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Razer Blade Pro – Faster! Flashier! Flawed?

2016-12-19
razor did not even wait for their blade Pro to be available to customers to take aim at apples use of the pro moniker on a product that didn't even have an SD card reader but in a sense apples correct in their assertion that Pro can have a lot of different meanings an audio production professional has an entirely different set of needs from a professional gamer so who is the razor blade Pro for and at 3700 to 4500 US dollars will anyone buy one these are both very good questions that I will try to answer verdaguer gonna make a sand + lines of gaming chairs make for a great addition to any gaming setup check them out at the link in the video description the blade pro outwardly has a lot in common with the ancestor i unboxed four and a half years ago it's a 17 inch class device with an all aluminum unibody construction it's got subtle contour on the lid and a black on black color scheme for style and it's got an 0.8 eighth inch thickness that makes it much sleeker looking and feeling than a typical desktop replacement once we get past the surface however it becomes abundantly clear what razor has been working on for almost half a decade instead of some namby-pamby mid tier graphics card and a dual-core CPU razer has stuffed all of this into the 2016 blade pro with the standouts being the raid 0 PCIe nvme SSD storage configuration from the top to the bottom of the lineup and the top-of-the-line desktop grade gtx 1088 gig graphics solution from nvidia and there's a solid mix of i/o to boot with the highlights for pro users being the integrated SD reader hdmi 2.0 output with 7.1 codec support Gigabit Ethernet and a Thunderbolt 3 port that allows the blade pro to be connected to a wide variety of external storage devices or other high end peripherals though curiously razer is not officially supporting their own razer core external GPU enclosure presumably because there wouldn't be much to upgrade to i mean to say this thing flies would be a gross understatement games productivity content creation it chews through it all there are a lot of laptops out there with 4k displays at this point but almost all of them including the also pretty sleek though still thicker EVGA SC 17 have suffered from the same fatal flaw they don't have the horses to properly drive that kind of resolution but these thermal results and gaming benchmarks should show that the blade pro is ready to deliver a comfortable experience in even the most demanding Triple A games with razors inclusion of Nvidia g-sync adaptive refresh technology going a long way towards smoothing out the appearance of on-screen animations even down to around 40 frames per second but back to one of my earlier questions cramming a gtx 1080 into any household object turns it into a suitable device for professional gamers but what has razer done to draw in other professionals we'll start with the display touchscreen nice to have solid IPS like viewing angles nice to have to a greater than 1000 to 1 contrast ratio with 99 percent Adobe RGB coverage now you're getting my attention this means more creative possibilities in programs like Adobe Creative Cloud with support for this wider color space but based on these values not out of the box a delta e of greater than 2 is considered not accurate so a calibration tool would be necessary before doing even basic color grading work let's move on now to the human interface aspect of the blade Pro the switchblade interfaces touch screen monitor touch pad and mini display programmable buttons from the original blade pro are gone Razer says this was to make room for more internal components but I think it's because they've had this time to reflect on the usefulness of programmable gaming keys above a touch pad but one thing that does remain is the curious positioning of the trackpad along with the integrated scroll or volume wheel and media keys what the hell was Razer thinking with this I think they were thinking yeah most people will get used to it and actually for most purposes I kind of did the dead zone at the bottom shouldn't be there it's uncomfortable to use two-handed so I run out of pad when clicking and dragging stuff over long distances and respect to Apple for their haptic touch pads the long travel down distance makes the pointer move sometimes when I'm trying to click but it is far from unusable and number two they were thinking they wanted to cram a maximum legal limit 99 watt hour battery into the wrist rest giving the blade pro very solid battery life for a desktop replacement class product about 75% of the Dell XPS pro in my usual tests and about equal to its smaller brother the blade in a gaming test so the touchpad ends up being kind of a neutral point for me but what about the keyboard well this might cost me early access to the next big razor blade launch but it has to be said loud and clear so they learn sure it's reprogrammable and synapse it's got RGB or whatever but this thing is abominable you don't have to move a lot to seriously impede a strong touch typists ability to get anything done on a keyboard and while I've been asking razor for full-sized arrow keys for some time now this is not a price I'm willing to pay for them making matters worse razor 65 gram mechanical key switches are among the worst I've encountered in a long time I already don't prefer the heavily front-loaded tactile bump and mushy follow-through but it's the inconsistency in feel from key to key that really make it impossible to maintain accuracy at speed you can even hear it listen to how different these keys right next to each other sound there's no hiding behind optimized for gaming as a defense this time this is a bad keyboard on that note thanks to some extra porting the compressed speakers actually sound pretty good but on the subject of acoustics the blade pro carries on the tradition of the blade song as I like to call it being tolerable at idle but very loud under heavy loads when a lot of airflow is needed leading then to the answer to my second question would anyone buy one this is a product that has some noticeable warts I personally vow to never buy a razer product with this keyboard design but it's one that also has some utterly unique selling points like its small power brick specially for a laptop of this power its Adobe RGB screen and it's jaw-dropping performance in what is a larger and heavier compared to the blade but legitimately portable and even sexy form factor so are there buyers out there yeah you bet there are ifixit.com is your complete DIY electronics repair solution from their 19,000 free step-by-step repair guides to their huge inventory of replacement parts and tools with lifetime warranties iFixit has your repair needs covered they're also proud to announce their release of their redesigned essential electronics toolkit it's versatile and only cost twenty US dollars you can fix your phone upgrade your laptop swap out a dead battery repair your drone tighten your door handle take apart a blender adjust your glasses do whatever you want use it for whatever you need and hold on I fix it calm slash Linus and use offer code Linus to save five bucks on a purchase of $10 or more alright so thanks for watching guys um he's had a lot of drinks of that in between China Vilnius if this video suck do you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at Amazon in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that other stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so check out our latest video over on channel super-fun
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