Hands on Razer Blade // new Samsung 7 Series Gaming Laptop

Hey guys, was at CES today checking out some of the gaming stuff (which there wasn't too much going on).

Got to check out the Razer Blade. It is pretty cool, especially the "Switchblade" portion of it. The size was decent, and quite thin, but because of that, I am worried about the cooling though.

Will it be worth it for the price? Absolutely not.

Project FIONA was behind glass of course. It looks neat, but I don't think it would float my boat. I noticed it did win a CES Best in Show award though.

As a side note, I got to meet the CEO of Razer (Asian guy who is super serious in the Razer Blade promo videos lol), and Swifty, for those who know him, a famous WoW player.

The samsung 7 series gaming notebook was a bit better than the Blade I would say. At least this puppy had an AMD 6970M. It was definietly bulkier and not as sleek, but overall, it was pretty nice. Still, when I asked a rep what the suggested retail price would be she said that it is not set yet, but they are guessing at least $1,800 USD. -- Not as pricy as the blade, but still could be better.

The nVIDIA booth was pretty awesome too, but the best part there was the new Tegra proccessor. Quad Core tablets playing full HD games (hooked up to an HDTV), and phones capable of playing the GTA III anniversiary edition.

If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask.

 

was there anything related to diablo 3?

 

The Samsung gaming notebook also rocks a 3D display.

 

Offtopic : my iPhone 4 can play GTA 3 Anni. Edition smoothly

 

any chance you could get your hand on an ASUS G75? (i know, that might be too much)

 

This is a Consumer Electronics Show. Not a Gaming Convention.

 

My brothers iphone 3gs runs it smoothly. OP i guess didn't realize this. My Galaxy s 2 plays anything you throw at it seamlessly.


EDIT: woops double post. :/ sorry all.

 

there was a little rumor that blizzard was going to announce d3 through some company's show (A TON OF MONEY involved in this kind of move for sure), but they were false apparently..

 

They just don't do game announcements at CES.

 

I know, but even Bashiok needed to bash the rumors at twitter, so I was like, heck what are the chances?

 

That Samsung and its specs will become obsolete by the time it comes out. Lol.

 

Just getting back from Vegas today, with my wallet much lighter than it was when I got there lol.

Will upload some pics/videos tonight or tomorrow. Unfortunately I didn't get too many good shots. Was kinda rushed and with the LV convention centre being so massive, walking through a sea of 150,000 people, and having so much eye candy for a tech geek, it was pretty overwhelming lol.

 

Well, its been out on the marked for a long time here in Europe, im guessing its only now reaching US shores?

 

yup in april and they said it will get the GTX 660M instead or as another option?

 

Why in the world would anyone launch a new lineup without Ivy Bridge. And the more important question, who would buy a laptop coming out in Q2 that wasn't Ivy Bridge.

 

My understanding is that Ivy Bridge offers many advantages to ultraportables (better graphics performance, better energy-efficiency) but almost no noticeable improvement for desktop-replacement laptops, where the dedicated GPU is the performance bottleneck anyway.

 

yes, also their specifications are already official (just wiki it) and they are absolutely the same cards except for 0.1-0.2ghz better clock speeds and HD 4000, the rest is the same, cache and power consumption.

 

Aye. And other than marketing purpose, there really is no reason to put them as 3xxx since they hardly add anything to the table. But their appearance will make the old chips cheaper (or so i hope)

 

Scrolling through my photos, I realized that I did not take too many shots of the gaming stuff, unfortunately.

But here are a few shots of the two laptops I briefly mentioned:

Samsung 7 Gaming Notebook Specs:


- Again, nothing too exciting if you ask me. Why not wait for Ivy Bridge and the new series of GPUs?

Samsung 7 Keyboard:


- notice that little metal hinge thingie on the top right side? That's your graphics switch. (Between light, media, and gaming, or something like that). When you slide it to Gaming mode, a flashy video plays on the screen and the keyboard and Turbo button (in the middle of the speaker grill) light up. It was cool to see, but how annoying would it get to watch that 10sec video every time you switch to high performance mode?

Samsung 7 Screen:


- Pretty nice, but nothing out of the ordinary.


I didn't have my camera with me when I visited Razer, but I took some crappy and very short videos of the fiona and blade. Sorry I couldn't get anything more detailed.

Razer Fiona:
New Razer Fiona Gaming Tablet CES 2012 - YouTube

- It wasn't a "working model", just showed that start screen. I liked that Terraria was showcased

- The controllers on the side don't look too comfortable to hold, but then again, this is just a prototype.

Razer Blade:
New Razer Blade Gaming Notebook -- CES 2012 - YouTube

- They keyboard was very nice. I didn't think I would like the green backlit, but it was sweet in person. One thing though, is that they layout looks like CRAP. Look at those arrow keys lol, so squished.

- Again, being very thin is nice. It has very similar footprint to the macbook pro, but when you lift it, it is much heavier (in fact, i'm pretty sure my P150HM is lighter, lol). but I'd be worried about the cooling. Clevos and the ASUS G series have it right.

- I don't know why they chose to show Firefall on the notebook instead of a much more demanding game to show off its capabilities. Was not impressed with the game at all, on a side note.

- They were also showing off the new Razer Naga Hex -- really sick mouse. would be awesome for Diablo 3, except for people like myself that use a mouse in their left hand
Razer Naga Hex - Expert MOBA/Action-RPG Gaming Mouse - Razer | For Gamers. By Gamers.

- As for the switch blade portion of the Blade, It's pretty cool. However, I couldn't get it to work properly when testing the system out. The default screen is numpad for the buttons and touchpad for the screen, But any button I would press would load up youtube, and the screen would just show a list of youtube videos to watch. I guess you could watch guide videos or something while you game, but it seemed pretty useless. It would have been much better to allow you to check out different games to see the dynamic changes of the switchblade depending on the game, but they only had one game showing.

In the end, nowhere near worth the $3,000 pricetag.

--

I have a bunch of photos of new phones and crazy TVs (55inch OLED screen that is only 4mm thick!!) if anyone is intereted in seeing those I could post some.

Also uploading a 10min demo of Windows 8 from Microsoft that I could post here if interested.

 

They can't show demanding stuff on the notebook because its really underpowered, specially at such high res. I still don't really get the point of the switchblade keyboard thing. It's not like you can't map any keyboard button to a function in game, and an additonal screen so out of the way will only distract instead of actually do something.

 

what was the weight and dimensions of samsung?