Razer Blade (2014) Owner's Lounge

You should check out the MSI gs60 forum where someone from gentechpc proves it's Kepler.

 

Well, this was the reply to my "When will it ship?" inquiry:

Thank you for contacting Razer. With the 2014 Razer Blade, per our warehouse they will start shipping out a batch next week. Hopefully one of those shipped is your package. Please let us know if you have any other questions in a reply to this e-mail, and have a great day.

However, my ship date now shows this on the order tracking page:

This order will be shipped after the release date of 4/16/2014 for The New Razer Blade - 256GB.

 

Mine says the same thing now for the 128gb

 

First batches only dude, just Nvidia trying to get rid of the old chips.... MSI stated they are maxwell... only time will tell... next week shipments should straighten things up. You should read the hole tread tough. Cheers

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Thanks for the suggestion, but Clevo's aren't an option... my last one was the biggest disappointment in a laptop I've ever purchased. Willing to spend a little extra this go round to not end up with a flimsy cheap chassis.

Thinking this Razer or the GS60 should be solid. Just waiting to see performance/heat on Razer and if MSI actually ships a Maxwell version... the current ones are in fact Kepler and there seems to be tons of confusion internally with MSI so who knows what is true or coming.

 

I highly doubt MSI is going to start with Kepler and then switch to Maxwell once the Kepler GPU's run out, unless they designed the MOBO to accommodate both versions of the same named GPU.
It's very strange for MSI to cuase such great confusion with the GS60. I know if they told me they come with Maxwell and I got Kepler I would be pissed. Not that it can't handle Kepler but for false advertising and deception.

 

I did.. I don't believe any of it until I see someone get Maxwell in the wild.. Kepler is proven already

 

Same here with the 512GB Version.

 

Same here, 128GB. Wondering of maybe they rushed the announcement and the release to fall in line with other manufacturers following the Nvidia NDA termination. That said, I'm in no desperate need of it right now, so it'll just give me more time to possibly find reviews of other laptops in the meantime. One can always how for a shipping slipup and someone getting a unit early to fill us in on the details as well.

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I'm in the same boat. I just checked and my date changed from 4/4 to 4/16 for the 256GB model.

 

Same here, ordered the 256GB within the first hour of them announcing it...Well thats disappointing....

 

Pretty sure the date is just a field they set in 1 place that populates everywhere. They have said many times that units start shipping next week, so at least some people should start getting shipment. I think an order today is probably looking at sometime after the new date, I think anyone already with an order should expect shipment before 4/16.

 

I hope you're right. My 2013 sold so quick I am now without a laptop. I would love to get mine in the next week or two. I went the 128GB route this time as I went with 512 last time and regretted it. Maybe the 128GB will ship a little quicker if there are less orders of them or more of the drives available.

 

Normally the 128GB is the most ordered, if you look at the new Blade Pro the 128GB is back-ordered 3 weeks while the 256 and 512 are in-stock. Still, if you ordered a while ago I expect you should get in the early shipments.

 

My 512GB model is also showing a ship date of 4/16. That kinda sucks. Was hoping to have it before PAX East.

Hopefully I get my 2013 14" back from repair next week.

 

I dunno, the actual text says "after the release date of 4/16/2014". That doesn't sound like an update for second waves. More like the entire release has been pushed back...

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I'm hoping for mine before PAX East as well.

At least my Shield will have remote streaming by then. :thumbsup:

 

Can't wait for the shield 2. Still loving the shield 1, but just thinking of a Tegra K1 equipped shield makes me drool a little. That and it will now stream off laptop GPUs as well.

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I love my shield too, great little device. If only the android App Store offered better games...

Ordered my first blade, 512GB config, I am drooling over this laptop - here's hoping we get them soon.

 

Well Valve is bringing Portal over. With the K1 and newer chips it's only a matter of time until older ports start coming over to Android. That's of course ignoring the massive catalog of PS1, N64, SNES, DS, etc. emulator titles you can play. I'm excited to see what they do with the next gen.

