Min-Liang Tan is a man in demand. His company has rapidly grown from making keyboards and mouse mats, and is now on the verge of launching the Blade, a 14in gaming ultra-portable that beats just about anything else out there in terms of style, performance and mobility. We sat down with him at Computex Taipei to get the lowdown on its creation.
At a mere 17mm thick and weighing less than 1.8kg, the 14in Blade is easily the most portable gaming laptop we've ever used. The sleek black chassis is milled from aluminium, with curved edges and an embossed Razer logo that make it look like a MacBook Pro has turned to the dark side - it's a stunning machine that will almost certainly turn heads when you take it out of your bag.
Attention to detail is something Razer prides itself in, so the green USB3 ports make a return from the 17in Blade Pro released last year. You'll also find an HDMI video output and a single 3.5mm audio jack at the sides, along with the charging port - the Blade's power brick is almost two-thirds smaller than the ones on gaming laptops from Alienware, MSI and Asus. Even the sound of the lid closing was refined in acoustic chambers, to make it sound more like a car door than flopping down a book onto a desk.
Internally, the blade uses an Intel 4th Generation Core processor, previously known as Haswell. The i7-4702QH runs at 2.2GHz, can Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz, and is paired with 8GB of DDR3 memory. It's not a low-voltage chip like the ones you might find inside Ultrabooks, so should have no trouble running performance-intensive applications.
Of course, the Blade is primarily designed for gaming, so dedicated graphics were crucial. Tan told us that previous gaming laptops had used Nvidia's GT-class GPUs, but that wasn't an option - only the faster GTX-class chips would do. It's one thing to fit a TX 765m inside a laptop this size, but quite another to cool it - thankfully, the demo unit we tried proved Razer has done its homework. It had been looping Crysis 3 (on maximum settings, at a perfectly playable frame rate) for hours, and although it felt warm, it wasn't painful to the touch.
With Nvidia's Optimus graphics switching, the Blade will fall back to Intel's integrated graphics card when you're on the move. It was apparently lasting six hours in the Mobile Mark benchmark at maximum brightness, so if you dim the backlight and stick to web browsing Tan said you could see up to nine hours on a single charge.
The keyboard is fully backlit in Razer's signature green, and felt fantastic to type on - each Chiclet-style key had plenty of travel and a springy action that brought them back into place almost instantly. The demo units had a US layout with a smaller enter key than we're used to, and there's currently no option to opt for a different layout. It's a full-size keyboard, although there's no numerical keypad, with an up-firing stereo speaker on either side. We weren't able to properly test them out, but they did a good job filling our meeting room with the gunshots and explosions of Crysis 3.
The large touchpad sits directly below the keyboard, and felt superbly responsive during our brief play with the system. We wouldn't expect much less from Razer, considering its background in peripherals. All the usual multi-touch gestures are supported, including Windows 8-specific swipes to open the charms bar and flip between full-screen apps. The physical touchpad buttons are a little on the small side and felt a bit squishy to us - if they were slightly firmer it would be almost perfect.
The one aspect of the Blade that didn't blow us away was its screen - the 14in, 1600x900 reslution display clearly uses a TN panel, as the viewing angles were rather limited. Although it's a better match for the graphics card, which would begin to struggle with newer games at higher resolutions, the omission of 1080p is disappointing in a high-end laptop like this.
The 14in Blade will be available in the US in the coming weeks, and is on the official Razer website for pre-order now. It will cost $1,799 for a 128GB model, $1,999 for 256GB and $2,299 for 512GB. Unfortunately we couldn't get Tan to commit to a UK launch, but unless Apple adds dedicated graphics to its next MacBook Pro, we may be forced to import one.
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