Gadgetory

excellent this is the razor blade 2016 model updated in late 2016 to add Nvidia's Pascal based GTX 1066 Giga graphics card to the mix a full desktop classic GPU and not a stupid mobile GPU of mind you the version that razer sent over for me to review features a skylake i7 6700 HQ quad-core cpu with hyper threading a 14 inch IPS 1920 by 1080 matte screen a 512 gig SSD and 16 gigs of DDR 4 memory all somehow wedged into this 0.7 inch thick CNC milled aluminum chassis and weighing just 4.16 pounds but I'm a desktop guy and sexy thin notebooks like this are always overpriced this one happens to cost two grand and its current configuration or you can pay 200 bucks less for one with a 256 gig SSD or 400 dollars more for one with a one terabyte SSD too large is a lot of money to spend on a computer especially when you consider how for the rest of this video I'm going to be comparing this razor blade to a desktop build just in an attempts to determine how much of a premium you have to pay for the convenience of portability and I guess sexiness - let's finish off specs and features though that 6700 HQ CPU can turbo up to 3.5 gigahertz on a single core but it will run at 3.1 gigahertz turbo when using all four cores the 70 watt hour battery will last for about 6 hours during media playback web surfing and about three to four hours while gaming depending on what game you're playing of course and as expected you get an eight-oh 2.11 AC Wi-Fi and bluetooth 4.1 module via a killer NIC and I very much appreciate that you can actually access the internals of the Razer Blade by removing the 10 t5 screws and popping off the bottom plate which means you could potentially update that m2 SSD in there and perhaps even the Wi-Fi card if you really felt you need to in the future physically the blade is just pretty badass I have to admit the flat black finish is beautiful and it stays cool to the touch while not in use at least the design is simple and elegant with a couple ridges right across the top and a cutout across the front that makes lifting the lid a little bit easier rubber strips on the bottom provides some spacing for the two Fanning takes down there but these can get starved for air unless the blade is on a a flat surface finally there is that glowing razor triple snakehead logo which I still can't decide if I love or a hate please help me decide by arguing for or against it in the comment section down below since this is a fourteen inch laptop the body size is small just thirteen point six by nine point three by 0.7 inches and for connectivity you've got three green accented USB 3.0 ports and a USB type-c port that is both USB 3.1 and the Thunderbolt three compatible so it can also be used to hook up the cool but also very expensive razor core external GPU enclosure if that 1060 isn't doing it for you there's also power in headphone mic jacks on the left side and an HDMI out and Kensington lock on the right side also really missing here is an SD card slot in my professional opinion opening the blade starts the fans spinning and they will continue spinning and making some noise even at idle under load the fan noise can get quite loud but more on that when the testing happens I do like the individual left and right click buttons on the trackpad but the trackpad performance itself is just okay it's simply not as responsive as it could be but the software has settings that you can adjust in the OS did help a bit bring a mouse if you're going to gain I guess is what I'm saying the keyboard is also adequate with decent travel for chiclet style keys with scissor switches so I didn't have much trouble with that but I do like the chroma RGB lighting it's a very nice touch and it can be customized if you want I also like the backlit keyboard because it's especially nice for gaming in a dark environment they have decent sounding stereo speakers that can be found on the left and right side of the keyboard and there's an integrated webcam up on top lastly there is the screen itself on the plus side it is 1920 by 1080 and matte I prefer matte to glossy any day of the week and 1080 is just fine for a 14 inch display while also aligning with what the GTX 1060 is capable of while you're gaming on the downside it's not a touchscreen for that you've got an upgrade to the Razer Blade Pro which has a GTX 1080 and a 4k touchscreen starting for the bargain-basement price of $3,700 good lord let's move on to some benchmarks though so we're going to start off with some synthetic benchmarks 3d mark of course running firestrike extreme and I'm comparing the benchmarks for the Razer Blade 2016 to the $750 build that I did a month or two ago it's got an i-5 6500 so still a quad core but not hyper-threading as well as a full-size gtx 1066 gigabytes in fire strike extreme overall score was 49 57 for the razorblade graphics was 52 48 physics was 95 76 and the combined score was 23 18 if you compare that to the full-size system you will note that it did not score as high overall however the physics score was much higher and I attribute that to the hyper-threading that's available on the 6700 HQ processor moving on to time spy which