Razer to announce something on the 26th...

If they had stuck an A8 in there. or even an A6, at the 1024x600 res its running, it'd max many games, and be able to handle any game out there. Thats what they shouldve done.

 

A6 would have been perfectly fine. Although 1366x768 would be ideal only because there are some games that need minimum 768 height, like Sins of a Solar Empire that would probably actually work fine on the machine as is.

 

Yeah, but its a 7 inch screen... Unless you scale up text, you wouldn't be able to read webpages. I just pray they somehow stuffed a 525M in there. Haaa.

 

7-inch screen? ew. I thought it was at least 10.

 

They wanted to put an Intel Atom Z630 and GMA 600 in it from oaktrail for UMPCs, but that wont game well. The original prototype had those specs.

 

LOL. We're pounding on Razer when they haven't even announced what it is yet.

 

Nope. 7... And, its because we all know if it is a crappy Atom with IGP, no one will buy it who knows what it has inside. However, they showed it playing L4D2 at CES...

 

Since when a crappy 7" switchblade = PC gaming? Let that compete with the DS consoles.
Hopefully it's something else.

I got the same email from Razer FR with no other mentions.

 

I'm thinking its not the Switchblade. I don't see how a portable handheld device would help fight the war between "HOME" consoles and PCs.


Perhaps Razer is going to begin producing their own line of Notebooks/Desktops similar to that of Alienware? But then again ... how does that innovate?



Guess we will just have to wait and see ... ... ...

 

I would be ok if they came up with an M11x competitor at a cheaper price and with perhaps one of those LCD keyboards. M11x is horribly expensive for what it is. I know it's small form factor and such, but its size is nearly that of a 13" laptop and weighs more. But $1200+ for an 11.6" notebook? They can do better than that?

 

The specs aren't even horribly impressive. 540M? Hard to call that a "gaming" notebook.

 

Depends.
If its true that its the Switchblade, probably it will come with a 1200x600 screen, or maybe a 720p screen.
At that res, paired with a decent cpu (which i hope i ts not Atom, otherwise yes, pc gaming is dead) it should quite deliver a good performance.
Afaik GT540m should be suitable for 720p res.

 

Well, I was talking about the 540M in the M11x. But yeah, I can't see this thing having anything more powerful than a 540M.

I honestly can't see this machine ekeing out decent performance, and even if it does, there's still the fact that you're playing games on a tiny little screen.

 

I guess portability here is the key.
Eeepcs had quite a boom and often they are used for light gaming as well althought the small screen.
If they squeeze a good potential under the hood then I wouldn't mind having a good performer in 7" given the fact that Pc has virtually infinite gaming possibilities, including emulators and proper games.

Others have attempted and had success with something similar, like Pandora hand held, or eeepcs as I said.
Igp and embedded gpus leaped forward in these years where netbooks predominance was dictated by intel gma's.
Amd in particular made this possible with Llano and his performance is not bad at all, you can game on it without too much hassle.
Let's see what razer is cooking, but I hope for them that is something really good or at least not already "old" otherwise all this hype and campaign wouldn't make so much sense and they probably will end up not getting the money they want.
Atom is a no-no, this is a fact. On the contrary, newer Core i-u could provide decent performance at low price and power consumption.
At least they are proper CPUs afterall.

 

you'd be surprised at the power the m11x packs. It can plays games that a lot of other big systems have problems with, such as the witcher 2.

But back on topic: I really don't see how something like this would really appeal to PC gamers. I assume most people like to game on a PC due to the generally higher quality graphics and the ability to use a keyboard/mouse (as well as have a real operating system).
This doesn't really offer any of these, the keyboard is a gimmick and if it is using the atom the performance will be garbage. Also I don't understand how you could play PC games without an actual mouse. I've never been able to do anything with a touch pad, other than surfing the web, and I find that difficult as well.

 

I don't doubt the M11x is a good performer, but my point was the cost. I think $1200 for the R3 is a bit high. In any case a good competitor would be nice. I guess we have a couple more days to wait and see.

 

I agree. I would much rather see a competitive gaming 10"-12" rather than a terrible handheld idea.

 

I really think that a handheld with an A8-3500M would be beasty, the LCD-keyboard is a good idea, and the 1024x600 resolution is good for a 7 inch screen, and the A8 would max the majority of games at that res. (Barring certain games, you know which ones.)

 

Low, but not low enough. The TDP of the Z670 Atom is 3W. There is nothing anywhere close to that among all the other x86 architectures. The ULV Core-iX processors are at 17W. Llano is at 35W (AMD and Intel TDPs aren't directly comparable, but it doesn't matter when the difference is more than an order of magnitude). The only processor that is within a factor of two is the 5.9W Z-01 (Bobcat), but it's not at all obvious that a 1GHz Bobcat will be faster than a 1.7GHz Atom and of course you're stuck with the 80 stream processor GPU on the same die.

