Razer Blade Pro 17" (1080 GPU/late 2016) Owner's Lounge

Marketing has always been their focus, that's for sure. I do agree that this year has been a little different though. A lot of the things that are releasing seem rushed and the timing of them seems to only benefit them, not their customers. We had two launches each for the RBS and RB 14 as well as the Razer Core. If you bought any of those combos early in the year, you're probably a little upset with the later launches. And if you bought the later launches, thinking there was nothing better coming, you're probably a little bummed that there's now an all in one package that pretty makes the Razer Core obsolete. I sold all my stuff a few months ago though, so I'm good.

I was originally getting the GS73 to hold me off for the RBP, but after seeing the initial results, I think I'm sticking with what I have.

 

You have 3 brand that copy CrApple's design... Razer, Aorus aka Gigabyte and Alienware. All want to win the competition... Have The world's thinnest gaming laptop!! And all three are in the lead. Which of these three who overcome in the end. Who knows?

 

Well their chassis quality itself is pretty good. But they have too many design flaws. For example the Razer Blade 14 would be much better if it was 15inch, a larger heatsink would fit and the battery would be further away from the hotspots and thus having a longer lifespan. The Razer Blade pro would be a much more reliable on the long run if it had a 1070 instead. Easier to cool, cheaper and the PSU would not be a problem then.

 

Mehh Alienware's are not that thin though. They are kinda in the middle. MSI Stealth laptops on the other hand are fairly thin. But their cooling is pretty good compared to Razer and Gigabyte.

 

There's also the Asus GL series (e.g. GL502/702 15,6" and 17" with two variants - VS and VM - which come with 1070 and 1060/TB3, respectfully). I don't understand why the 1070 equipped VS variant doesn't come with TB3, though.

 

The timing is just unreal here, huge coincidence and it's going to take some self discipline lol. But here's a short fun story for ya:

I couldn't sleep last night because I have alot of things going on atm and I up late playing Overwatch and a little hearthstone plus I have my annual review today at 9:30 AM. 1 AM soon becames 6 AM real fast... Anyways at 6:03AM I get an email from Razer stating that all pre-orders will open today at 6 PM PST or 9PM EST (So there's that bit of information for you).

Moving on I go to my year end review and I'm thinking Meet's Expectations, but little do I know that I'm a severe critic on myself and I'm a BI developer (Qlick and Salesforce) so essentially I work with phrama data and it's like my first year on the job and well the data hasn't been up to snuff for what I'd like to do with it. But apparently alot of the business objects work I do is greatly appreciated plus the data analysis that I do for stakeholders and executives.

To shorten this up I'm wide awake right now running on the 26 hour mark probably on cloud 9, I somehow scored a 5% year over year increase and a $15,600 cash bonus for the year. I'll have to make a quick decision on what laptop I'm buying in the next 8 hours before I crash FYI bonuses are only that big because Uncle Sam literally takes like half of it.... Feelsbadman

 

Congrats! As much as I love my Razer Blade, for $4K+ I wouldn't get the Pro unless you needed some extreme portability. Sooo many options out there. Cost is only one of the factors - the 1 year warranty is scary as hell. Also, when my 2015 Razer Blade had screen issues, they told me it would have been a month process to repair, and $310 in parts alone since I was out of warranty. Thankfully I had purchased from Microsoft and just exchanged it. If you're a non mobile gamer, give Clevo/Sager a look. You can get a P650RS for $2200 with a 1070 that's as fast as the RBP, or go all the way with a P870DM3 with 1080 or 1080SLI.

 

Razer Support was great and able to provide me with new drivers
Which allowed me to finally try BF1!

Actual benchmarks incoming

 

Hey man we appreciate the videos .. but the only way anyone can get an idea of performance is if you are running something like MSI afterburner with monitoring. If we can't see fps or temps or anything it becomes a guessing game. If you can recreate these videos with that it would be most helpful. Thanks!


