Back in the day a Toshiba 5200 would have set you back north of $5200. To be fair that dough got you a super-fast 386/20 and a huge 2 MEGABYTES of RAM...
If you go through the literature for almost any notebook, you will find they almost never refer to them as laptops, but as notebooks. This is because most notebooks (especially gaming-oriented ones) are not meant to be used on the lap due to heat output. They put the vents there because its the only way for them to push that much heat out of a chassis this skinny.
Except heat rises, and it has no where to go sitting on a desk. The hot air will come out on all four corners very slowly, instead of quickly out the back. Additionally, the hot air will creep over to that cold air intake since they are 3 inches apart.
There's a reason why Apple and virtually any other premium laptop designers put vents on the back, because that's the most logical choice.
But the outakes are in the back. Those in the bottom are air intakes, both of them. Its 2 fans, 2 intakes, 2 outtakes. The required air flow to remove the heat that those parts output requires does not allow for small intakes at the side, like the macbook pro.
Which laptop do you have that pushes air out the bottom? It's always out the side usually and you get 1 side that is extra hot, usually the left to accommodate right handed mouse users.
Old "laptops" were big things. Literally, lap-top computers. When the small, ultra-thin 15.6"-screen 1.5"-thick models started coming out, they were given the different, sexier category name of "notebooks" -- the same as ultrabooks are doing now.
I wonder what's next. Sheets? Pages? Brochures, god forbid?
You're actually not, "lap"tops have carried health warnings related to that type of use for many years for good reasons. You also risk blocking vents on virtually any soft surface no matter how high-performance the computer is (even netbooks).
M.2 can support or use either PCI-e or SATA. This uses SATA III/6. Kinda like having a mSATA (Mini PCI-e) slot that can support WLAN-cards and SATA mSATA-SSDs. M.2 can also be used for non SSD-devices.
I can (only partly) agree with more RAM but lack of Thunderbold will not make the laptop obsolete. The only reason thunderbold has even survived this long is Intel's backing. It'll see the same fate as firewire.
nah the only reason its survived this long is because of Apple. However, its still the only way to hook a device straight up to the PCI Bus, and it's damn fast.
firewire did not die. Liek many superior technologies it failed to garner much support with consumers, but was embraced by pros. We use firewire daily in broadcast, and only gave up Beta a few years back. I just ewasted our last beta decks in 2012. Thunderbolt is Intel IP, so it won't have the $1 a port licensing barrier that Apple imposed on firewire. Thunderbolt will probably have better traction with consumers since most of them aren't buying midtower machines anymore. It's a natural fit for high speed connectivity and laptops, NUCs and NASes. Though most companies are making DAS or NAS products, I've not seen any that bridge the two connection types in one box.
I would love to hear about a gaming use-case where you need more than 8GB of RAM. 16GB isn't necessary unless you're running a bunch of virtual machines, something which the blade isn't designed for.
I hardly think this will become obsolete even in the next couple of years...
Not everyone will buy this for gaming. There's definitely demand for a powerful quad cire ultrabook. Look at the 15" rMBP: the $2600 model has 16GB of memory by default, and the new Blade is basically a Windows version of that with a much more powerful graphics card.
So they aim at 1600x900 gaming? Guess that's what you get when you just do off the self builds. No DisplayPort? That's a big mistake, most use external monitors and want to use these as desktop replacements.
That's what I assumed initially, but then I saw that they put an 860M in their 17" model with a 1080p display. The way they designed the two laptops seems to be under the assumption that you're going to be gaming at the native resolutions, which in the case of the 14" Blade seems absolutely absurd.
To me it would've made a lot more sense to put an 860M in the 14" and 870M in the 17". I think the benefits of Maxwell in the smaller lower TDP form factor would far outweigh the performance disadvantages compared to an 870M. It would still be perfectly capable of gaming at 900p, neither would be capable of gaming at 1800p. For newer titles some big sacrifices would have to be made, either frame rate or quality settings, neither of which sounds like a compelling experience... to me at least.
Nvidia drivers/gpu do scaling just fine, so it's obviously not meant to run at native res. GPU might be fine for 1080 gaming, 4x scaling is probably what people will use though. Switching the gpus around from the 17 to the 14 would have made a lot more sense.
... I'm not sure you really got what I was talking about.