That said, they do have remote streaming now and while WiFi might be iffy, the lag on Ethernet might not be bad (I have an adapter). That and now that mobile GPUs are allowed, it may be nice to bring my Razer Blade to my g/f's parents home during the holidays, plug it in in the other room and play some games on the couch while they watch something ridiculous.

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So I'm in the market for a new gaming laptop. The fact that Razer is stuffing an 870M into this machine is making my eyes bug out and making me seriously wonder if I shouldn't pull the trigger.

Basically I have it narrowed down to a Clevo chassis (maybe something sold by Mythlogic), one of the new MSI machines (bulky and ugly but they've got horsepower), and this. I'm intrigued by this simply because it is so compact and I can use the touchscreen for a lot of cool non-gaming functionality. A few things concern me though:

1 - It looks like we're hard-limited to 8 GB RAM and it can't be upgraded later (correct?). Has anyone determined if this might become an issue down the road? For now, I feel like 16GB is a little overkill. But if I drop >2k on a damn machine I don't want it to be obsolete next year.

2 - The extremely high resolution means most games will have to be upscaled (say, run them at 1080p). Has anyone had any real-world experience with doing this on a screen of this type? There's always windowed mode, but who wants to rely on that if they have a choice?

3 - Please note that I plan to play games like Skyrim and Rome Total War 2, etc etc at high settings. I don't care about anti-aliasing though, and usually turn it off by default because I prefer a smoother framerate to supressing jaggies.

 

The ram should be fine, it is pretty rare to fill 8GB in normal usage.

The GPU should run most games on medium at native res or maxed out at 1600X900 (which is a perfect 1/4th res of the panel and will scale without any distortion). You can also pick any 16:9 res and likely won't have any problems because the panel is just so high res. When you can't see individual pixels it doesn't matter as much if some of them are not perfectly rendered.

 

I agree with this. I "only" have 8GB on my top of the line SLI desktop I built less than a year ago. I've never had any issues with running short on memory for any game. Also, with the high res screen being almost 3x the pixels of a typical 1080 screen, and only being a 14" display, I agree that scaling should be quite well, even on in-between resolutions. The PPI of my 27" desktop screens are 81, compared to the 14" razer at 262! I expect it to be very sharp.

 

Thanks guys. I'm an old school gamer/system builder but have been out of the game since like 2008. So I feel like my knowledge of things like upscaling and memory utilization is kind of obsolete. Heh.

 

I have firsthand experience with display scaling on a retina MacBook Pro (Windows and OS X) and it looks great. I had my doubts at first, but scaling at 200+ Ppi is nothing like scaling at conventional resolutions.


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Posted this on the all-up owner's lounge thread too, but I also preordered in the first few hours and my order page updated from 4/4 to 4/16. I asked Razer about it but no response yet.

Hopefully it's just a universal bit of text on the site and they start shipping in the next week or so!

 

I finally caved and ordered the 512GB model on 3/22 (to use if/when I travel), and the shipping date said 4/16 the last time I checked.

 

Same for me. It went from 4th to 16th.

 

Yup. Everyone is waiting til the 16th. If it was individual orders it would just say shipping on the 16th. Not released.

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Hi,
Hi all,
New to the site. Been using MBP for the last few years for video editing, but now switching to premier and love the portability offered by the 14inch blade. I also need Windows for other reasons. I looked last year, but didn't like the screen. Love t now. Would appreciate any comments on the 2013 blade's battery life and any users who video edit on it. I know video editing will kill the battery, but GP usage info will help

 

Note book check just did a review of the 870M and it can pretty much handle every game on high or ultra settings. Awesome!

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

 

Just like the GTX860M but with half the power and heat and longer battery life..

They were pretty close to make a perfect notebook
- GTX860M for not burning your hands
- put a SDcard slot in it (what were they thinking)
- mini display port slot
- need for smaller bezel around the screen (which now is huge for a 14")

 

to each his own, would rather have an 870m.

 

Me too, if the heat doesnt increase over prev model, but it will (it packs twice the amount of shader cores)

 

Power Consumption

The power consumption of the GeForce GTX 870M should be similar to the the GTX 780M, leading to a TDP of at least 100 W. Therefore, only large desktop replacements can handle the power demands of a GTX 870M.

