Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hard road box today I've got for you a video on a laptop that I've been waiting to get my hands on for a couple of months now it is the gorgeous razor blade 2017 this guy's kitted out with all the way to starred where an Intel Core i7 7700 HQ processor and video geforce gtx 1060 graphics and of course you get that excellent slim and light aluminium unibody chassis it's a really fantastic product ii and one of my most highly recommended gaming laptops at the moment the hardware movi unit packs no surprises as I mentioned earlier we're looking at the i7 7700 HQ and also the GTX 1066 gigabyte but we're also seeing 16 gigabytes of ddr4 and a 256 gigabyte SSD inside SSD of course being the primary piece of hardware you can configure in this laptop along with this display we're looking at a 14 inch 1080p display on this particular model you can configure that up to 4k if you choose before I dive too deep into the hardware and performance of this laptop let's take a look at the design because this is without a doubt my favorite gaming laptop chassis on the market at the moment the aluminium unibody design curves seamlessly around the edges to create a premium look and feel one of my favorite aspects here is the lack of game style elements this is a minimalist and understanded design it looks fantastic you can use it in office settings with no trouble whatsoever and really the only thing that could come close to being a game element is the acid green Razer logo on the lid but even then I think that looks pretty decent and in general the Razer pres design well it's definitely the best design on the market as far as gaming laptops are concerned part of the reasons why this design is so successful is that it's both slim and light at just one point eight six kilograms heavy for the 1080p model and seventeen point nine millimeters thin you can easily take this laptop around with you on the go despite the fact that it's got a quad-core CPU and a GTX 1060 inside it's the perfect mix of Portability and power in my opinion and well it just adds to the feature set that makes this design so compelling razer has chosen and a perfect array of i/o on this laptop everyday users we're seeing three USB 3.0 type-a ports complemented by a thunderbolt for a USB type-c port also seeing a full-sized HDMI 2.0 port and a 3.5 mm audio jack perhaps the main permission here is no internet although this laptop is too thin to actually fit nice an airport in it and no SD card slot perhaps a slight a mission here would have liked to see one of those included on the blade but nonetheless Thunderbolt 3 is not a feature that you see on every single gaming laptop so it's great to see Rosa has included it here the keyboard on the razor blade is well suited to gaming thanks to its light actuation force and reasonably good tactile feedback despite its short travel distance I think the layout here is very good except for the truncated arrow keys and in general you'll have no problems typing or gaming on this laptop and of course it's fully RGB backlit as you'd expect from a razer prodigy and super-tender Razer synapse and configure this as you would with any other Razer peripheral there's plenty of RGB options in there and tons of awesome effects you can include on this laptop there's endless possibilities that you can do in there I was also really impressed with the trackpad on this laptop you wouldn't necessarily want to use it for gaming but just in general everyday use yeah it tracks very solidly it has some nice clicky buttons at the bottom dedicated buttons there and in general I really can't complain about the trackpad experience or the keyboard that's provided on flat top perhaps the weakest aspect to the razor blade is its display my review he was cleared out with a 14 inch 1080p IPS LCD with no touchscreen you can configure that up to a 4k model with the touch screen and you get all the benefits of an IPS panel 300 tween its peak brightness 1 to 70 to 1 contrast ratio and great viewing angles but my main issue here is the color performance out of the box as we jump into spectra Cal Cal Man 5 and take a look at some of the graphs we're only seeing an average delta e value in greyscale of just 7.6 which is particularly bad and a saturation average of 4 point 43 with a color checker average of 5 point 4 7 are not great results here for the razor blade ideally you'd want to see a value below 2.0 for casual use and under 1.0 for professional use so it's well beyond what I would consider an accurate display and it's noticeably tinted green out of the box which is a bit surprising here so at least I guess raises and in color is green so maybe they thought that tint the display green or whatever but you can calibrate that out of the display oh and I wanna display Pro to do that you can achieve reasonably good results here and now let's move on to the section that you guys have all been waiting for the performance as we're looking at a core i7 7700 HQ and a geforce gtx 1060 GPU we won't see results that differ too much from some of the other gaming laptops that i've reviewed but it's still a pretty solid showing from the razor blade across the board nonetheless with no performance differences compared to some of those other laptops with similar specifications as we dive here into our pc mark home workload again very decent results here scoring 3213 around the same range as some of our other laptops with similar hardware and you'll see similar result in our creative benchmark here again this tends to be a bit GPU limited so we're not seeing some of the same scores as you'll get from gtx 1070 laptops or upwards and in the works core you probably wanted to use the razor blade for some productivity workloads and it scores reasonably well at 4815 in this particular test as we move on to our encoding benchmarks Cinebench our eleven point five again the razor blade falls within the range of other i7 7700 HD processors in both the multi and single threaded workloads and you'll see very similar results moving to our x264 HD encoding benchmark does reasonably well here scoring at around seventy nine frames per second and pass one of us run pretty typical results for the i7 7700 HQ and this makes it a very suitable laptop for some video editing on the go moving onto winrar and you'll see again rose oil results here that put this device in the same