Razer Blade (2014) Owner's Lounge

Pretty cool! I'll take it for the aesthetic look. I bet that added more like $30 to the final price, not $380. They'll surely sell more than 1000 units between both lines of laptops. Weren't last year's ports green too? I know the Edge had a green one.

 

where can i purchase that matte screen protector? does it lower the quality of the screen?

 

It connects via USB, and has its own audio processor, so the internal card is bypassed.

 

The sleves don't provide much protection. Knowing the screen was glass, I opted for using the Everki Atlas backpack. It goes for around $140 on Amazon. It is just plain awesome! I plan to post a review on it very soon.

 

I can only speak for the one I bought. It was as perfect fit, but was a little pricey ($25). Honestly I hated it and took it off in a few days.

While I hate a glossy screen, I hated having a screen protector on even more when it reduces the quality of the image. Also a 14" screen protector was very difficult to install compared to a small phone screen protector. I had several bubbles and was unable to remove them (I realize that is my fault not the screen protectors).

 

This is a tip I thought might be of use to some of you - I haven't seen this one here, although I admit I haven't read all 111 pages of this thread.

When I got my 2014 Razer, I noticed that Windows' drop-down menus appeared to be aligned oddly (not the text in the menus, the whole menu itself). After some experimentation, I discovered this was a side-effect of the fact that the Razer's touch-screen makes it a Tablet-PC - at least to Microsoft's way of thinking.

Apparently, when you use your fingers to drop down a menu, it is considered better default behavior to have the menu drop down to the left of where your finger is pointing rather than to the right - hence the Razer's (and apparently all "Tablet-PC's") default setting is opposite to what I was accustomed to on a non-touch screen laptop.

The good news is that this is a configurable option. Here is the setting's location:

Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Tablet PC Settings -> "Other" tab -> "Change where menus appear..."

Changing this setting from the default of "Right-handed" to "Left-handed" returned the drop-down behavior to what I had expected.

Sorry if all of you already know this - it took me a bit of time to figure out what was going on, and to finally locate the option to change it.

*edit*
exchanged "right" and "left" in explanation above - oops..

 

That's odd that I never noticed anything unusual about drop down menus, but that sounds like something I'd want to turn off as you suggest. I will check for it when I get home. Thanks!

*edit*
I see what you mean now. While I hadn't noticed it before, now that you pointed it out it would have driven me nuts!

 

Awesome, thanks! I stopped at 100mV on mine, I could go further but around 150 it started locking up. I honestly can't tell if it lowered the temps but they seem to be well into the safe zone. I also lowered the voltage for the GPU as well, not sure if that helped either.

 

This was bugging me but not enough to do the research . Thanks for the heads up!

 

How do you undervolt gpu/cpu,
is there a tutorial, and how much does it help with the heat?


thanks

 

You havent monitored temps to see how much lower they went? Would love to know your results.
Never thought of reducing the voltage of the GPU since it never topped 85c, what program do you use for that?

 

Hello! I wanted to share that the 13" Mac Book Pro sleeves/bags fit the 2014 Blade just fine, although a "snug" fit. You get the picture:







This is the Incase 13" Neoprene Pro Sleeve for MacBook Pro - Apple Store (U.S.)

 

Would be interested in how you lower GPU voltages as well.

 

That's the same one I used on both the 2013 and 2014 Razers.

 

Pretty sure you'll need to modify the vbios to adjust voltage of the gpu. Even though programs like afterburner or evga precision show options to adjust voltage, they won't have any affect. You would need to find someone like Prema to modify the vbios for you and flash via freedos or similar.

 

upon closer examination the tiamat is not designed for laptops/7.1. it requires multiple 3.5 jacks to work.
Come on Razer design a 7.1 headset that uses the laptop hdmi connection and/or usb for power (if the hdmi port itself can't power the headset..)

 

Anyone else notice some stuttering on game start-up? It's not the game engine per se, but the intro videos that play when a game starts up.

My desktop is set to 1920x1080 and I set my games to 1920x1080. I've seen a little stuttering in some games (Crysis), but it settles down after a few seconds. This is all while on AC power.

 

I have a USB Plantronics GameCom 780. Love it.

 

Hello Everyone!

Winterbox here, I live in Canada Vancouver B.C. and a few days ago I actually purchased the New Razer Blade 2014 at my local Microsoft store!