-from the notebookcheck site. Of course leave it to Razer to defy conventions and stuff it into a 14' slim notebook.

 

Yeah, the reason they had to push the ship date is because they are having heat problems from the 870m. Even with it down clocked quite a bit, and the new fans that move a more air (and are much louder) it just can’t keep cool. (April fools!)

 

Source? Or are you just speculating. If you are not speculating, do you have someone we can throw questions at re other things?

 

Do you have any proof of this? Not trying to argue, sincerely curious where you are seeing this information.

 

Sorry guys, it was a bad attempt at an April fools joke. I don't know anything, and since I have one on order I sure hope there aren't any issues!

 

Don't throw around speculation as fact without proof. We have enough of that around here. Provide sources.

 

He was just trying an april fools prank

 

Too many emotional people here, such jokes could be dangerous

 

But it's not funny is the problem, just annoying. You better bring your A-Game humor if you want to dance that dance in here.

 

Yeah I'm sorry guys, I won't quit my day job. I just bought Goat Simulator and was playing it over my lunch hour and had a blast. I guess it made me think I was funny for some reason:laugh:

 

Quit play in' games with my heart...with my heart...with my heart...

I should have known from the...

Wait, .

/SuddenlyBackstreet'd

 

I would not be surprised at all if this is absolutely true. I am expecting news about burnt finger tips in the coming April

 

4/16/2014 ... say it ain't so....

 

Notebookcheck doesn't indicate which laptop they used to test the the 870m, but it likely was not a Blade. While the 870m is definitely a great performer, it is yet to be seen what thermal limits are applied, as there are bound to be some. However, Gigabyte and MSI are both also implementing 870m's in their thin and light machines, so there may be some method to the madness. In any case even if 870m can't perform better than stock, it's still bound to be faster than a heavily overclocked 860m only because it has more shader power (even though each Maxwell shader is ~ 2x Kepler), and 192-bit memory bus vs 128-bit.

Still waiting to see some performance *and* thermal numbers in the wild from the new Blade 14.

I would take that with a grain of salt. The 765m NBC said it is suited for 15 inch or larger laptops or desktop replacements too and it found its way into lots of smaller form factor machines.

What I find most curious and concerning is that there have been zero early reviews on this machine, yet so many people are willing to throw lots of money at a machine that they have no idea how well it performs. Usually newer laptops get into hands of a few tech sites that do a somewhat detailed review, yet I have seen nothing more than "here's the new Blade 14, here's the specs".

 

Oh, I don't know. . it's not like this is the first production run of the blade. Incremental modifications do not a COMPLETELY new machine make. As for heat, my guess is it'll dynamically down clock at certain temps [say, above 85c] Given that cards like the GTX 780ti reference do this already, it's not too far of a stretch to imagine.

Of course, I just drank the green kool-aid myself this morning, so PART of that speculation may be me trying to justify pre-order on a machine I really don't per se "NEED", but that I find waaaay too irresistibly beautiful to ignore.

And that;'s BEFORE you get to the externals ; )

 

I guarantee that the pre-order numbers for this laptop are WELL below any other electronic device released ever... and I'm sure many of them exist (like mine) because of Razer well-designed previous iteration (RB 2013). As for reviews, if the release date was pushed back to 16th, the shipping of review units was also. I'd like to hope that it won't get pushed back farther, but considering 99% of PC manufacturers end up pushing back their release date prior to release, it wouldn't shock me if it slipped again. Luckily it is not critical that I get one immediately.

I think you make a fair point though. This is an incremental upgrade in many cases, as a lot of the chassis/design has remained identical. As has also been stated, the 870m will still outpace the 860m, even if underclocked, so if I'm throwing down this kind of $$$ I want the best of the best. It is also possible that Razer may have updated their internal cooling, which would be great! Either way, I'd rather have them push release dates back and get it right, then have to return 2/3 of them before I get one that's flawless (an all to common practice these days for PC OEMs).