New Razer Blade & Razer Blade Pro

i know the razer blade doesnt have an ethernet port but what about the razer blade pro? i looked in the tech spec and i can't find it, did they really not put one?

 

I ordered the Pro 256 as well, 1-2 weeks also.

 

razer blade pro has the RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet Port

Razer Blade Pro: Extreme Performance Gaming Laptop - Razer United States

 

ah i'm so dumb, i was looking in the additional feature list

and while we're waiting on heating reviews, could anyone tell me what option i have for a gaming laptop that doesn't over heat like crazy while gaming for 4-5hours+

 

Asus G series is good, as are alienware 17 and 18. Anything with a big fan and thick chassis. Although razer seem to have proven they have found a way to do it in a thin laptop. but Even they admit the area above the keyboard will get HOT, they are calling it isolated heating or something. But whether that bothers you is your call

 

Please take temperature measurements for CPU and GPU (HWMonitor works great) during a 3DMark test and also during a high stress game like BF3 or Dirt 3 if possible. Thanks.

 

Yeah I would also really appreciate this, as that is probably the primary concern for me here, second being the screen potentially

 

shogun 2 as well, its similarly demanding as bf3

 

Please take temperature measurements for CPU and GPU (HWMonitor works great) during furmark + prime 95 test..... or just loop 3dmark for terminal gaming temperature, I don't expect any room for overclocking but it would be nice to know that the machine can run 3dmark stress test at reasonable (maximum) temperature

 

^ If you can run Open Hardware Monitor, you can see the graph of the temperatures plotted over time (time scale adjustable). Run stress test until the temperature levels out, then stop the test, let the graph show the cooling to normal temperatures, and post a screenshot of the graph for us. TIA.

 

Just now got around to finally get to play BF3 for 5 minutes. Sorry I'm in the process of moving so wife isn't giving me much game time... BF3 at ultra textures and everything else at medium runs at 60 FPS or higher. Only played for 5 minutes on the night level near the beginning of the game, sorry its not much info at this point. Will get more games installed and stuff as soon as I can. Fans only kicked on after about 3 minutes into playing, did not notice any throttling in the game (no dip in FPS performance). When the fans kicked on they were definitely audible but no worse than the Blade R2. The thing is mousefart quiet when using it just as a laptop for internet surfing, movies, email... like a 13" macbook pro that plays games very, VERY well. trackpad and buttons are fantastic. super build quality there. Also think the keys are a more matte less glossy kind than the R2, have a feeling that fingerprint grease or wear will be as bad. Still wiping my Blade down like a boss.

 

using a samsung 15" leather sleeve for it, fits like a glove. $39 best buy

 

Can you do a furmark test and report to us the highest temp it goes, and whether there are any throttling going on?

Thanks!

 

Thanks John. Under full load are the fans so loud that they drown out the game audio? Do you have to turn up the volume or can you still hear everything clearly?

 

My primary concerns are heat and noise as well. No worse than blade R2 doesn't give me any context. I suspect no worse means about the same?

 

got this e-mail from razer a few days ago:

Salutations Gamer,

In both the Blade and Blade Pro the battery life has been extended, each have about 20% more life over the previous models.
We have also switched to a new fan type and improved cooling to lower the fan noise.

Hope that helps.

would be really nice to see a full review.

 

Agreed. I'm not going to buy until I see enough reviews to get some sort of consensus about it. For instance I've seen the alienware 14 reviews sway wildly with some saying it's hot and loud and others saying it stays cool and the noise is no more than a quiet rush of air without any annoying loudness.

I went and read one blade r2 review and they said the fans would "wake a light sleeper" which is unacceptable. Perhaps we expect too much of a chassis this small sporting a 75W GPU?

EDIT: corrected myself, 765M is 75W TDP not 60W.

 

i guess it all depends on the new haswell cpu. we have seen that due to nvidia optimus and ivy-bridge, running such machines for light work allows a lot of battery time and an overall cool operation. the problems start when you are running intensive load on a laptop with such a thin form-factor. air-cooling has its limits and at some points those devices get pretty hot and then they have either to throttle down on cpu or gpu. as long as cpu and gpu is getting to hot, there will always be some limitations.

i dont know of any pre-haswell i7 quad core powered laptop which didnt face those problems, at least not when packed in such a small form factor. look at the asus zenbook prime ux51vz, the dell xps 15 or any other of those ultrabook type of laptops.
if you want a thin laptop which is this powerful you have to accept that there will at least be fan noise under high load. the question is now if there is a bigger difference with the new haswell-cpu, powered with up to 47 watts. if this cpu gets as hot as the ivy-bridge, there will be noise and after the noise there will be trottling, otherwise the device goes up in flames

i am currently waiting for a solid review of the razer blade pro and the gigabyte P35K which will be available around august.