I could not believe that they carrier this beast! I waited patiently for my local NCIX retailer to stock up but lo and behold they were "delayed" in shipment.

So I almost gave up and tried to compromise by considering ultrabooks such as; Acer Aspire S7 (the 2013 and 2014 MODELS) as well as even the new Samsung series 9 ultrabook with the QHD+ display etc etc.

But as I walked around the Microsoft Store at metrotown B.C. I caught something strange at from the cornor of my eye. Without thinking I mutter an audible "what?" and I turned my body around to see the New Razer Blade 2014 256 GB model with the price tag of 2399.00 CAD. With tax this comes to 2686.88 CAD. but Microsoft was holding an Anniversary sale which discounted 100 dollars off the order! I immediately purchased the last one in stock and was the happiest man on earth for that day and for a while after. Total paid 2586.88CAD (I also purchased some other stuff so the grand total is a bit higher but anyways...)

This was an amazing experience as there are no notebooks like the razer blade out there. I was very picky since last year when I entered the notebook market in search of my perfect machine. To have all the qualifications met in my list of strict requirements I was glad to fork over my money to Microsoft/Razer.

I know that many have already contributed this type of rave that is about to in sue below but.... I need to let it out, I apologize beforehand; here we go...

My Razer Experience so far...

The Glass pane (edge to edge) is a beauty. I am used to glossy screens as MATTE tends to make me feel a bit iffy (colors not as vibrant as it can be, just like when I had a MATTE protector on my S2/Note 3 etc). My co-work who sits literally beside me owns the 2013 Razer Blade (I made him buy it with my sales pitch was 10 times better than the actual sales person at London Drugs... like seriously, how can you read off the price tag/description tag for a completely different model and try to sell it to us?). Nonetheless, the display makes me very happy as colors are just POPPING with vibrancy and accuracy. Everything feels and looks pristine and solid. I have gotten way too many compliments on the design of the note book (it sure is eye catching) and also for the screen where a lot of Mac (Retina display) users at my work admired. Felt good when one Mac fan man said to me that; "not even Macs have a touch screen with this amazing display!" The only thing is that, while the 3200x1800 resolution with 26x PPI blows me away, when I hook up my work ext. monitor (a samsung 1080p monitor) via HDMI / DVI I find that everything gets blown out of proportion. Nothing that a bit of tweaking couldn't handle so no worries there but I do end up tweaking a lot here and there. (I suspected this anyways as QHD+ is now coming out so more and more things / softwares / systems should support a seemless experience over time.)

The Keyboard is a joy to type on as the tactile keys are responsive, fast, and have nice travel. The Touch Pad is a nice bonus which I actually use when I play some games, or even in situations when I end up disabling my touch pad but having left my mouse at work I just use my touchscreen to re enable my touch pad. Its great! the sound quality is great to listen to in certain areas (like my room or at my office). This definitely brings me to my next joy: the Touch Pad. Never have I in my life experienced a Windows notebook with such a responsive and accurate touchpad. It really does feel like working on a Premium (Black) Macbook (I say this as I do not have anything against Mac's)... but 10.5 times better! (Don't trust me on that scale).

Gaming is great, Diablo 3 on maximum settings run smoothly without any lag (although 30 fps is definitely not for me, so I did lower the resolution to 1600x900 and play at highest settings.) The important thing is, though the machine gets slightly warm, the fans stay rather quiet which is awesome. Unfortunately, when playing Bioshock Infinite the fans revv up rather high and it sort of alarmed me a bit. The temperatures spiked rather incredibly too from super cool to the touch to a.."woah thats hot" kind of feeling when I briefly touched the top part of the laptop after running Bioshock Infinite (the last few scenes) for about 10 minutes. To be fair I was running Bioshock Inf at the absolute maximized settings, so I may try again later with a more moderate setting choice that would not tax my machine.

I bought the New Razer Blade for my usual line of work (programming, web dev, database management, photoshop, and of course when time allows on travels and other I will be using it for entertainment). Gaming will definitely be included in all of this as I am still 22 (turning 23 in a few days (May 22)) so this beast is my bday present to me.

Mini / Messy Review written on my New Razer Blade

WinterBox Signing out.

Glad to join all ye folks

 

I have been looking at ordering one of these. I develop games with Unity, and I was originally hoping that these would have a 1920x1080 resolution because that's a nice resolution to work at. With the high dpi display, how high of an effective resolution can you comfortably run this machine at?

