Recently, we have been seeing a spat of ‘reviews’ of Razer’s Blade Laptop. Considering that we actually had a chance to play with the Blade at both NVIDIA’s GeForceLAN and this year’s CES 2012, we are confident we have an idea of what the laptop looks and feels like.
Our real concern is that we have heard rumors that Razer is fearful or at least hesitant to sample the Razer Blade to ?real? tech media. When we say ?real tech media?, we are referring to sites like our own; sites that do in-depth product reviews and whose opinions primarily rely upon the overall performance and experience of a gaming system. Furthermore, there have been allegations that Razer has attempted to influence the opinions of reviewers who have already been sampled and have used the product itself, trying to prevent any negative coverage.
The truth is that the Razer Blade is a mediocre product at a luxury price point, even though we have done our best to make this known to Razer by attempting to reach out to the company multiple times, to no avail. Our previous Op-Ed outlined the reasons why the Razer Blade is the wrong decision for any gamer with more sense than money, and still the wrong decision for any gamer with more money than sense considering the alternatives from other manufacturers at that price point.
Razer already backtracked on one of their original design decisions and ended up delaying the laptop’s launch as a result, considering the change should not have been a change at all, but rather included in the original design. Razer is more concerned with profit margin than they are with performance and function. The Razer Blade has a 17″ screen and as a result runs at a relatively high resolution, which requires more graphical power than an NVIDIA GT555 can deliver, even with additional VRAM. Razer Benchmark Scores Revealed
At this year’s CES, we got a chance to play with the Razer Blade and did some benchmarking with the Blade and its newly included SSD. We simply ran the Windows Experience Index and ran CrystalDiskMark on the SSD that Razer had opted for. In the We identified the SSD as a LiteOn SSD which at the time of this writing cannot yet be purchased as a consumer product. These SSDs are new, but as you can tell from our benchmarks below, they are not that fast. The SSD that we are comparing the LiteOn in the Razer against is a Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD which is comparable to the LiteOn 256GB SSD.
Razer Blade Benchmark Scores
We ran the Windows Experience Index and CrystalDiskMark on both laptops and compared them. The laptop that we are comparing against has the exact same GPU and a faster quad-core CPU than the Razer Blade. If you look at the WEI scores, you will notice that the Razer Blade’s CPU beats out the Alienware M14X that we tested because the dual-core processor in the Razer Blade has a higher clock frequency, running at 2.8GHz instead of the M14X?s 2.4GHz. Looking at gaming capability and overall system performance, that the Razer Blade is slower than the Alienware M14X in most categories. On top of that, the M14X actually scores a full point higher than the Razer Blade in 3D gaming with the exact same GPU (and less memory).
Alienware M14X Benchmark Scores
All of this leads us to one conclusion, Razer has ignored enthusiasts and has focused on aesthetic over performance. Unfortunately for Razer, this is a losing proposition in the long term when you consider that gamers demand the best available performance for the latest and future games. If a gamer were buy a Razer Blade, they would be paying twice as much for older, worse-performing hardware that what is currently available from other manufacturers. We still cannot in good conscience recommend going out and purchasing a Razer Blade at $2800 US.
BSN* Challenge
Here at Bright Side of News*, we will challenge Razer with the review of their product. If Razer chooses to send us product sample, we will review it in the same manner as we reviewed Maingear SHIFT, HP DM1z laptop and numerous other platforms over the course of the past three years. Namely, in a fair and objective manner with a focus on function, performance, and credit given for aesthetics.
Furthermore, we will be recording the product review video using broadcast grade equipment with a 4K camera, to ensure that absolutely every detail is visible on the screen, in identical video quality to what we provide our automotive and telecom customers with. Perfect products will look perfect when shot at a resolution 4096×2304 pixels, and imperfect products will have those imperfections show.
If you believe your product is good enough to hold up under that level of scrutiny, we challenge you.
We have reached out to Razer for comment, but they have not responded by the time of publication.
