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Razer Blade Thin & Light Gaming Notebook Featuring Switchblade Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2012-06-16
you guys asked for it and I delivered eventually this is the razor blade I am doing an unboxing of this was an e3 demo unit so yes it's already open but I think you'll mostly get the point so what do we have inside we have pilaf okay interesting place silver and apply the film to the ocal explain what this is after so that's sort of probably supposed to be actually inside the package somewhere so the razor blade is a gaming notebook from a legitimately gaming company razor there's a lot of gaming notebooks from and I speak from first-hand experience from companies that don't actually understand what gamers want and what gamers need and not every not every notebook solution that is high performance or that is high quality is necessarily great for gaming for example Lenovo ThinkPad great notebooks not great for gaming more designed for corporate use rugged portability that kind of thing so it's all about what you actually need and razer believes that this notebook is entirely focused on what the gamer needs razer as always just like brilliant packaging that's that's how they roll it felt like kind of a carbon-fiber ask sort of look to the top of the box here and that's all the time you get to look at it because we have to keep things rolling here and have a look at the notebook yourself so this is a 17-inch gaming notebook it has a quad-core 2.8 gigahertz mobile processor that turbos up to 3.5 gigahertz did I say quad-core I'm sorry I meant dual-core thank you for the correction slick so it has a dual core processor however if you checked out my recent episode on NCIX tech tips on the NCIX comm channel you'll see that actually beyond the two cores hyper threaded in modern games there isn't really much benefit assuming the same clock speeds however for mobile CPUs making the same clock speed assumption isn't really fair because most mobile quad cores are not clocked at the same kind of speed as most mobile dual cores so there you go something to be aware of you guys it has eight gigs of DDR ddr3 memory it has a GT 550 m graphics card and at 0.88 inches it is phenomenally thin so it uses an aluminium construction which feels just absolutely beautiful um wow that's quite nice actually and the weight is actually pretty manageable too so the unit is about seven pounds which for a 17-inch notebook is already pretty good plus the fact that it uses a metal construction which doesn't really help with the weight factor but does help them keep it significantly slimmer so let's start with the overall is oh right right right okay let's finish with specs so spec wise right so it's got a 17.3 inch LED backlit screen it has a 256 gig boot SSD it has let's just open this up here it has a full anti-ghosting keyboard so what that means is that you're not going to have any issues or problems if you accidentally press you know some keyboards you if you press sort of combination of keys you can ghost and it can actually interject additional characters or not register key presses correctly all that kind of stuff so it has a gaming grade keyboard has a power button up here which has a green halo it also has a fully backlit keyboard and it's got an integrated sound bar so instead of doing stereo speakers they've gone with a sound bar and this this is the kuda grass of this particular product this is the Switchblade interface so instead of a traditional touchpad it is booted up now it is a glass surface here glass plastic feels like glass so whatever it's it's a it's a surface here that has two buttons and then ten fully customizable display buttons so these okay if you guys remember that I forget what it called was called it was like that art leba dev keyboard that it was the full keyboard within the oh LED screens and all the keys and it was fully programmable for whatever you wanted to do whatever language you wanted this is basically that except actually made commercially viable so you use their synapse 2.0 software which allows you to customize what shows up on these little screens it allows you to customize the functionality of the buttons you can have profiles for various games and the synapse 2.0 software actually allows you to save a variety of different gaming settings in the cloud so you can take them with you wherever you go so let's finish up with the exterior of the unit before we get too much further into into more details of the Switchblade just a whoops now we break it everything ok so let's do the the traditional iPhone thickness comparison there you go guys that gives you some idea so the laptop is actually less than seven pounds the seven pound travel weight is assuming you're carrying around the adapter as well which is extremely small and slim so you can see it's even Saha here we go iPhone size comparison whether you guys like it or not now you know how big the adapter is so there and this is actually kind of cool it comes with a nice rubber strap for dropping the cable so instead of one of those velcro ones that will wear out eventually because velcro inherently will you get that instep okay so ventilation is here on the side you can see the the heatsink fins power in is here Gigabit Ethernet HDMI out super speed USB three color coded green two USB 2.0 ports and a headphone out port on this side on the front of the unit you find not a whole lot in terms of i/o and on the other side of the unit you find just a Kensington lock which as you can see based on that this is a demo unit has been used can also see another cooling vent here as well as a heat pipe in there so obviously like pretty much every laptop that exists right now it is using a heat pipe for cooling more vent oh yeah more ventilation here so this must be the intake and that's probably the exhaust so you're going to might want to make sure you don't use it on a soft surface because those are your intakes right there make sure they don't get covered when you are especially when you are gaming so the Razer logo on the back it which i think is great and slick apparently doesn't like the razer logo as much as i do but whatever he's not the one who gets to stand in front of the camera and give his opinion anyway so the Razer logo which I love looks absolutely fantastic on the all-aluminum top here and it does have a backlight so it glows looks all baller I mean come on it's better than Apple or Dell with their logos on the back of a laptop see now he's nodding in agreement awesome the keyboard itself has almost no flex which is of course one of the advantages of using an aluminum construction for the notebook the notebook itself has this is actually pretty good considering how thin this is so this is a very thin screen as you guys can see now that I'm holding my iphone up against it and it only has just a touch of flex to it that's really good and then the bottom just absolutely no flex at all completely rigid so this thing is going to that it really helps it adds to the durability of a notebook when the parts aren't constantly being stressed and it happens whether you're aware of it or not when you're putting it in a bag or or moving it around it will happen I mean I mean have you guys ever used a notebook like this and walked around like this if