Can it run at the equivalent of 1920x1080 with DPI scaling? Without crippling the display by lowering the real resolution? And by the way, has anyone else run Unity on this machine?

 

I always run with native res. on my games it looks spectacular. Plenty of notebooks for full hd.
Full hd is awful in 2014, this is a 3k notebook made for 3k content.
The clevo, msi ghost are a better choice if u focus on full hd work.

 

I also don t understand d3 ros comments. I run 60-55 fps with qhd and aa. There is no need to game d3 on 1600x900. Something iswrong in your blade (check battery options..).

 

how hard it is to see text with native resolution with regular desktop apps?

 

It's a bug or something but to get d3 ros to run at higher fps, you have to turn on vertical sync in the display options within the game. It doubled my fps once I did that which is weird but it works.

 

It works well, just be warned that at native resolution with WIndows scaling that Unity looks terrible as they haven't updated their UI to be HiDPI aware. Windows itself looks fantastic along with apps that have been coded properly, but many still look blurry.

 

This is a really great bag for the RB 2014 and its on sale(26% off) in spruce(green, orange interior) as part of an end of season Tumi sale. Tumi is a high quality bag with a high price but when you catch these Tumi on sale then it can take a lot of the bite off. Its normally quite difficuult to find Tumi bags on sale. Its worth every penny.
Amazon.com: Tumi Alpha Bravo Brooks Slim Brief, Spruce, One Size: Clothing
You should be able to find reviews on youtube. If requested I will create a video showing the bag and RB together. RB 2014 fits very well in the bag. I've just ordered the Kraken Forge headset and will know if that fits or not in the bag in a few days(it might not fit the box the Forge comes with (its HUGE)). I give it a 50/50 chance of fitting just right in the center compartment.

 

Well, that's lame. I saw that it had a USB connector, but apparently that is just for power. I use and love the Logitech G35, which is also 7.1, but uses USB for power/audio. You lose a bit of flexibility though, as there are no no 3.5mm inputs or outputs.

 

Between 1920x1080 and 3200x1800 there's an option for 2048x1152 (and a few others that aren't 16:9). They're supposed to be adding 2560x1440 as well.

I've been running mine at 1920x1080 on the desktop. Seems fine to me. 2048x1152 is usable as well.

 

Hey everyone, I've been stalking this thread for a while now and I just wanted to thank everyone for all of your helpful tips and suggestions. I just received my new razer blade and so far I am loving it. The one thing I've noticed is that on firefox, but not on chrome or IE, video playback in flash videos is incredibly tiny at native resolution (I can barely see the volume or full screen input buttons). Does anyone know if there is a workaround for this issue?

 

Is it using Flash? Right click on the video to see if you get a flash menu.

If so try disabling flash in FF to see if it will fallback to html5. I thought I read somewhere that YouTube was html5 first now and flash fallback..

I'll investigate when I get home tonight.

EDIT: I was able to confirm, disabling the Flash plugin in Firefox causes youtube to fallback to HTML5 and that scales fine. Try it out.

 

anyone have their razer blade shipped from microsoftstore.com is it gonna come with a box within a box?? i wanted to return my 256gb that i bought from the microsoftstore brick and mortar store and exchanged it with 512gb is it a wise decision? i am going to do it this sunday. already talked to customer support they said its fine.

 

It does ship in a box within a box. I got mine last Friday from the MS store.

 

thanks man! i hope they dont ran out of stock this week lol

 

Ok, so coil whine has never really bothered me until now. I've had a faint coil whine which I can live with. What I notice though is the tone changes when pressing the "a" key. I noticed it when playing a FPS at low volume. Tried a few other keys but it seems to be isolated to the "a" key. Does anyone else have the same symptom?

 

So I just got my razer blade today and it's awesome! I'm loving it so far! However, I noticed that the computer got warm, the fans kicked in, and the bar along the top got extremely hot while installing Steam and then Skyrim. Is it normal for it to get this hot when installing something or am I doing something wrong? Any tips or suggestions?

 

I'm guessing something was using the 870m GPU, probably Steam itself. You can check what is using the GPU by looking at an icon in the taskbar hidden area. If that icon isn't there you can enable it first by going to the nvidia control panel and under the "desktop" menu its the bottom option with something about "Display GPU activity icon..."

 

Ok I found it. You were right, Steam was using it. So should I change it to the integrated graphics card then? If so, how do I do that? This is my first laptop by the way so all of these settings and stuff are a little new to me.