The reason it seems like Razor is implying that the user should be gaming at the native res of the displays, and if not the native res then at least a higher res on the 14" model than the 17", is because of the GPU SKUs they included in each laptop relative to their native resolutions. 1080p is paired with 860M, 1800p paired with 870M. It has nothing to do with Nvidia driver scaling (whatever it is you meant by that, I have no idea). If they intended users to game at 900p, like both you and I have suggested (and which makes a whole lot more sense to me), why would they put the more powerful GPU in the 14" model?
"GPU might be fine for 1080 gaming, 4x scaling is probably what people will use though."
I'm assuming you're referring to the 870M? ...actually I don't know, but I'll just role with that. The reason I suggested 900p was because it's a clean quarter resolution of 1800p, not because the 870M wouldn't be able to run games at higher resolutions. I'm sure it probably could run a lot of games just fine at 1080p, but that would lead to artifacting as a result of the displays native resolution. I guess some people don't mind this, but I do, and I'd imagine a lot of people who would be in the market for a more elegant solution like a Razer Blade would probably mind too.
4x scaling means 1600x900. As I implied at the top of this thread. In effect they are not urging or encouraging users to drive a higher res then the old Blade has. Gaming at that seems to be the only reasonable decision users can do on the Blade 14. They hardly imply native res. 870M would probably do 1080 gaming on the 17-inch Blade Pro just fine. 860M is weaker. So it would be better of doing 1600x900 outputted to 3200x1800 by the driver. That was only brought up to point out that they probably should switch. To match respective model better than today.
The design choices doesn't seem to have been made at the same time when regarding these two models. But I don't know if the 860M is the Kepler or Maxwell part for that matter. I didn't register that they actually had a model with the 860M part before the dragon squirrel wrote though.
Honestly, I'd prefer the 760m Maxwell in the 14-inch Razer Blade even at the same price. It could've been thinner with less focus on the heat characteristics and maybe even broken into the upper 3 lb range.
I worry. The 765M was near the limits of what the Blade 14 could keep cool and not have the fans sound like a hair dryer. It was actually the quietest under load of the thin-and-light notebooks. I hope that does not change.
I want a razer blade light... similar to the macbook air, running an intel i5 and maybe some low-end graphics priced around 1200$. While I love razer laptops, I need something for school that's smaller and even lighter and thinner to carry around in my bookbag that will last for hours. I love mac's aesthetic but also want windows.
Well, the screen has the resolution the previous iteration of this design lacked... but has it improved on the lousy viewing angles and colour quality? If they have, I may have finally found my next laptop.
It's an IPS panel. So at least viewing angles should be MUCH better than the 1st gen. And apparently brightness is up to 400 nits! So you can game in bright sunlight for some reason... :P
"which is an IGZO panel rather than the pentile screen seen on the Lenovo"
Is this completely unrelated or am I missing something here? PenTile is the name of a subpixel arrangement and IGZO is a display tech utilizing IGZO semiconductors for constructing display panels.
You're right about IGZO being a display tech. However, the high res Lenovo laptops are notorious for having pentile displays (rgbw) on the Yoga 2 Pro and possibly also on the Carbon X1.
Same here. It's like an overclocked 680M so its performance is close to that of stock 780M. Fitted in a laptop barely bigger (about 1 cm wider and deeper) than my Sony S13 and even 0.5 cm thinner. Compared to Sony, they did remove the optical and HDD drives and the RAM slot, and the Sony cooling design (or lack of) does suck, but still.. The cooling should be somewhat revolutionary for this to work as advertised (I'd expect no significant heat issues, no super noisy fans and no throttling during normal gaming loads - Cinebench and Furmark running in parallel notwithstanding).
There's a notebookcheck.com test in german. It gets quite hot with Cinebench and Furmark running simultaneously, but apparently no problems during normal gaming, other than the area above the keyboard being fairly hot and the CPU and GPU operating closer to their upper temperature limits.
I figure I will run games on mine in 1600x900 (quartered) resolution without any trouble. using 3200x1800 for games would probably require turning down the settings a lot. I'll still appreciate the high resolution for image editing and for running software like Cakewalk Sonar or Solidworks etc.
On a side note, this will most likely be my next laptop. I'm only waiting for the first reviews to come in to make sure there aren't any major heat or noise issues. It still shocks me that most of these high-end gaming notebook manufacturers haven't figured out the art of simplistic design and clean lines. Companies like MSI, Gigabyte and Alienware just make gaudy designs. If I'm paying north of $1,500 for a machine, I damn well want it to look good as well as have good performance.