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Going to get that going this weekend this video was more to show that the drivers from Razer would install, and allow for BF1 to even run.
Before they gave me the drivers i had to restore the whole system so still reinstalling stuff.
more to come

 

congrats on getting your Blade Pro. I was the first to buy the original Razer Blade (660M) a few years ago, have also owned the smaller 14" Blade. Managed to buy the new Blade Pro this afternoon online. Hoping it will ship and arrive before I head out of town Friday next week Will offer a humble review of it as I did with the original Blade on techinferno here in the forums. Can you post some 3dmark scores with the new driver please?

 

Some better benchmarks/tests

 

Athenic any chance you can record the fan noise while gaming? I'm seriously considering the same unit but don't want a hair dryer when doing any late night gaming.

 

I will try and add that for my review but i can tell you while gaming it does get a little loud

 

I had a blade pro from 2013 and it was really cool when it worked... You may want to think twice before sending it in for repairs --- their repair center is incompetent. I have so many horror stories...

 

One time I sent it in for repairs and I logged into steam and realized they were playing tf2 on my steam account on my laptop which was suppedly still being repaired.

I didnt have a working computer for an entire smmer break because they repeatedly sent me dead on arrivals. They do have free shipping for repairs though.

 

got my Razer Blade Pro at my local Fed Ex store today, so now I can take it with me out of town tomorrow Installing steam and 3dmark right now. Love, love, love the keyboard. Love the build quality though feels heftier (and is) than the Aorus x7 v6 which I still have as well. Screen is better than the Aorus hands down, as is the typing and touchpad navigation. Build quality is better, hinge is better.

 

the power supply is so svelte its pretty awesome, know that folks are wondering if 250w is enough, I dunno. but I can say I appreciate the little things that Razer does to make a high class product, like a braiding their power supply cable

 

But $4000 for gimped hardware seems super high.

 

How loud are those fans? Hair dryer, vacuum cleaner or jet engine?

 

they ramp up, but think they are quieter than aorus under heavy load.

 

nuclear bomb

 

BOOM...haha! but seriously anybody how loud dB are they under load?

 

Don't have a decibel reader. They get loud, but again, not quite as loud as my x7. I imagine the x7 dt is even louder than both of em

 

Can anyone report on the display response time? I think 60 hz is less of an issue than a poor response time.


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For the 4K, if it's higher than 300 nits, it's a sharp display that doesn't have a datasheet yet. Else it's the AUO B173ZAN01.0

Both of the 4K display model will do 99% SRGB and Adobe RGB, the sharp one has 90% DCI-P3 but dunno about the AUO


AUO has a 25ms response time, I'd imagine the sharp one would be similar to it.

 

25ms seems pretty average for gaming.


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While most desktop monitor is below 15 lol?

 

Perhaps I should be more clear. I'm interested in total display lag. Signal processing plus response time.


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Hmm.. the 4k Sharp display on the RBS has very high response times, especially on grey to grey. That might be not a good sign for the RB Pro display.. we have to wait until some professional reviews are out.

 

Anyone have any info on why I am locked into 369.56? Can I hack this (PCI IDs, inf files)? Would hacking this have an adverse effect? Fans or such?

I don't want to be locked into an old driver for ages, especially for what I paid for this. I am wondering if I should refund this machine as this is bringing back horrible memories of my experience with my MSI GT80 Titan laptop. FYI, the graphics driver kept crashing and the only fix was to use a really old driver, hence losing out on newer games with newer graphical features. After six months of painful back-and-forth with MSI tech support, they finally gave in and gave me the next revision of the laptop in exchange for my old one.

 

FYI, first game I tried was SC2 and the screen was jumpy and flipping to B&W for a few ms. I had to disable GSync to get past this.

 

Probably the vendor ID on Razer's 1080 is not whitelistet in the new driver packages yet (as they were not after the release of the new Alienware notebooks). You should definitely report this to the Razer support, they might be able to give you a estimated date when you can install official Nvidia drivers.

