Razer Blade 14-Inch Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on July 2, 2013 1:00 PM ESTSystem and Futuremark Performance
Despite being remarkably slim, the Razer Blade 14-inch is afforded remarkable capacity for performance thanks to its well-designed cooling system. The result is that despite fitting squarely in Intel's ultrabook category, there's a tremendous amount of horsepower on tap. Razer benefits from advances in Intel's Haswell design by employing the 37W Core i7-4702HQ, a quad-core processor which moves the chipset on package. Meanwhile, they can leverage the increased parallelism of an NVIDIA GK106 (as opposed to GK107 in the last generation of Blades) without substantially higher thermals.
Just how fast is the Blade 14? Fast enough. The i7-4702HQ is able to meet the last generation i7-3630QM's performance without much issue, and ensures that CPU bottlenecks won't be much of an issue during gaming sessions.
The Razer Blade 14-inch isn't knocking it out of the park in 3DMark, but it doesn't need to. What's impressive is how close it is to the GeForce GTX 675MX; that chip is a full GK106 with 960 CUDA cores and a 256-bit wide memory bus, but the substantially higher clocks on the GTX 765M help make up the difference. What you're going to see as we move forward is that the 765M is actually hampered only by its 128-bit memory bus; shader power is largely present for this chip, and the 1600x900 panel resolution in the Blade 14-inch may actually be the sweet spot for performance.
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zach1 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Finally, I was waiting for a review for weeks. Can't wait to read it.bji - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Why don't you post *after* you've read the review so that you don't waste review comment space?xTRICKYxx - Thursday, July 4, 2013 - link
But then how could he be first? :Pzach1 - Monday, July 8, 2013 - link
So someone won't post "first" and then the following comments will then be like, why did you waste space writing that, and ruin the first page of the form, but you had to comment any way so I guess I failed.kedesh83 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
I've been looking at getting a gaming notebook due to me traveling a lot for my job, but this is just ridiculous. the Lenovo y500 has 2 graphics cards, a 1080p panel, and cost a grand.flyingpants1 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
That's right. And a few months ago, the Lenovo Y580 had a faster GTX660M and was available for as low as $799 from Newegg. A gaming notebook that can run BF3/Skyrim on high... for $799. It was never mentioned on Anandtech to my knowledge, and instead they had about 63 articles about the Razer 17" notebook for about 3x the price ($2499 or something like that), comparatively speaking, a luxury item.Most of the stuff Anandtech looks at is sent to them by mail, likely from the manufacturer themselves. Sorry to say it but that basically makes them a mouthpiece for others' corporate marketing budgets.
That being said, this thing looks pretty cool.
flyingpants1 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Forgot to mention, the Razer 17" notebook had nearly identical specs.kedesh83 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
guess it makes sense when your also a mouthpiece for the right/libertariansSamus - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
WTF!?TheQuestian - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
Haha!