Razer Blade (late 2012)
Razer’s Blade laptop is a fairly low-performance gaming machine wrapped in an impressively slim black aluminum chassis that looks and feels great. The well-designed, sturdy laptop weighs 6.6 pounds and measures just 0.88 inches thick, and the newest iteration — which we reviewed a couple of months ago — has made some significant improvements since the first model. The trackpad, which is located on the right side of the keyboard in lieu of a number pad, functions well except for mild issues with two-finger scrolling. The Switchblade UI — a set of ten customizable LCD keys and an LCD screen beneath the touchpad — is a cool concept, but remains little more than a glorified set of macro buttons until more games support it. The cramped keyboard is shallow and occasionally unresponsive, which is bad news unless you plan to carry a full-size USB keyboard around as a substitute. The 17.3-inch matte LCD screen and revamped speakers provide a reasonably good experience, but nothing exceptional.
On the performance side, the Razer Blade really lags behind thicker gaming laptop options. A 2.2GHz Core i7-3632QM processor, 8GB of RAM, and a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M with 2GB of memory may sound impressive, but these specs aren’t exactly the makings of a gaming powerhouse, and are disappointing in a laptop that costs $2,499. The slender machine can certainly still play games — you’ll be able to play Battlefield 3 at 1080p on low to medium settings and The Witcher 2, easily the most demanding game we tested, at 1600 x 900 with medium detail — but it will have a hard time keeping up with the newest titles on full settings. Gaming laptops aren’t future-proof — the processor and graphics cards can’t be upgraded, and in most cases you can’t add more RAM — and with that in mind, you probably don’t want to start out with a machine that’s already behind the curve. The Blade also runs fairly hot when gaming, and the fans can get a bit noisy when they’re running at full capacity.
RAZER'S BLADE DOESN'T QUITE CUT IT
The Blade has a 64GB SSD to speed up frequently-used processes, and a 500GB HDD to store your games. In our Verge Battery Test, during which the machine cycles through a number of popular websites and high-res images with the screen at 65 percent brightness, the Blade lasted 3 hours and 27 minutes — not bad for a gaming machine, but weak compared to most laptops. The Razer Blade is the only laptop in this roundup that doesn’t dial down its graphics performance when unplugged, which is useful for switching between outlets or going very short periods without power. However, in our tests the Blade only managed about 20 minutes of Battlefield 3 before warning us the battery was running low, so even though you can play games without being plugged in, you won’t be doing it for long.
THE VERDICT
The Razer Blade is a beautifully designed, durable laptop that’s surprisingly thin for a gaming machine. It’s much more portable than the vast majority of gaming laptops, but its poor battery life essentially negates the Blade’s advantage as the only laptop in this roundup that doesn’t throttle when unplugged. Also, its performance flounders in comparison to other gaming machines: we’d expect a $2,500 gaming laptop to be able to play virtually all of the latest games on full settings, but instead, Razer sacrificed performance for size and slapped on a pretty huge price tag. Ultimately, unless you’re absolutely in love with Razer’s aesthetic and the Blade’s thinness, any other machine in this roundup is a better option.
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