 

I was really more wondering if there are any reasons I should not try to hack the latest driver myself. The SC2 glitch had me a little concerned and I was thinking maybe a newer driver would fix this GSync issue since GSync is kind of newish for this laptop. WHat I was also concerned is that if I somewhow hack the inf file and get the new driver on this machine could I breaks other thing such as fan throttling or stuff like that maybe specifc to that old version and this laptop.

 

Alrre

 

Already asked Razer and they said by the end of the month

 

they told me by the end of the month as well, I would guess whenever the next Nvidia driver drops to try it out and see.

 

Did it myself. Edited two files: ListDevices.txt and nvrzi.inf (although I could have just done nvrzi.inf) and retrofitted some lines into the devices sections (based on device id string from device manager). Had to reboot. Looked like some parts of the install failed (PhysX detects a newer version, etc), but the driver part seems to have taken. Brightness didn't work right until going into Device Manager and rebooting again (DisplayAdapter indicated this). But, after all of the installation glitchiness, I am now on 375.xx and am no longer getting the screen glitches in StarCraft2. Hopefully this will remedy other issues I had with some of my other games as well.

I can post the steps if anyone is interested.

 

my CPU maxes out at 76 degrees playing titanfall 2 for a little over an hour (ultra settings 4k), and the GPU caps out at 72 degrees. this is with the Blade on my lap. I would recommend jeans, shorts would be too hot methinks.

 

Are people actually buying this thing? It's nearly $4000 and you can't upgrade it.

 

Unfortunately yes. Most people are not even considering/aware of how much performance they are loosing with the gimped hardware.

I mean the darn thing has a 230W power brick. With a 1080 inside xD.

 

The not being able to upgrade it is a point of debate. but indeed. that psu is by far not enough. and for that money i would expect at least the 6820HK core i7 instead. anyway, this laptop will not perform on the levels of other 1080gtx laptops and closer to a 1070gtx.

 

True that, dont quite care about upgrade-ability with that form factor. But at the cost all that fluff does not justify the performance loss.

 

Helpful questions not needless criticism please. Btw it's a 250 watt psu.

 

I was just curious, lol. Completely harmless! You're the one making assumptions.

 

The criticism is definitely needed, specially of the overpriced machine. No doubt the body, keyboard and the screen are amazing! But that does not justify the $4000 price tag. I dont mean to offend any one when i say this, but that is literally like flushing money down the toilet.

 

Did you hit a frame cap or something or are you at the power limit? Those temps are pretty low. I'm really surprised they aren't using the thermal overhead they have. High 80s is perfectly acceptable for thin gaming laptops.

 

Expensive, absolutely. Overpriced. . . not really..(though price is a very subjective thing)

Given the ultra high end components, the relatively small order size of a smaller boutique seller like Razer, and the enormous R&D costs of the custom internal design/motherboard/cooling solution/ etc, and the fact that this is about as high end as you can get. . . The price seems to be fairly consistent. The new Highest tier new Macbook pro isn't that much less expensive, but you get exponentially less performance, half the ram, and a joke for a GPU.

Again, the cost is massive. This isn't a "gaming notebook for everyone" This machine is almost all excess. . lavish, gorgeous, and I can't wait to sell a kidney to get my hands on one. . . but I'm fairly sure Razer doesn't expect to sell millions of them.

As a side note. . . I'm a little disappointed they didn't add the real sense camera from the stargazer, but that's the ONLY nitpick I can find on the machine.

 

Problem is, the laptop appears to be acting like it has a 1070. That dishonored 2 benchmark a few pages back wasn't all that much better than some of the 1070 laptops out there. Except for the temps... Maybe that's what they were aiming for - 1070 performance with lower temps. I guess I could see some people buying into that, but I would rather the laptop be taken to the limits and let me do the throttling.