Looks like a pretty nice machine, although I'm disappointed that a website like Anandtech has completely ignored the Clevo W230ST. I know they only review machines they are sent, but they could at least mention this machine in one of their articles as being something to look at for a small, ridiculously powerful laptop.
It's a little thicker and heavier, but supports the 47W TDP cpus, 2x standard laptop DIMMs, a 2.5" drive, 2x mSata drives, wired gigabit ethernet, nVidia 765m, (and SD card reader) and still has all the modular panels and removable battery that laptops should have. It's made out of high grade plastic instead of aluminum and doesn't look as powerful as it is (which is a good thing in my opinion, the Razer Blade is just crying out for attention and looks like a direct rip-off of a macbook pro, i.e. its going to be a tempting target for thieves). When it gets its yearly update, I don't doubt it will be rocking at least the same GPU as this newly refreshed Razer. On a side note, I really like the screen the new Razer Blade has, sounds like Razer learned their lesson about cheaping out on the screen.
Sorry for the mini-rant, I just get annoyed when all the tech sites drool over the Razer Blade and at best mention the W230ST in passing.
I suppose Razer didn't send them another after the (totally accurate) panning of the display on the last model...?
This time around, I didn't wait for a new review and just ordered one. After all, last year's model has tested rather well aside from the display. So I don't see much risk with one of Sharp's IGZO displays fixing the one big issue.
I'm still waiting for mine to come: I'm 2 days away from the 4 weeks mark (they say on their website "ships in 3-4 weeks"
Without a Display Port out (as other gaming laptops have), how will we get G-SYNC to work with this laptop?! That seems like a stupid move on such a high end machine with a GPU that supports G-SYNC (unless Razer knows something we don't.... perhaps nVidia might open up G-SYNC to work on HDMI out soon?)
here we go with the "Apple Tax comments again. oh,whoops, it just looks like a Mac. So what is the stupendous price tag for? A touch screen that will be all gummy after a week?
Any word on release date and/or when we can get a review? I'm not even sure if they sent AT a review sample. It's April and I'm getting the itch to see how it performs.
Its available as a pre-order since late March or so. After two weeks of trying to get past the orwellian billing system they use (Digital River), I finally managed to place an order on April 6th.
I will post here when they actually ship it. So far, I just got one email from them about it being on "back order" with instructions on how to cancel my order in case I run out of patience ^^
I see a few reviews floating around although not from the best sites. Engadget and Cnet both have reviews up for Blade but they're not nearly that in-depth in terms of gaming peformance, thermals, throttling, screen etc. The one consistent downside I'm seeing is only a 4.5 hr battery runtime as compared to the previous blade's 6 hours. Reading the notebook review forums, however, it seems that some owners are getting closer to 6 in light usage. I would really love AT to put the blade through the wringer to confirm/refute some of these performance numbers.
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r3loaded - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Any plans to ever come to Europe? Also, what's the battery life like?JoshHo - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Wow, this could be good.willis936 - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
I seriously hope any laptop that starts at over $2k is good.Jon Tseng - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
Tsk you're spoiledBack in the day a Toshiba 5200 would have set you back north of $5200. To be fair that dough got you a super-fast 386/20 and a huge 2 MEGABYTES of RAM...
http://www.toshiba-europe.com/bv/computers/product...
But if the price of a high end laptop has fallen from $5000 to $2000 (excluding the impact of inflation that sounds bargainous to me!
PS And the IBM PS2 Model 70-486 used to set you back more than $10k on release. But that's another story entirely...
squirrelboy - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Why do manufacturers keep placing the air intakes and/or hot components exactly where your legs are when you have the LAPtop on your LAP?e36Jeff - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
If you go through the literature for almost any notebook, you will find they almost never refer to them as laptops, but as notebooks. This is because most notebooks (especially gaming-oriented ones) are not meant to be used on the lap due to heat output. They put the vents there because its the only way for them to push that much heat out of a chassis this skinny.jasonelmore - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Except heat rises, and it has no where to go sitting on a desk. The hot air will come out on all four corners very slowly, instead of quickly out the back. Additionally, the hot air will creep over to that cold air intake since they are 3 inches apart.There's a reason why Apple and virtually any other premium laptop designers put vents on the back, because that's the most logical choice.
