Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Stein senior editor at cnet now it doesn't come along so often that will see a gaming laptop that attempts to redesign or redefine what's going on in the world of gaming laptops but razor has attempted to do just that with a laptop that you've probably heard about the razor blade we talked about this for about a year now it is coming out at a price that's not cheap at all is twenty eight hundred dollars what do you get for that well this laptop is under an inch thick it's all about 6.4 pounds and has a big 17.3 inch screen and it is oriented towards gamers the graphics or maybe a tad less robust than you get on some laptops like a Liam where's or you know pumped up to the Gil origin laptops this is nvidia GT 555 graphics inside and it's got a core i7 processor 8 gigabytes of ram and a 256 gigabyte SSD that is built in one configuration that's available on razor site now there's no optical drive on this laptop is a solid-state no optical drive machine and the idea is that you're going to be connecting in the cloud with your steam and your origin downloading that way which a lot of gamers already do the new hardware that this brings to the table is the Switchblade UI and if you remember back a couple of CES ago we showed this concept device called the switchblade the razor had made that was almost a gaming netbook had a touchscreen that also worked as the touchpad with a whole bunch of customizable buttons well that survived here and it's off to the right-hand side replacing where the number pad would be theoretically what you can do with this is you can show anything on that second screen and use it as a touchpad plus there are 10 buttons up here that have customizable graphics that pop up on them that can be used for anything from launching applications to being used for recording macros and all sorts of other functions and not just those 10 but with a three-finger swipe across the screen you can bring up many sets of 10 so if you're playing some sort of in-depth game with a lot of different transactions well you can nerd out your heart's content with recordable macros and all that stuff now certain games maybe about 10 to 15 of them razor says we're going to be specifically does signed with a certain number of buttons in mind and graphic assets that razor is going to supply however you can customize your own looks for buttons and put in your own graphic assets so that's nice that you can do that as far as the screen goes well right now you can pull up some apps that allow you to play youtube videos or check facebook or use gmail but other than sort of a glorified web browser on a second screen there really are any games yet to take advantage of that which is a shame because you could easily see how that could be used especially for any sort of micro transaction system or any game that has a lot of strategy functions it's going to be a bit of a disconnect however if you're planning on using a trackpad and you're used to where it is I kept reaching for this phantom trackpad over here and not finding it it's over on this side it's ergonomically fine to use it over here once you get used to it but it just threw me off a little bit plus when it comes to ports there are a bunch of ports on the left-hand side none on the right side so if you want to plug in a mouse or something like that you got to funnel it over here on the left side to deal with that twenty-eight hundred dollars is not chump change and that's a lot to invest in a concept type of device which in a lot of ways this is and is a real gaming laptop but you are sort of having this sacrifice a little bit for graphic robustness for in terms of a a slimness of design 6.4 pounds which is and the lighter end of gaming laptops but it's still not light compared to a regular laptop this switchblade you I syncs up with synapse which is razors cloud syncing service for saving all of your customizable macro settings now the idea is that you could save your settings and then plug in they have one of these you is in a gaming keyboard or plug in one of their other peripherals and be able to sync across devices I'm Scott steinem that's a first look at the razor blade gaming laptop