Only slightly better than last- year's. Razer’s 2. 01. 4 Blade Pro seems to be caught between two hardware generations. While its less- professional cousin, the 1. Blade, benefits from an enormous bump in graphics horsepower and display resolution this year, the 1. Blade Pro looks much the same as it did in 2. Razer abided by the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it†axiom here, and I can’t fault them: The Blade Pro was a beautiful, sleek, and capable machine in 2. The Blade Pro ships with an Nvidia Ge. Force GTX 8. 60. M that’s slightly faster than last year’s 7. . but it has the horsepower of a much larger gaming laptop.Well done, Razer. The new Razer Blade powered by Razer Chroma gives you access. The Thunderbolt™ 3 technology in the new Razer Blade brings Thunderbolt. Razer Blade (2012) Review. unique secondary LCD screen that does double duty as an in-game dashboard and gaming trackpad. The $2,499 second-gen Razer Blade retains. Razer outfitted the Blade with a matte 17.3-inch, full. . the improved Razer Blade is a better gaming laptop in an impressively thin form. Razer Blade - fall 2012 review. 17.3 inches: System weight. . In light of the new 14-inch Razer Blade, the 17-inch version of the Razer Blade. there's a lot to love about Razer's new 17-inch Razer Blade Pro gaming laptop. It's. The Razer Blade Pro has a 17.3-inch. ![]() M, but not spectacularly so. Nvidia has crammed some new game- related features into the 8. M series though: Battery Boost and Shadow. Play. Battery Boost allows the computer to dynamically adjust the power draw of the GPU to keep games at a steady 3. Shadow. Play leans into the You. Tube, share- everything obsession of modern players by automatically capturing footage in the background without a performance hit. The Razer Blade pro features a large 1. Also under the hood: an Intel i. HQ processor (the same as last year), 1. ![]() GB of DDR3/1. 60. GB solid- state drive (our review unit was outfitted with a 2. GB SSD). There aren’t any other options for more capacious onboard storage, so digital hoarders beware. Three USB 3. 0 ports are on the left side of the machine, along with HDMI, a combo headphone/microphone port, and a gigabit ethernet port. While it is thinner and lighter than competing 17-inch gaming notebooks, the Blade Pro is. Razer’s machine earned a Laptop. The Blade Pro’s battery hung on for a respectable 3 hours and 18 minutes. . Razer Blade Pro 17 inch (Blade Pro Series). T3 The Razer Blade Pro is a great gaming laptop. 17.3': This large display. Razer Blade Pro 17 Inch Gaming Laptop 256GB with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M graphics-Free Windows 10 Upgrade 3.8 out of 5 stars 13. The. 17.3 inches Max Screen Resolution 1920 x 1080 pixels Processor. ![]() If you prefer to go wireless, the Blade Pro sports an 8. Wi- Fi adapter and Bluetooth 4. All the Blade Pro's I/O ports are on the left side, so righties will need to route the mouse cable around the back of the display.Â. So what does all that mean for practical, day- to- day use? Perfectly acceptable performance that won’t take your breath away, but that stacks up fine against the competition on most counts. Razer’s machine earned a Laptop World. Bench 9 score of 1. A Dell XPS 1. 5 with an Intel Core i. HQ and an Nvidia Ge. Force GT 7. 50. M video processor. But as you can see in the chart below, it lagged behind both the 2. Alienware 1. 7 ($2. Digital Storm Krypton ($2. The Razer Pro outperformed our reference system, a Dell XPS 1. World. Bench 9 benchmark suite. But it trailed the the Alienware 1. Digital Storm Krypton gaming laptops.Â. The Blade Pro’s gaming performance won’t blow your mind, either, but it does exceed the 6. The Blade Pro delivered Bio. Shock Infinite at 7. But Bio. Shock has been around for a while, so there isn't a lot of headroom to accommodate future AAA titles that will demand more resources. The Alienware 1. 7 and Krypton both run Nvidia’s top- shelf Ge. Force GTX 8. 80. M, and each of those machines can play Bio. Shock at more than 1. The Razer Pro delivered Bio. Shock Infinite at a healthy frame rate, but Nvidia's Ge. Force GTX 8. 80. M helped its bigger, heavier components outperform it. The Blade Pro’s battery hung on for a respectable 3 hours and 1. That’s 2. 