DryAir - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
But the outakes are in the back. Those in the bottom are air intakes, both of them. Its 2 fans, 2 intakes, 2 outtakes. The required air flow to remove the heat that those parts output requires does not allow for small intakes at the side, like the macbook pro.Makes sense, honestly.
blzd - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
Which laptop do you have that pushes air out the bottom? It's always out the side usually and you get 1 side that is extra hot, usually the left to accommodate right handed mouse users.mkozakewich - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Old "laptops" were big things. Literally, lap-top computers. When the small, ultra-thin 15.6"-screen 1.5"-thick models started coming out, they were given the different, sexier category name of "notebooks" -- the same as ultrabooks are doing now.I wonder what's next. Sheets? Pages? Brochures, god forbid?
theqat - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
You're actually not, "lap"tops have carried health warnings related to that type of use for many years for good reasons. You also risk blocking vents on virtually any soft surface no matter how high-performance the computer is (even netbooks).Lapdesks are the superior solution.
jasonelmore - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
I wonder what Bus the M.2 SSD's will be on? Hopefully not Pci 1.0 lol.Penti - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
SATA, just look at their specs (website). So SATA III/6Gbps.Connoisseur - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Isn't it the SATA Express interface? Should be a lot faster than SATA III.Penti - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
M.2 can support or use either PCI-e or SATA. This uses SATA III/6. Kinda like having a mSATA (Mini PCI-e) slot that can support WLAN-cards and SATA mSATA-SSDs. M.2 can also be used for non SSD-devices.programcsharp - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Needs Thunderbolt and at least 16 GB RAM. With that, I'd spring for the $3k version in a heartbeat.Without, it's hard to justify buying a brand new laptop that will be obsolete next year.
dishayu - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
I can (only partly) agree with more RAM but lack of Thunderbold will not make the laptop obsolete. The only reason thunderbold has even survived this long is Intel's backing. It'll see the same fate as firewire.jasonelmore - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
nah the only reason its survived this long is because of Apple. However, its still the only way to hook a device straight up to the PCI Bus, and it's damn fast.CalaverasGrande - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
firewire did not die. Liek many superior technologies it failed to garner much support with consumers, but was embraced by pros. We use firewire daily in broadcast, and only gave up Beta a few years back. I just ewasted our last beta decks in 2012.Thunderbolt is Intel IP, so it won't have the $1 a port licensing barrier that Apple imposed on firewire.
Thunderbolt will probably have better traction with consumers since most of them aren't buying midtower machines anymore. It's a natural fit for high speed connectivity and laptops, NUCs and NASes. Though most companies are making DAS or NAS products, I've not seen any that bridge the two connection types in one box.
Connoisseur - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
I would love to hear about a gaming use-case where you need more than 8GB of RAM. 16GB isn't necessary unless you're running a bunch of virtual machines, something which the blade isn't designed for.I hardly think this will become obsolete even in the next couple of years...
madmilk - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Not everyone will buy this for gaming. There's definitely demand for a powerful quad cire ultrabook. Look at the 15" rMBP: the $2600 model has 16GB of memory by default, and the new Blade is basically a Windows version of that with a much more powerful graphics card.Penti - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
So they aim at 1600x900 gaming? Guess that's what you get when you just do off the self builds. No DisplayPort? That's a big mistake, most use external monitors and want to use these as desktop replacements.dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
That's what I assumed initially, but then I saw that they put an 860M in their 17" model with a 1080p display. The way they designed the two laptops seems to be under the assumption that you're going to be gaming at the native resolutions, which in the case of the 14" Blade seems absolutely absurd.To me it would've made a lot more sense to put an 860M in the 14" and 870M in the 17". I think the benefits of Maxwell in the smaller lower TDP form factor would far outweigh the performance disadvantages compared to an 870M. It would still be perfectly capable of gaming at 900p, neither would be capable of gaming at 1800p. For newer titles some big sacrifices would have to be made, either frame rate or quality settings, neither of which sounds like a compelling experience... to me at least.
Penti - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Nvidia drivers/gpu do scaling just fine, so it's obviously not meant to run at native res. GPU might be fine for 1080 gaming, 4x scaling is probably what people will use though. Switching the gpus around from the 17 to the 14 would have made a lot more sense.dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
... I'm not sure you really got what I was talking about.The reason it seems like Razor is implying that the user should be gaming at the native res of the displays, and if not the native res then at least a higher res on the 14" model than the 17", is because of the GPU SKUs they included in each laptop relative to their native resolutions. 1080p is paired with 860M, 1800p paired with 870M. It has nothing to do with Nvidia driver scaling (whatever it is you meant by that, I have no idea). If they intended users to game at 900p, like both you and I have suggested (and which makes a whole lot more sense to me), why would they put the more powerful GPU in the 14" model?