What Razer is trying to accomplish is truly mobile PC (i.e. Windows) gaming. Personally, I am not convinced this is a worthy goal, but given that it's what they're aiming at, they took the only possible approach. You cannot do it with Sandy Bridge or Llano -- they consume little power when idle, but try to game on them with the kind of battery found in 7" devices and you'll be lucky to get half an hour out the thing. If you want to use Windows, you need x86 rather than ARM and your only option is Atom.

 

It doesn't need to be 7" though. I think 7" is too damn small. 10" would be great, and at 10" you can fit even an AMD A6 and its IGP would be more than adequate. It's a 35W TDP, but so what, that can easily be managed.

 

If you can't do it right maybe it's not time to do it at all. This thing is going to be as or more expensive than a PSP/DS, and I really don't see it appealing to handheld or pc gamers.

Not to mention I'm sure the hard drive space will be very limited. Who wants a "portable gaming pc" that you can only fit 2-3 games on? That would force people to uninstall games constantly, which some people don't like to do.

 

The heat can be managed, the battery life cannot. How long would you be able to play games on it without being plugged in?

 

Well, the Asus K53TA in my sig, I can play Bad Company 2 at 720p using the IGP with a 56WHr battery for 1.5 hours at 25-35fps! And that is a pretty resource taxing game, CPU especially. I played some Deus Ex Human Revolution for an hour and could probably reach 2 hours in that game since it's not real taxing on CPU. Reduce resolution to 1024x600 and set CPU to peak at 1.5GHz (mine was at 2.0GHz) then you could probably get even more life.

 

Even if you could stuff a 6-cell battery into a 10" laptop, the most it would get you is 2 hours of gaming. There is no way they could stretch that to the 5-15 hours that mobile gaming systems typically have.

 

So play 2003 and earlier games for 5-10 hours or newer games for two hours. Which do you choose? Could probably get close to 3 hours depending on onboard options, more efficient backlight, etc. A 10" 1024x600 screen will consume considerably less power.

 

As I said, I personally don't see the point of this (I don't like PC games on screens smaller than 15"). However, I think there much more value in a laptop that can play games for 5-10 hours on battery than in merely a smaller version of a mainstream laptop.

 

People saying that a 35W TDP processor in a 7" system would be possible really need to get a health check. Half the damn thing would be made of cooling. A 540M is 35W too. It won't work on battery with those parts, there's no way round it, it's like trying to mine for gold by slamming your face into a cliff repeatedly.

As for who it would be marketed to, maybe they aren't trying to appeal to us? They could be trying to pull in the DS/PSP crowd who would probably find it a lot less odd than us since they have little experience with PC gaming (I don't mean to generalise but most console/handheld owners won't have dabbled in PC gaing much).

If it turns out not to be a handheld but something similar to Alienware then I think that would be a great idea. Although there is already a market for gaming laptops, the only major brand is Alienware. Yes there are clevo rebrands but they're comparitively unknown and less commercialised. Since Alienware are top dog at the moment, they are free to dictate their prices. If razer challenged that then we could see some better prices.

 

Umm, Maybe re-read the posts? The AMD "APU" is 35W which includes CPU and integrated GPU. We're not saying 35W in a 7" but a 10", and integrated GPU only no dedicated GPU.

 

Yes, I realise that the AMD llano system is 35W, however that's not what I was talking about.

Someone mentioned a SB CPU possibly with a 540M. Be it 7" or 10" you're still not going to be able to cool off something like that very effectively. I agree that a 10" with llano would be possible though, the integrated GPU might leave a little to be desired but you can't ask for much more in a 10" system which is presumably is meant to be fairly low cost.

 

Right. Just for giggles I ran my A6 Llano at 1024x768 playing Bad Company 2 on med-low detail with the IGP and it actually ran on a 32-player server at avg maybe 25-30 fps! So it would be feasible. Just curious what they have up their sleeve though. I just can't imagine a 7" housing anything that people would want to buy for gaming.

 

One more day and we will see what will revolutionize PC gaming. Tick Tock.

 

Obvious question about the Switchblade - what about the mouse? The image of the prototype doesn't seem to have any kind of mouse inherent. Touchpad gaming is pretty horrendous, so maybe they're doing an external mouse thing, but doesn't that cut back pretty badly on the portability of the thing? 7" gaming thingy = carry in a cargo pocket, play on the bus. 7" gaming thingy + external mouse = carry in a carrying case, play where you've got a table.