0 minutes longer than the Alienware 1. Intel’s newer Core i. Q CPU (Razer picked Intel’s Core i. HQ), but six minutes short of the Krypton (Digital Storm uses an Intel Core i. HQ). All the major gaming laptop manufacturers have hit the same battery wall—2. As with most gaming laptops, you won't want to stray far from an AC outlet while using the Razer Pro.Â. So the Blade Pro’s performance is at the high end laptop scale, but it’s far from the top of the heap. Powerful gaming laptops are no longer uncommon. A few manufacturers, Alienware among them, once dominated this market, but now there are many, many players in this space. But in their quest for power, many of these companies seem to have forgotten the reason for buying a laptop in the first place: Road trips! Take the Alienware 1. That beast weighs more than nine pounds. Add its power supply and you’re schlepping 1. That’s enough to put a strain on the strongest of computer bags, not to mention your shoulder. The Krypton is slightly lighter than the Alienware, but it ends up weighing about the same as that machine when you take its power brick into account. The Blade Pro is impressively thin and light for its size. The Blade Pro weighs in at just 6. And where its two competitors are both nearly two inches thick, Razer’s machine is a svelte 0. Those measurements put the Razer Pro in the same class as Apple’s Mac. Book Pro line, with similar attention paid to aesthetics. The Blade Pro’s black aluminum case, however, shows every single fingerprint. I left a bevy of them just putting the computer in my bag. Razer provides a surprisingly small power supply for the Blade Pro, which helps keep its total carry weight to a manageable 7. Like most laptops, the Blade Pro’s keyboard uses modified scissor switches, although Razer designed these in- house. The keyboard is not too bad to type on, though the keys have very little travel. The Blade Pro also features N- key rollover, an essential, and now fairly standard feature for gaming keyboards that enables you to hold down as many keys as you want without overloading the computer with input data. The keyboard is also fully backlit, although your only color choice is Razer’s eye- searing brand of green. And then there’s Switch. Blade. The Switch. Blade. The Switch. Blade is the feature that sets the Blade Pro apart from the smaller, lighter Blade. It’s essentially a low- resolution, touchscreen display embedded to the right of the keyboard, supplemented by 1. LCD buttons. The screen can display just about anything, and you use Razer’s software to map context- sensitive commands to the 1. You can play a game on the primary display, for instance, and watch a You. Tube video, browse Twitter, or chat with your Twitch viewers using the smaller display. It’s a very cool concept, but the compromises Razer had to make to build a device that’s both a touchpad and a display culminate in an underwhelming experience. The resolution—8. Images look disappointingly fuzzy. And unlike a genuine touchscreen, you can’t use the display as a trackpad while Switch. Blade is active (you can use it to control apps displayed on the trackpad, but not the apps displayed on the primary LCD). You must plug in a mouse if you want to take advantage of the Switch. Blade’s dual- screen potential. Switch. Blade is a better display than it is a trackpad.Â. Actually, I’d recommend using mouse anyway. The secondary display exhibits considerably more friction than a normal trackpad. It’s usable, but it’s not exactly pleasant. Your fingers drag across the surface, making it difficult to navigate around the screen with any speed or precision. Switch. Blade isn’t a bad concept, but it’s not as revolutionary as it appears when someone sees it over your shoulder. I’m not convinced compromising trackpad usability for to gain a second display is a worthwhile tradeoff. The Blade Pro is a moderately powerful machine designed for the average user, versus the hardcore crowd. While I love a laptop that can run games on the highest settings without a stutter, “normal†gaming laptops are portable in name only. The Blade Pro isn’t as fast as those machines, but it’s a whole lot easier on my back when I need to hit the road. It’s fast enough, and it’s beautiful: Strangers will compliment your choice in hardware, as opposed to staring with pity at the horrific monstrosity you’ve somehow dragged into your lap. Here’s hoping Razer gives the 2.
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