"GPU might be fine for 1080 gaming, 4x scaling is probably what people will use though."
I'm assuming you're referring to the 870M? ...actually I don't know, but I'll just role with that. The reason I suggested 900p was because it's a clean quarter resolution of 1800p, not because the 870M wouldn't be able to run games at higher resolutions. I'm sure it probably could run a lot of games just fine at 1080p, but that would lead to artifacting as a result of the displays native resolution. I guess some people don't mind this, but I do, and I'd imagine a lot of people who would be in the market for a more elegant solution like a Razer Blade would probably mind too.
Egg - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
I agree that the GPUs should probably be switched, as you said.I don't think that any of this implies running at native resolution, though. QHD isn't feasible.
Penti - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
4x scaling means 1600x900. As I implied at the top of this thread. In effect they are not urging or encouraging users to drive a higher res then the old Blade has. Gaming at that seems to be the only reasonable decision users can do on the Blade 14. They hardly imply native res. 870M would probably do 1080 gaming on the 17-inch Blade Pro just fine. 860M is weaker. So it would be better of doing 1600x900 outputted to 3200x1800 by the driver. That was only brought up to point out that they probably should switch. To match respective model better than today.The design choices doesn't seem to have been made at the same time when regarding these two models. But I don't know if the 860M is the Kepler or Maxwell part for that matter. I didn't register that they actually had a model with the 860M part before the dragon squirrel wrote though.
lmcd - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
Honestly, I'd prefer the 760m Maxwell in the 14-inch Razer Blade even at the same price. It could've been thinner with less focus on the heat characteristics and maybe even broken into the upper 3 lb range.Kevin G - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
I'll second the need for DisplayPort. It is great when paired with an MST hub to drive multiple monitors when you have them.Penti - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Or just a monitor at above 1920x1200.hfm - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
I worry. The 765M was near the limits of what the Blade 14 could keep cool and not have the fans sound like a hair dryer. It was actually the quietest under load of the thin-and-light notebooks. I hope that does not change.Gigaplex - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
The Maxwell cards have roughly twice the performance per watt.ArthurG - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
but the 14" blade carries a renamed GK104 Kepler...jasonelmore - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
it's not just a rebadge, its got some serious architecture improvements to push clocks 200 mhz with almost double the shaders.therok - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
I want a razer blade light... similar to the macbook air, running an intel i5 and maybe some low-end graphics priced around 1200$. While I love razer laptops, I need something for school that's smaller and even lighter and thinner to carry around in my bookbag that will last for hours. I love mac's aesthetic but also want windows.squirrelboy - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
there are plenty of ultrabooks out there...SleepyFE - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
Install Windows on a Mac. It's not ilegal.ImSpartacus - Wednesday, March 12, 2014 - link
It actually works pretty well. I'm typing this on a Win7 MBP13 from 2009.Nowadays, we have Ultrabooks with respectable integrated graphics.
Back then, Nvidia's 9400M IGP was a godsend and the MBP13 was the smallest 9400M laptop with the best battery life. Thank God for bootcamp.
evilspoons - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Well, the screen has the resolution the previous iteration of this design lacked... but has it improved on the lousy viewing angles and colour quality? If they have, I may have finally found my next laptop.Connoisseur - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
It's an IPS panel. So at least viewing angles should be MUCH better than the 1st gen. And apparently brightness is up to 400 nits! So you can game in bright sunlight for some reason... :Pdishayu - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
"which is an IGZO panel rather than the pentile screen seen on the Lenovo"Is this completely unrelated or am I missing something here? PenTile is the name of a subpixel arrangement and IGZO is a display tech utilizing IGZO semiconductors for constructing display panels.