The feasibility of such a device working at all for most games is pretty low (unless it's on a cloud service like OnLive, and who's got that much mobile bandwidth?), but even if they can get it running a lot of games, there's only so much room for mobility in PC gaming unless you come up with a feasible mouse replacement. Who knows, maybe they hacked a Wii nunchuck to control the cursor...

 

Whatever it is, it better be impressive, because when you claim that you're going to revolutionize PC gaming, people tend to have high expectations.

 

I sense a big mistake here...and an angry Pc community (or one that lol's alot).

Afterall we don't need any Razer to tell us who we are or our origins.
Pc gaming was never dead and it will not be judging by the look of the releases.

 

I'm just getting deja vu from the Palm Foleo. I really hope this is better.

 

Foleo, Ngage, Panasonic Jungle? Asus n10j?
Everyone tried to make a good compromise between species, some of them even reached retail (ngage being a console/cellphone hybrid).

Panasonic Jungle was getting the same attention and similar specs to this Switchblade.
Problem is that Panasonic realized that an Atom and an intel igp wouldn't give "gaming" a chance and since tablets are overflowing the market (tegra 2 android ones as an example) they intelligently dropped the idea.

Look, in the near future windows will run even on Arm architecture. Nvidia still pushing out his tegra 2 CPU/gpu and Ka-el will be the first tablet/mobile CPU with 4 cores.
This should bring console like quality titles (and there are already alot of them on iPhone/iPad/Android) on your favorite sub-$300 tablet/netbook.

I really hope for them that they took into account all of this because either way it will be a big laugh.

Ps: I mentioned Asus n10j, it was a gaming netbook. 10", intel igp+dedicated geforce 9300m. Gpu performance was good for such a small machine (even cod4 was playable along other titles) but it never quite delivered because, guess what, that damn atom.
It was a CPU bottleneck fest,I'm pretty sure that the unit sold less than they expected,also it was retailing for $499 if Im not wrong.
Totally a mess of wrong hardware and decisions.

 

I loved my N10J. Only problem I had with it was the 1024x600 screen. There were several games that would have played well on it but required minimum 1024x768. So I eventually sold it. But for the time it was an awesome machine for me because my CPU overclocked to 2.1GHz from stock 1.6GHz I believe it was. But the CPU was definitely the bottleneck. The GPU was more than adequate and probably overpowered for that anemic Atom.

 

epic fail, their server crashed.

You build up all the hype and you can't even keep the site up.

 

and the announcment is?!

NOTHING

lol

 

razer blade ...."1st gaming laptop" ........ Razer Blade - The World's First True Gaming Laptop - YouTube

 

Ultrathin laptop, called the Razer Blade, GT 555, i7 2640, .88 inches, 17 inch display. 2800 bucks. Not that impressed.

 

its cool ... but will I buy it?

prolly not

 

LOL that is pathetic Razer.

The placement of the Razer UI is terrible. It's not even useful.

 

It has a great look but cost and hype is a let down for sure.

 

So it's basically a black macbook running PC with touchpad at the side and Razer stamped on it instead of an apple logo.

Way to hype it Razer

 

"... Despite being only 0.88-inches thick (thinner than another 17-incher we know...), the svelte number still packs a punch with a 2.8GHz Core i7 2640M CPU and GeForce GT 555M graphics replete with 2GB of GDDR5 video memory. "

Okay, why the dual core i7 2640m and not the quad 2630qm?
Second, GT555m with 2gb of ram? That means gimped 128bit bus.

Its better than the expected switchblade thing, without doubt, but unless it costs like $500 i dont see how it would redefine the gaming pc world.
I mean, cmon Razer, you got a whole world of professional gaming laptop manufacturers and all this fuss for a machine that is basically a gimped XPS L17.
Which btw is alot cheaper and with a better cpu (not sure about gpu, is the one with the full shaders unlocked?).

No thx, but applause for the try.

 

looks like an i7-2640 CPU, 8GB of Ram, an (lol, gaming) GT 555M GPU, all at under an inch thick, at almost 7 pounds...


EDIT: wonder what the cooling is like.

 

An overpriced mid range "gaming" laptop

The reason for the dual core i7 might be for battery life since they aim for portability but then again for a gaming thingy, I doubt that thing would last more than 3 hours.

 

Those keys make no sense. Are you supposed to move your hand all the way from WASD to the right side of the laptop? Or are you supposed to take your hand off the mouse? or worse, are they really expecting you to use a touchpad to play games?

 

What a let down. I thought it was going to be good. Apparently, I'd rather shell out that money for an m18x.