you have done that you're putting your putting stress on the internal components because you're only supporting a small part of it and you're straining the PCBs it's not good for it I mean it's not going to kill you immediately but it's just one of those things we're having a more solidly built notebook is definitely a good thing um oh yeah I will show you guys how nice the back leg is on that keyboard awesome so beautifully backlit keyboard you can't really see much halo around the outsides of the keys at all but the the letterings themselves are very very well lit up so those look like they must be I mean they must be etched keys because I kind of have any get an awesome backlight like that right so let's talk switchblade 2.0 so the switchblade 2.0 UI and so you can see guys this is a trackpad it's also like a glass touch thing now not everyone likes glass wait okay now let's talk switchblade 2.0 uh synapse 2.0 before we go any further so synapse 2.0 is compatible with this as well as future Razer products and some legacy products like the Naga it actually allows you to save a variety of different things like macros any kind of programming any kind of sensitivity settings even things like lighting effects you can actually save in the cloud and then you just go to a LAN center or go to wherever you want and you can make sure that everything's set up exactly the way you want if that's cool the Switchblade is fully compatible with it and it can serve as a one of two different things so it can either be a four point multi-touch trackpad or it can be an 800 by 480 resolution display which is actually a phenomenal resolution to have in such a small space these are also LED backlit displays I think I covered that already and ah if you don't like the glass feel of the touchpad it actually includes a couple of different feeling covers that you can put on it that'll a protect the screen and be give you a bit of a different a bit of a different feedback experience depending on what you prefer so that's that's really good Oh what else do we have here guys oh yeah we haven't really covered the keyboard much let's have a look at the layout of the keyboard because that can really make or break a laptop for me if the keyboard has kind of a fail layout so can I reach the backspace yes can I reach Shift + Shift yes I can caps lock can be off this is a good keyboard layout yay or at least in my opinion you know not everyone agrees with me about everything but if they don't then they can get their own YouTube channels so um so the keyboard layout uses long shifts a reasonably long enter and a reasonably long backspace when I see short and shift keys short and back spaces as someone with small hands that's a real problem for me when the backspace ends you know right about here and you have a really short one because I just can't reach it whereas this one I can so in terms of hotkeys you've got your volume controls you've got your external display your media controls your brightness as well as your other more different brightness so your keyboard backlight brightness as well as your screen brightness and let's see what it can do there's your Razer logo for activating your hotkeys so I don't know what brightness that is but something's probably going on and oh please log into synapse to access full switchblade functionality so give me sec guys so our wireless network isn't working which means I have to sit here to log in but either way we have now logged into the synapse 2.0 software and this is really cool so you can customize whatever these displays have on them so let's go to Twitter for example oh cool and then once you do that apparently you have like navigation back forward and refresh so the dynamically change in terms of what what they're displaying since we don't have a Twitter account set up check that out that's actually like a pretty ballin out display so to go back to home you just click the razer logo right here and so let's try going to something that we actually can go to like say for example um what's this oh cool number pad okay back oh cool touch screen number pad I'm actually kind of I'm kind of like in this Oh Mac row recording okay what's that gaming mode okay so all this is neat so everything that's up here I was going to show you guys the app on the screen so everything that's here is also apparently here so you got your lighting effects so switch play module brightness normal bright screen brightness all that kind of good stuff you've got your art that that might be keyboard brightness I don't know whatever something there's touch there's a hotkeys for that anyway so put them to sleep on this saving power saving mode okay gaming mode allows you to do up disable a bunch of different key combos this is cool I actually haven't most gaming modes are like disable Windows key but disabling all tab and disabling alt f4 are sort of equally important so yeah okay so anyway everything that's up there seems to also be down here so let's go ahead and press this apparently that's gonna ha go to razor calm can we zoom or anything like that oh yeah I don't know how to actually enter like a I'll search there we go keyboard active suite I mean this is the kind of thing that if you're someone like me okay here here all I'm going to show you guys something when I'm using my computer at home a lot of the time my smartphone is like popped up like this on my desk because I'll have like a YouTube video playing or something while I'm actually trying to use my computer this is that now I can have like triple screens so I can be like navigating the ncx weekly special or like reading the forum without actually okay it's not super fast but it is what it is forums come on yeah there we go no no I clicked the wrong thing ah there we go so I'm legs a little bit there oh I missed I hit the new arrivals forums come on okay so it's not quite an iPhone touchscreen but for basic functionality like watching YouTube videos or whatever else this kind of thing would be absolutely perfect so let's go back let's see what else we got here so you can have a clock using razors like fancy thing and okay so this is just so you see that Razer logo there that is because the whole thing is a display you can turn that off and it can just be blank in a four point multi-touch pad you don't have to have anything on the display so in games you can actually have additional information displayed here as well which is really really really cool so I'm going to open brace sorry is looking for a touchpad there I'm just sort of hardwired for that now screen resolution so let's see if it detects it as like a completely separate screen yeah I don't know how they're doing I don't know how doing this but they're doing it it's really cool and there you go what's that is that the youtubes there this is exactly like the only thing that I would really use this for when I'm not like other than games I guess I guess Twitter's not bad either to be perfectly honest so you can watch later account most recent search so we could search for um oops - tech tips and we could watch my PA z77 premium motherboard unboxing so cool okay so that is the razor blade razor blade unboxing don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from boxing's reviews and other computer videos that goes my phone
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