Gadgetory

so this is an engineering sample which means that I can't do any benchmarks and I can't do any thermal testing or anything like that but if you guys have been following along with me for the last couple of years you'll probably know that while I wouldn't describe myself as a razor fan by any stretch of the imagination sorry racer I am partial to their laptops whether it's the blade formerly blade 14 formerly blade 14 year 2014 or whatever or the blade stealth which has actually been my daily driver lately so when Razer offered to send over their new blade 15.6 whatever it is they're calling this thing their latest cutting-edge gaming laptop for an early sneak preview I couldn't resist humblebundle lets you save money on games while supporting charitable causes and you can learn more at our link in the video description so any first look starts with the unboxing experience oh oh you want to see oh sure here so this has actually been opened up already by Tyler because he had to take it out and put a label on it all that kind of stuff so I'm getting like that this is a very subpar subpar on box this is like sloppy seconds unboxing experience that's okay I think I think I'll get over it so they have actually finally changed their packaging for the blade and I think they managed to make it even more bare-bones which is a feat so you get a letter from this is interesting he changed his title we've dropped the chief gamer charade ha good for them you get some instruction manuals you get a microfiber cloth you'll need one of those and you get a shiny multicolored Razer logo with some other Razer chroma stuff that you can stick all over here your stuff you also get a plea not to return the Razer has revised their power brick because of the increased power requirements of this new blade so gone is the sleek small rounded hundred and sixty five watt brick and here is the 200 watt sort of block here and larger bricks the one thing that they did manage to keep is my least favorite thing about it and it's the right angle cable that comes off of it like this is the problem with it this happens all the time it puts constant strain on it and while they've reinforced it and it's wow it's really thick I'm still really not a fan of that design so if you were hoping for type C power you will be sorely disappointed not only do you not get a standard power connector you get a new proprietary one from Razer that I have not seen before fortunately it's reversible so you can plug it in either this way or that I'm gonna go with this way so my initial impression when I first touched this was that it was a lot bigger than the old blade fourteen even though razors marketing is all about how it's a really similar size but what I also thought was that maybe I just felt that way because I've been using the blade stealth as my daily driver lately and that one really is a lot smaller like we're talking an inch here an inch and change there but I think what makes it feel so big is not just that it is taller so you can see it's got a significantly higher profile off the table almost the entire thickness of the screen even though it's actual X&Y dimensions aren't that different those are really close but the squareness makes it feel just because of kind of its its sharpness and blockiness it makes it feel a lot bigger really not sure if I prefer this new design language from them on the bottom there's another big change here too so while these feet used to hold the blade a little bit off the table that was actually one of the fundamental problems with its design was it had a hard time sucking air into these bottom fans now they're really tall like they're less you know anti-slip feet and they're more like a built in laptop stand to hold the thing off the table and you should be able to really see that if I put it up next to the other one another big change is that those two bottom fans are now actually metal blades as far as I can tell so they're super thin blades they should be more efficient and because they're jamming up to a gtx 1070 in this thing you can also see a huge change to the way that they're doing the venting at the back so in the old blade it was just like the old mac books where it came out from behind the hinge here and then the air vented up towards the screen now air gets sucked in here and it can go out any which way it can come out these holes here it can go out this way and it's like quite open in fact you can even see that the display cable is exposed there that is a very strange design choice I have never seen anybody do that before but for all the bigger Vernis we're definitely getting some benefits so we've got Thunderbolt 3 yet again we've got a USB 3 HDMI and been asking for this for a while mini DisplayPort on the one side so you can drive up to three displays off of this thing externally at a time that's freaking awesome then we've got a couple more USBs and a headphone microphone combo jacks so we do get an i/o upgrade for the size increase and of course all of the internal upgrades so they're now shipping with 8th gen core i7 processors so that's up to six cores GTX 10 60s or 10 70s and I think we've got that's 110 60 or 110 70 and I think we've got more competition to thank for all of that stuff because Razer has done hardly anything with this design over the last four years but now this really does look like a 20-18 notebook my biggest complaints about the last gen blade were the very outdated looking thick bezels the 60 Hertz refresh rate which in my mind is unjustifiable on a gaming machine in this day and age and the lackluster performance being limited to a GTX 1060 rather than up to a 1070 even if that 1070 is a max q1 so that's a lower TDP version and they've actually fixed some things that I hadn't even really complained about that much so like the blade stealth the regular blade now has an oversized trackpad and really it's especially noticeable if you go and put the old one up next to it but one thing I have to confess I'm a little disappointed about is they've actually done away with the hardware clicky button something that I I really like and I do use in place of just sort of push a push in trackpad one that doesn't have like it's hinged up at the top so it doesn't have an even amount of force required everywhere that you press on it you know even though it feels a little stiffer it's not Anna it's not in a bad way there's less key wobble already like that's something that was a bit of an issue with the old blade definitely some backlight bleed I can even see it in the studio lighting but I'm not gonna ding them too hard on that when this is a pre-production model the thunderbolt connector is still on the right which is a real drag because that's where my mouse goes so we've got some dongle Mouse interference and this power button was an opportunity to include a touch sensor in 2018 everything should have biometrics even if you choose not to use it and they've opted not to include either IR emitter windows hello or a touch sensitive power button both of which make logging into the machine a lot faster so the two different resolutions they're shipping 1080p at 60 Hertz so that's the one that starts at 1899 which to me is crazy a $2,000 gaming laptop with a 60 Hertz display or 1080p with 144 Hertz those are both meant to be the gaming models and then what's interesting to me is the 4k one so the gaming one has a hundred percent srgb coverage while the 4k one has a hundred percent Adobe RGB coverage and because it's 4k only a 60 Hertz refresh rate and touch so what's interesting about that to me is it seems like razors actually only got 1080p gaming models and then the 4k one is positioned more like a creative or professional option man with the game running over a hundred and forty-four frames per second this looks so smooth even though every machines chips with 16 gigs and I don't disagree with that configuration what's really cool is that it is now upgradeable for the first time on a razor blade so I shouldn't have to be impressed by that but it's 2018 so I am and acoustics I mean that was the first thing Brandon asked was is it as loud as the old one reserving full judgment for the full review but actually it's not bad so far like even though I've had this running for 10-15 minutes now so we're at full heat it doesn't have that shrill whine that the old blade did though I've yet to see how it behaves with the 1070 max-q so on the surface the all-new blade and that really does seem to be what they're calling it address is pretty much every complaint I had about the way that the old blade was aging it's got two more CPU cores it's got a bigger display it's got a high refresh rate display but the industry has come a long way since the original blade and the competition is a lot better so whether I would recommend it over something like an Asus Zephyrus is gonna come down to raw performance as well as thermals in acoustics and for that we need a finished unit so stay tuned guys because this is going to be an interesting showdown speaking of interesting private Internet access is an interesting choice for your VPN PIAA supports a variety of VPN protocols and types of encryption and authentication allowing you to dial in the exact level of privacy protection you need we've got apps for Windows Mac OS Linux Chrome Android iOS and support for more platforms coming in the future and their apps include DNS leak protection and ipv6 leak protection they've also got an Internet kill switch which will block all traffic if the VPN becomes disconnected unexpectedly and you can check it out today at the link in the video description it is surprisingly affordable so thanks for watching this first impressions of the blade the all-new razor blade if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured 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