TechGizmo - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
You're right about IGZO being a display tech. However, the high res Lenovo laptops are notorious for having pentile displays (rgbw) on the Yoga 2 Pro and possibly also on the Carbon X1.jasonelmore - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
I wonder if the display has a glossy surface. I sure hope so, it almost has to for the digitizer in the touch screen right?Chuck123 - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
The 870M is a 100W card. How can they make such a thing work on such a thin-and-light design without throttling?ijozic - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Same here. It's like an overclocked 680M so its performance is close to that of stock 780M. Fitted in a laptop barely bigger (about 1 cm wider and deeper) than my Sony S13 and even 0.5 cm thinner. Compared to Sony, they did remove the optical and HDD drives and the RAM slot, and the Sony cooling design (or lack of) does suck, but still.. The cooling should be somewhat revolutionary for this to work as advertised (I'd expect no significant heat issues, no super noisy fans and no throttling during normal gaming loads - Cinebench and Furmark running in parallel notwithstanding).n13L5 - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
There's a notebookcheck.com test in german. It gets quite hot with Cinebench and Furmark running simultaneously, but apparently no problems during normal gaming, other than the area above the keyboard being fairly hot and the CPU and GPU operating closer to their upper temperature limits.I figure I will run games on mine in 1600x900 (quartered) resolution without any trouble. using 3200x1800 for games would probably require turning down the settings a lot. I'll still appreciate the high resolution for image editing and for running software like Cakewalk Sonar or Solidworks etc.
Connoisseur - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
On a side note, this will most likely be my next laptop. I'm only waiting for the first reviews to come in to make sure there aren't any major heat or noise issues. It still shocks me that most of these high-end gaming notebook manufacturers haven't figured out the art of simplistic design and clean lines. Companies like MSI, Gigabyte and Alienware just make gaudy designs. If I'm paying north of $1,500 for a machine, I damn well want it to look good as well as have good performance.gamer1000k - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Looks like a pretty nice machine, although I'm disappointed that a website like Anandtech has completely ignored the Clevo W230ST. I know they only review machines they are sent, but they could at least mention this machine in one of their articles as being something to look at for a small, ridiculously powerful laptop.It's a little thicker and heavier, but supports the 47W TDP cpus, 2x standard laptop DIMMs, a 2.5" drive, 2x mSata drives, wired gigabit ethernet, nVidia 765m, (and SD card reader) and still has all the modular panels and removable battery that laptops should have. It's made out of high grade plastic instead of aluminum and doesn't look as powerful as it is (which is a good thing in my opinion, the Razer Blade is just crying out for attention and looks like a direct rip-off of a macbook pro, i.e. its going to be a tempting target for thieves). When it gets its yearly update, I don't doubt it will be rocking at least the same GPU as this newly refreshed Razer. On a side note, I really like the screen the new Razer Blade has, sounds like Razer learned their lesson about cheaping out on the screen.
Sorry for the mini-rant, I just get annoyed when all the tech sites drool over the Razer Blade and at best mention the W230ST in passing.
n13L5 - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
I suppose Razer didn't send them another after the (totally accurate) panning of the display on the last model...?This time around, I didn't wait for a new review and just ordered one. After all, last year's model has tested rather well aside from the display. So I don't see much risk with one of Sharp's IGZO displays fixing the one big issue.
I'm still waiting for mine to come: I'm 2 days away from the 4 weeks mark (they say on their website "ships in 3-4 weeks"
nightcabbage - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
Without a Display Port out (as other gaming laptops have), how will we get G-SYNC to work with this laptop?! That seems like a stupid move on such a high end machine with a GPU that supports G-SYNC (unless Razer knows something we don't.... perhaps nVidia might open up G-SYNC to work on HDMI out soon?)CalaverasGrande - Wednesday, March 19, 2014 - link
here we go with the "Apple Tax comments again.oh,whoops, it just looks like a Mac.
So what is the stupendous price tag for?
A touch screen that will be all gummy after a week?
nerd1 - Saturday, March 22, 2014 - link
One word: thermal.This sleek machine just won't be able to cool 140W of silicone well enough.
n13L5 - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
Search for the test on notebookcheck.com and eat your words ;-)Connoisseur - Friday, April 4, 2014 - link
Any word on release date and/or when we can get a review? I'm not even sure if they sent AT a review sample. It's April and I'm getting the itch to see how it performs.n13L5 - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
Its available as a pre-order since late March or so. After two weeks of trying to get past the orwellian billing system they use (Digital River), I finally managed to place an order on April 6th.I will post here when they actually ship it. So far, I just got one email from them about it being on "back order" with instructions on how to cancel my order in case I run out of patience ^^
Connoisseur - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
I see a few reviews floating around although not from the best sites. Engadget and Cnet both have reviews up for Blade but they're not nearly that in-depth in terms of gaming peformance, thermals, throttling, screen etc. The one consistent downside I'm seeing is only a 4.5 hr battery runtime as compared to the previous blade's 6 hours. Reading the notebook review forums, however, it seems that some owners are getting closer to 6 in light usage. I would really love AT to put the blade through the wringer to confirm/refute some of these performance numbers.