 

Yes, I have and zero bad effects from changing it. Go to the Nvidia control panel, manage 3D settings tab, then program settings tab, the find steam on the list and change the preferred graphics to integrated. This same procedure can be used for any other program to force it to one card or the other if it's not auto picking the one you want.

 

I notice that Photoshop CC uses the nVidia graphics card too. I went to the control panel and changed it from auto-select to integrated graphics but whenever I launch it, it's still using the nVidia graphics card. Not sure what to do. I use Photoshop a lot and I'd rather not have it drain the battery so quickly.

 

I'm happy to report Wolfenstein runs ok at native resolution. Not al settings are maxed out, but it looks good.

 

Anybody else able to try this out please?

 

Not me, I have no strange noises coming from mine.

 

Hi guys,

I've had the 512 RB14 for about a week and a half now, and it's been great. The build quality and battery life (compared to my previous laptop, a Dell Studio XPS 16 from 2009) are particularly nice.

I've had some frustrations with a few programs not scaling well, and I'm curious if anybody has any good resources or suggestions to help with the scaling of specific applications. There are a few applications that I use that don't seem to be DPI-aware, and just look too tiny at native resolution.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

 

There are certain apps that you can't do much about unless you change desktop resolution.

 

Couple of things today:

1) Read a tip on easing use of apps that don't play well with HiDPi settings (looking at you, Photoshop Elements 12.0):

a) Win+Plus = Activate Magnifier
b) Ctrl+Alt+L = Switch to Lens view (if not already there)
c) Win+Plus or Win+Minus = increase or decrease magnification while magnifier is active
d) Win+Escape = Close magnifier app

This really helped me to be able to use Photoshop Elements. Maybe it will help some of you that are struggling with apps that have ui elements that are all-but-microscopic at 3200x1800.

2) Got my free Orochi mouse today from Razer (early pre-orderers got this when Razer missed their initial ship dates). Unfortunately, the install was a minor disaster. After the mouse was paired (it's a Bluetooth model) I couldn't get the sensitivity buttons on the right side of the mouse to work, and figured out I should run the Synapse software (I usually don't). The synapse software didn't see the mouse, but wanted to update. I let it, and it broke my Intel Bluetooth device (assume this is the Bluetooth radio device) such that it was detected by device manager as having an error. Uninstalling the Bluetooth device didn't help, since a rescan resulted in an "unknown device id" error on the device. Rebooting also didn't help. All I could do was go back to a restore point from the night before (lost a couple of Steam game installs - grrrr.) That fixed everything, and a reinstall of the Orochi went smoothly this time, but I'm now very nervous about using the Synapse software. Without it, though, the mouse's sensitivity buttons don't seem to work, and the default sensitivity is way too twitchy for me.

I have also noticed that, when the synapse software is running, I occasionally get a flicker of the keyboard backlight. This never seems to occur when the Synapse software is not running. Anyone else?

Just a heads up - might be a good idea to create yourself a restore point before letting Synapse update. I know I wish I had.

 

That sucks. I didn't have any problem updating Synapse, but if you deselect the "Switch all device lighting to OFF when idle" option in Synapse (under Keyboard/Lighting), you won't get the keyboard flicker issue. I think everyone is experiencing this, and it's likely a bug in the software.

 

I am having lots of fun playing with these toys--the Blade, the dime, and the caliper!

 

The hackintosh thread seems dead. Does anyone have experience with low-level OS X stuff like devices, kernels and extensions? The 3200x1800 display is acting up because Razer chose to put a CPU with an Intel HD 4600 in it. Hence OS X isn't recognising the display. Well, to be fair, Apple doesn't use the HD 4600 in any of its Macs, so expecting support would be a little on the thin margin. Nevertheless, anyone with the willingness to do so, please head over to the hackintosh thread... Thanks.

P.S. I can't help in any meaningful sense because I cancelled my order (financial reasons, read back in this thread for more details).

Sent from my One M8 using Tapatalk

 

which mice do you guys prefer with the razer blade? razer orochi or the ouroboros? i already return my 256 and ordered the 512gb online soo excited for another unboxing lol

 

The Orochi is decent for a wireless mouse. I haven't tried the Ouroboros, but keep in mind that it doesn't use bluetooth--you have to keep that corded receiver plugged in. If I'm gonna have wires, I'll stick with my G502--the best mouse ever made IMHO.