range as other laptops with similar hardware this benchmark can be a little bit memory bandwidth limited but we're looking at a dual channel system here so no issues in terms of its performance and for those engineers out there that want to be using MATLAB our 2016 for some simulations and so forth again a very solid showing from the razor blade here compared to some of the other laptops on the market with this sort of hardware and again you know it's a pretty portable laptop so it's improved showings across our productivity workloads is a very solid result here moving on to 3d marks times by workload just to make sure the GTX 1060 is working as expected and well it is it's approximately 29% slower than the GTX 1070 in some GPU limited tests however for those of you upgrade from a gtx 970m you can expect to see 44% more performance in the GPU limited workload so a pretty decent showing from the GTX 260 and it's pretty good to see a laptop with this sort of power in this sort of bomb factor moving on to some of our gaming results now we'll start with the older titles like tomb Raider's ultimate preset at 1080p 55 frames per second average with a 1% load of forty-one FPS makes this very playable on the GTX 1060 inside this laptop Microlife slides very high preset 77 FPS average with a 1% low of 53 fps so you can basically crank the settings up all the way in this title taking a look at BioShock Infinite we've got an average frame rate here of over 100 FPS exactly what we want to see and a 1% low of 49 fps a bit low here in BioShock Infinite that's pretty typical of the test that we're looking at Middle Earth shadow of Mordor again we're seeing fantastic results here an average frame rate of 87 FPS at 1% low of 62 FPS so a very smooth experience in this title in Grand Theft Auto 5 at maximum settings we're seeing an average frame rate of 57 FPS with a 1% low of 40 fps you can change the scenes down to high to achieve an average well above 60 fps but I think the gaming experience provided by the max settings are still pretty decent on the razorblade also take a look at rise of the Tomb Raider the most intensive title in this benchmark suite unfortunately you can't play it on maximum settings on the gtx 1060 and average frame rate of under 30 FPS just isn't an acceptable experience but if you take the settings down to high at 1080p you'll be cranking that average up to 64 FPS with a 1% low of 44 FPS so very playable experience I'll bet add some slightly reduced quality settings Deus Ex mankind divided a pretty decent game here at Ultra quality things we're seeing an average frame rate of 39 FPS on the GTX 1060 with a 1% low of 32 FPS so cutting it a little bit fine but again if you bring the settings down too high you will see your framerate jump up to 54 FPS with a 43 fps 1% low so pretty decent there so across the board here the Razer Blade II is a very capable gaming laptop with the GTX 1060 inside it's well suited to 1080p gaming at around the very high to ultra quality presets with frame rates around the 60fps marking some of the more recent tiles you might need to crack down things just a little bit to hit that frame rate target that you're after but in general the GTX 1060 this sort of form factor is a really compelling option for gamers I want something portable that they can take around with them wherever they are while we are seeing some very solid gaming performance results here there is one thing to note and that is the razor blade runs very hot and very loud if you don't have a good pair of headphones you will be able to hear the high pitch and loud fan whine from the blade over your in-game audio it is one of the loudest gaming laptops that I've reviewed and it runs very hot in AI 264th stability test we will see 95 degrees C on the CPU and 89 degrees C on the GPU and the metal unibody chassis is quite hot to touch in some of these situations if you're running a game like watchdogs to the temperatures are a bit better 81 degrees C on the CPU and 80 degrees C on the GPU but again some gaming laptops do have better cooling solutions that run quieter and cooler the razor blade has certainly traded off its cooling solution for its excellent form factor that's just something you have to consider when purchasing this laptop one aspect that I was more impressed with though is the battery life from this laptop and this surprised me considering the quad-core CPU inside and the GTX 1060 it's a 70 watt hour cell and take a look at some of our battery benchmarks here it performs very similar to a mid tier ultrabook and that's exactly what you want to see from a portable laptop like this achieving over seven hours in our video playback test is a fantastic result and achieving nearly six hours in our Wi-Fi browsing test is very similar to some of the ultrabooks that I've been taking a look at recently like the HP spectre x360 so what we've seen from the razorblade so far is a fantastic aluminium unibody chassis a great keyboard and trackpad with RGB backlighting we're also seeing a decent display not too well calibrated out of the box that can be fixed if you have a calibration tool and great performance and battery life across a wide range of benchmarks so the one thing that will prevent you from purchasing the Razer Blade is its price at 1900 US dollars for the 256 gigabyte model it is a very expensive laptop and to be honest I think you want at least 512 gigabytes of SSD space to make this laptop really worth it for your everyday usage and that will bring the cost up to two thousand one hundred US dollars well above the price of other laptops with similar hardware inside for those of you in Australia wanting to know how much is costing dollar readers we're looking at two thousand eight hundred dollars for the base model and three thousand one hundred for the 512 gigabyte model so again whether you're in Australia or the United States is a very expensive laptop but I think if you want the highest quality gaming laptop on the market perhaps the best on the market at the moment you will have to pay for the quality and that's simply the case with the Razer Blade it's a quality laptop but it will certainly cost you a bit to buy it anyway that's it for this review of the Razer Blade you can check out the full review the written review on techspot comm check out our patreon if you're interested in supporting the channel and we'll catch you in the next one