 

Its not the "expecting too much", it is the providing too much bit from them that makes us "expect even more", as we have unlimited desires we are hard to satisfy

though from what people say about the AW 14.... i guess the they do have some quality controlling issue on their manufacturing line in China, perhaps they have 2 separate contract factory back there that causes such margin of manufacturing error

I bet that since Razer is not such a big company it will only occupy 5-10 production lines within a factory that has 30-40 product lines, making the margin of error much smaller than the AW's international production line..... Thus most of us are unlikely to receive a badly assembled product

 

But from the perspective of gaming it's all about the GPU. The GPU in the blade is going to get hot much faster and more often than the cpu ever will. Couple that with the fact that the GPU has a higher tdp. The CPU doesn't mean much here during a 5 hour gaming session which is what this laptop is for, being a gaming laptop and all.

 

That is, we are all waiting for 3dmark/furmark stress review..... i mean it won't surprise me if the unit fails NBC's prime+furmark test but it will be very comforting if we see a below 90C under furmark stress at equilibirum temperature, anything below the 90s will keep me happy whilst surface temperature under 50 will be nice too, I'm only suggesting the good enoughs here, not the "I expect at this premium price" thing, we just have to realize that it is getting close to the limits of how "cooling with fans and copper" can do at best, and yes, having a proper MXM rig and dissembling it many times makes me believe that if the blade 14 runs just normally it will be a significant achievement on heat dissipating efficiency, especially given so little room for airflow

 

CPU drives the GPU, it can get quite toasty if not cooled properly. Heat is the biggest concern to me, period. The screen too. I don't want to pay $2000 for a laptop that has an average or crappy screen.

 

Have not played with the volume levels as it was 130am and didn't want to wake the kiddos. Suffice to say the fans did not drown out the speakers. I don't have a means of measuring decibels so sorry I can't be more precise than to say the fans are quieter than the blade r2. ID say they are about as loud as an MBA under heavy load, maybe that helps. The PSU is rated for 150watts vs 120watts with my blade r2.

The screen is sharp and has nice colors. I also think its plenty bright even if its not an ips display. However it doesn't have good black levels at all so poor contrast. The edge pro has better blacks. For that matter the blade 2 does as well. ID say I like it more than my old alien ware 17 display BC it doesn't have a glossy screen covered by plastic or glass. The new alien ware matte IPS displays will probably blow this one out of the water. The newest future mark benchmark fails every time I try to load it. Will install 3dmark11 and 06 Instead.

If the LCD screen is the most important feature for you you will want to look at alienware at this point. It is the only average thing about this notebook I can find at this point. But it is by no means terrible.

 

Do you guys know what shipping company Razer uses to deliver the notebook?

 

Hi John,

did you keep track of every step of your order up to the delivery? Would you be able to know what order statuses it has to go through?

I went through Order Submitted > Order in Process already. I'm assuming the next one would be Order Shipped? I'm curious as how you were able to know the detail that it was in the car to your house already =P

 

I knew mine would be likely to ship since they announced at e3 the first batch of the razer blades were going out this weekend. I emailed razer to verify and they confirmed it. by the time I got my fedex tracking order Friday morning it was already on the delivery truck on the way to my house

on the lcd screen, I would say you just need to find the "sweet spot" in terms of brightness (have mine turned down to 50percent) and viewing angle. once you have it its really quite nice. very sharp actually.

 

Any chance of a CPU stress test would be good also. Prime or Intel XTU would be good. Thanks! But only if it's easy for you. I know most people don't care about CPU temps.

 

Thanks for the initial review johnnobots, but myself and everyone else. We are dying to see load/idle GPU and CPU temps.

Someone on youtube apparently has the Razer Blade, and states that during load the temps are 60*c on CPU and 69*c on GPU. That's when playing Crysis 2 on extreme settings. I don't know if it's reliable though

 

Actually you will stress the system more if you run at a lower resolution and detail otherwise either the CPU is waiting for the GPU or GPU waiting for the CPU. Lower FPS usually equates to lower temperatures. I would run 1600x900 BF3 @ high 64 player multiplayer. Or run the Dirt 3 benchmark at 1600x900 high or ultra because Dirt 3 is a very well optimized game that balances workload very well and makes use of every last ounce of computing power.

 

I see, very nice. So I'm assuming you pre-ordered yours as soon as it went up? I'm roughly 9 days behind then.

I'm a bit curious since when I try to check the availability of the Pro 256 on the store, it says it's in stock. Yet I have a 1-2 week wait, not quite sure there. Lol.

Thanks!

 

3 minutes into stress test and fans kick in at an audible level at 85 degrees. blade is on my bare legs and is warmer on the bottom but not uncomfortably so. the bottom back middle gets the hottest as does the top of the laptop above the keyboard. bottom sides of the laptop stay comfortable so I can keep the fans fully open for cooling and keyboard and palmrest are mild as well. stress test is over, just ran for 5 minutes (intel stress test) and 85 was the max cpu temp reached.

 

John I might have misunderstood your flickr photos, but did you have both the Blade Pro and the new 14' Blade? Or was that the older 17' Blade?

 

CPU or GPU? If it was Prime 95 cpu then those temps are pretty good.

EDIT: Just saw your update. Those temps are great.

 

So those temps are running prime 95 to stress-test the CPU? What about GPU temps john?

 

I've got my eye on the Razer Blade 14 inch, I live in the Netherlands and have a contact in the US who can ship it to me for a small price.

Coming from an Alienware M14x R2 this thing is perfect, it doesnt matter how crisp your screen is if it gets crap on it easily which is the case with the glossy M14x screen then resolutions and whatnot dont matter much.

Im about to sell my M14x and then order the Razer, but still curious about the temperatures because my M14x has been overheating so much that ive had mutliple repairs for the past year I've owned it.

 

ok almost done installing games, will head home and try them out later.

tomb raider, dirt 3, bioshock infinite, crysis 3, bf3, sim city 5, skyrim, gta 4, and far cry for starters. only have the 256gb ssd so can't overload here.

can't wait to buy titanfall for the pc...

 

Awesome I'm looking forward to the results, it'll be the deciding factor for me.

Out of curiousity, how long did it exactly take for you from order placed to received at adress regarding the new 14 blade?


Also like everyone has been asking for those temperatures are really important, i'm also buying a cooler or atleast a pad for the laptop for extended use at home.

 

I'm more worried about gpu stress as the tdp for the 765M is 75W which is far greater than the i7. Stressing both simultaneously will be interesting as well, though games tend to put a great amount of stress on the gpu and nominal stress on the cpu. Running through 3DMark 11 on my Sammy Gamer 7 I tend to hear the CPU fan kick up only during the physics tests, but as we all know games tackle both simultaneously.

 

Just got back home from hospital visitation, will run 3dmark tests soon and get temps.

 

That's mad commitment.

 

funny thing, keyboard lights aren't turning on... i turned them all the way down then powered off the laptop a few hours ago. synapse shows the kb brightness bar going up and down as i hit the fn10 and 11 keys. hope my lights didn't go out permanently....may try to just reinstall synapse as a quick fix.

3dMark11 scored a 4042. forgot to run temp monitor. will run that again later. gotta go run outside. still can't get keyboard lights to come back on... frustrated about that.

 

So sorry to hear that. Sounds like Razer still has poor quality control. Bad omen for the rest of us :-(

 

the alienware m14 scored a 4136, and i was running a few background apps, not to mention the driver is pretty old.... may be able to tie the m14, but not gonna cry over it being 100 points slower when its this much thinner and lighter (and just plain better looking). Now if only I can get the lights back on this thing. Grrr.

not bad quality control, just a lemon in the first batch. my blade r1 and r2 were both solid and worked perfectly. my edge pro did have graphics card issues but they swapped it out with a perfectly working unit in just 2 days.

that higher alienware score was with 16gb of ram by the way so don't think razer has a throttled down gpu vs aliewnware's. makes me happy

 

Guys, is it possible to add another drive to the new Blade Pro?

I have modded my Blade-R2 and have an eSata 256Gb for my OS and a second drive of 512Gb for my other things. Now I have that it is also possible for the new Razer Pro. So if anyone has the new Blade Pro, can you tell me? Thanks in advance!

 

I don't want to disturb you but could you take pictures of the Razer Blade 14 inch power adapter? Thanks for listening. I'm very curious how exactly small it actually looks like.

 

the power adapter is identical to the blade r1 adapter except its 150 watts. just as thin and light.

 

16 vs 8 GB ram isn't going to change 3DMark score unless it's faster ram. 96 pts in the realm of margin of error for a number of reasons though. We're talking 2-3% decrease.. not really worth mentioning could be due to a number of factors.

 

I as well am ready to purchase a 512GB Blade - just waiting for the similar idea of the fan noise/temps.. I hope the screen is okay, I'm completely fine with the res (coming from a previous 14x R2), it's just the viewing angles seem to be something that people are bringing up. Can't really find any other laptop that can compete with the 14" variant of the Blade.. I hope things turn out well as I'm anxiously awaiting to make the jump to my first laptop! My only question is that from what I understand, the Razer Store claims a 14-day return/refund policy on systems, but with the shipping time and all of that.. wouldn't that mean I could possibly never be given the chance to claim a refund if I am not happy?

 

You have the new Alienware M14 as well? If it's the old one with the 660 then the razer 3dmark11 performance is really dissapointing.

 

I purchased a 512 14" Blade. Waiting for it to ship. Now, I need to use this in a business setting. Anyone have leads on a good skin for the lid to cover that tacky logo?