you've forgotten how misleading graphics card naming schemes are. The main difference is just that the GT 650M can support both DDR3 and GDDR5 whereas the GTX 660M requires GDDR5 memory according to its specifications.
 


The GPU comes out of turbo mode on battery and runs at stock clocks. If the CPU or GPU operated below normal frequencies, I would call that throttling. The Blade does not throttle on battery, it just backs off on overclocking the GPU. I respect the fact that you can pull the power on the Razer and still keep gaming.
 


That is the wrong side of a semantics argument. The Blade has a higher stock frequency, so it is in fact throttling based on the Blade's specifications. What you call it doesn't change what the official meaning and definitions are.
 


I respect your opinion on this, but I disagree.

Nvida has stock clocks for cards that pull a set amount of power and give off a set amount of heat. If there is spare power and thermal overhead, Nvidia allows for higher clocks via turbo mode. The more spare power and TDP you have, the higher the turbo clocks.

On battery power, the Blade needs to stay within 100 watts of power use, so it leaves the CPU running in turbo mode, but pulls the GPU out of turbo mode and falls back to stock Nvidia frequencies. Not the power saving low power Nvidia frequencies, but the full power stock frequencies.

Check the clocks on other gaming notebooks when you pull the power. You will see 60%+ cuts to clock rates in some machines that have 50% more battery capacity.

Yes, you are correct, the Blade cannot perform at the same level on battery power. It is very close though. Close enough to not let your friends down in a multi player game when someone kicks out the power cord. Trust me, I pulled the cord during boss fights while I wrote this review and it held up.
 


Going beyond Nvidia's own specifications is a factory overclock. The factory overclock is still considered stock settings for that card. It is merely not reference settings. You are mixing up your terminology 😉

You can have a different opinion if you want, but what I said is fact, not opinion. If you want to disagree with that, then fine, but that is official. At that point you're not disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with the people who made it that way.

Yes, many laptops can't power their hardware properly when the power cord is not plugged in. However, there are others that can, even others with better pricing. Sure, most of them are larger and a little heavier, but not all of them. There is no getting around the fact that the Razer's value for its price is mostly in its style, not its performance nor even its size and weight, at least there's no denying that if you look at the subject from a wide perspective objectively.
 
considering the people most likely to buy this are the kind that will want to manually change out internal parts either at the beginning or a few years down the line to make it more modern, I consider this a bust, especially at that price point.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom