Razer Blade 2014 Thermal Performance - Initial Findings And Impressions

I don't think I've seen a thread yet for actual information and discussion about the thermal performance of the 2014 Razer Blade, so here's my take.

I've been doing a bit of testing with Prime95, Furmark, Heaven Benchmark, and games (Diablo 3, Bioshock Infinite) to put the cooling system of the new Blade to the test and so far, I'm very impressed with my findings.

At idle, the system is silent. The fans appear to spin at all times, but at idle they are completely inaudible (I had to pick up the unit and put my ear to the bottom intake to hear the fans). Temperatures are great, I see around 40-45C CPU and 35-40C GPU. The keyboard, wrist-rest, and trackpad are all cool or lukewarm to the touch. (This is after allowing the system to cool after stress-testing, NOT from a cold boot). The areas of interest are all between 28 and 30C, with the exception of the center of the keyboard, which is 32C.

Under load, the system is even more impressive. I was initially testing with Prime95 and Furmark simultaneously, but I was having issues getting the GPU to run at the proper clocks, which may indicate some kind of application profiling for Furmark in the drivers for the card. I had more success with Heaven and Prime95 simultaneously.

I stopped my testing after 30 minutes as the system appeared to have leveled after 10 minutes in surface temperatures and internal temperatures.

CPU - The CPU started at higher turbo clocks and even maintained 2.6 GHz for a few minutes, but eventually leveled out to the 2.2 GHz non-turbo clock and maintained temperatures of around 85C. This may sound a little disappointing, but keep in mind the small FFT stress test in Prime95 hits Haswell processors the hardest with the AVX2 instructions, creating the most heat and requiring the most voltage. There are very few of us that will ever stress the CPU in this like that. Most programs will not even come close to that kind of load.

CPU solo testing - Running prime95 on small FFT's by itself resulted in the CPU dropping turbo clocks to maintain an average 80C temperature. It maintains 2.8 GHz for some time, then drops to 2.6 GHz and stays there indefinitely.

GPU - The 870M maintained the 967 MHz turbo clock the entire duration of the test. The temperatures varied between 76-81C depending on the scene. I know Heaven isn't the best program to bring up the temperatures, but Furmark would not work properly and there aren't many other options for something that will run with prime95 in the background and heavily stress the GPU. While playing Diablo 3 and Bioshock Infinite, I have not recorded the GPU going over 86C.

Palm rest and touchpad - These surfaces only got lukewarm, up to temperatures of about 31-32C during the test.

Keyboard - The fans draw air not only from the bottom vents, but in through the keyboard. This kept the keyboard at a cool 28-29C during the entire duration of the test on the left and right halves (WASD and other important gaming keys were cool/lukewarm to the touch). The center of the keyboard tends to heat up, though, as the fans only draw air in from directly above them. The center is left to get hot due to heat from the motherboard/CPU/GPU. So far, I have not had a problem with this during gaming. It actually feels like the keyboard is cooler than it really is because the air being drawn in helps cool your fingertips.

No-Touch zone - This area reached temperatures of around 47-53C. Obviously, as the name implies, don't touch. Although, it's not that hot.

Overall, I'm very impressed with that kind of performance. Certainly beats the Lenovo Y510P I had for a short time. I'm curious if the GS60 performs as well.

Edit: Ambient temperatures have been between 66-68F during my testing. Laptop is flat on a wooden table with no cooling assistance.

More edit: Tested WildStar for a 40 minute play session, set to native resolution, maximum everything except AA set to very low. Ambient temp 70F, CPU peaked at 83C with an average 80C, GPU peaked at 85C with an average 82C. Figertips still cool.

 

THIS is what I wanted to know since the units started arriving

Can't thank you enough i made up my mind now

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I did a test today playing Wildstar at 1080p on the 2014 Blade 14 inch at a blend of mostly high settings with medium view distance and got a max CPU temp of 91c and max GPU of 86c. This game has been the most stressful on the hardware of the system out of all the games I have played and I used a cooler master cooling pad during the entire test. I've also played Bf3 1080p at ultra which has been easier on the system, followed by D3 which is even lighter, and then team fortress which puts about as much stress on the system as a web browser (joking...but its very little demand for such a powerful laptop).

I simply run my desktop resolution at 1080p as its more than enough, and play all games at the desktop res of 1080p so I can max settings with no hiccups.

 

I cant thank you enough for these tests, puts my mind at ease that temps are really kept under control.
It would be great to see more owners post there results.

 

Why nobody says the ambient temperatures when temperature testing? IMHO it is a very important detail and has great effect on results. The temperature delta is a nice data for ppl who wants to guess how the system will perform. Anyway great review very informative, just if you could update it with your ambient temperature I would greatly appreciate.

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Just for giggles, go run disk cleanup. [Win+r, cleanmgr.exe] Set it to clean up system files, check everything, run it, and monitor your temps.
I'm really curious to see if it out-heats prime95...

If it makes no sense why I would think that, I challenge you to try it for yourself...

 

Temp in my room is 76F/24.4C. I'm going to run another wildstar test at 1080p with no cooling pad soon.

 

That didn't really do much, CPU utilization didn't go above 38%, temps peaked at 55C.

 

Fixed. Ambient temps were 66-68F during my testing.

 

Tested Wildstar at 1080p again using no cooling pad solution for a 45 minute session. Room temp still 24.4C (76F) and the CPU temps hit a max of 93c and the GPU hit a max of 89c. About 3 degrees c difference from cooling pad usage.

 

That's really interesting. I downloaded Wildstar and was testing it at native resolution. At 70F ambient, I got a maximum CPU temp of 83C with an average of 80C, and a maximum GPU temp of 85C, average 82C over a 40 minute session. I'm not using a cooling pad, I've got my Blade flat on a wooden table.

I highly doubt a difference of 6 F ambient caused that much difference in temperatures. Maybe there's some variation in the paste job. What kind of temps were you averaging?

Edit: Is there a reason you were testing at 1080p instead of native? The game appeared to run well at native while I was playing it.

 

Nice thanks for that ambiente comparison, btw awesome you mention how/where the notebook being used, I forgot about that one ... you know everything counts on a system that is built on its limits... I would say the difference between your results are half ambient (6F is 4/5 C) and half paste job/cooling system (6/5C which is very common), and that sums up to the 10C dif... Cheers

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What temp monitoring program are you using, just out of curiosity. Using Hwmonitor, doing JUST the O/S cleanup, on THREE DIFFERENT SYSTEMS [a 2014 RBP, a 2014 GS60 Ghost, and an older MSI 683-DXR] I'm getting temps above 95c!

 

I'm using the Intel XTU.

 

Well I tested at 1080p because that resulted in 35-60 frames and I like to be 60 plus frames in any game I'm playing. I didn't test but assumed that native 1800p would result in a significant performance knockdown. I'll have to download Intel xtu and report Temps tonight at 1800p, if mine is running substantially hotter I'll send it for replacement.

Also I'm not sure if anyone else notices this or has this issue but when my gpu is working I hear a very feint ticking noise on the right side of the keyboard (I have to get close to the laptop and have volume almost off to hear it). When I minimize a game the noise immediately stops, so I'm thinking it's not fan related. Is this intended noise or maybe a faulty capacitor? Again...the noise is very feint and only occurs while gaming.

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