is a DirectX 12 test overall score was 35 14 graphics was 34 59 CPU was 38 64 I was again able to beat those overall scores with the $750 build that I did last month however again you can see the CPU score the Razer Blade 2016 outperforming again due to the availability of eight threads moving over to GTA 5 running it at 1920 by 1080 of course average frames per second was 78.8 on the razorblade 2016 and the minimum frames per second was 16.5 comparing this to a full-sized stock or reference GTX 1060 that I tested a few months back when it launched 96.4 average FPS was what it got there so so you'll notice the reduce score even though we're comparing the exact same GPU here more on that when I come to temperature testing and what frequency the 1060 and the razor blade was actually running it civilization 6 I've just recently added so I don't have much to compare this to but again running at 1920 by 1080 in DirectX 12 mode average frame time was nineteen point four to 99th percentile was 24 0.38 and the AI benchmark which is again a very CPU dedicated test scored a thirty point three three seconds average term time the only other system I've tested this on is the Mini ITX build that I did last month which scored about 16 seconds for average turn time and there it's just basically the difference in performance that you get with the full-size desktop CPU versus the mobile version of the 6700 HQ finally I did a little bit of productivity testing with Adobe Premiere cs6 just doing some time I'm scrubbing was again just fine with this particular system and when I encoded a six minute and 15-second 4k video it took just shy of 20 minutes 19 minutes and 59 seconds to render out on the system just using the internal SSD which is where it was pulling the data from for the project as well as writing the data to so I would say overall that's pretty impressive again when I compared it to the Mini ITX build and the 380 T with a 6700 gain and gtx 1070 that one did it in 15 minutes and 29 seconds so only about 4 or 5 minutes slower than you would get with the full-size build so that was pretty nice - let's do a quick noise test I hope you guys can hear me okay so right now the system is at idle it's just been sitting here idling and ambient temperature is pretty cool so there is some fan noise that I will you can probably hear as soon as I stop talking so not too terrible but it definitely does make some noise even at idle but let's load up Unigine Valley and let things warm up and then we'll see how how we fare so now I've been running unit in Valley for I take a 10 to 15 minutes everything has warmed up and the fans are not spitting it pretty much full speed which is pretty much what they're going to do when you game with the system for any extended period of time so let's give a listen and that is a pretty substantial amount of noise given that it is a fairly small laptop but again it's doing everything it can to keep that 1060 cool now you guys can't see it but I'll give you a close-up in a sec the actual GPU temperature right now is 76 degrees Celsius and it's running at just shy of 1600 megahertz that's a big difference between what you would get with a desktop version of a GTX 1060 which under load on average is going to run at least at stock frequencies more around 1850 or so so you are losing about 200 to 250 megahertz on average of frequency just because it's in a much smaller form factor it's having to fight to keep things cool a little bit more and it's just having to throttle back that temperature I'm sorry that frequency in order to maintain the temperature and keep everything smooth now the plus side everything has been nice and smooth so it is doing a good job there but I also want to point out that the temperature wear starts getting warm down in this area which is where the GPU is underneath the little keyboard right there and although the area out here starts out staying cooler it warms up so this is a fairly subjective I'm just using a little pointer thing to measure temperature there at the center of the keyboard we're getting temperatures at least spot check temperatures around 100 and 607 degrees Fahrenheit which is which is pretty warm not quite comfortable if you have your hand right on top of that now at first there was about a 20 degrees difference when I started going so it was about 95 in this area and out here where it was still staying cooler where your wrist rest would be down to about 65 degrees however that is now I'm sorry about 75 but that has now also warmed up so we're hitting 87 88 there so as this center area warms up as a GPU gets warm it's going to warm up the rest of the chassis again it's not like you can't use it to play or anything like that it's just it's work and that's something that you should bear in mind if you are purchasing this laptop so on the plus side the Razer Blade gives you desktop grade gaming and processing performance and a form factor that's the size of maybe a stack of a few magazines the design is both sexy and functional if you can get past the sort of gamer II Razer logo and green accents and the battery life is solid if not exceptional on the minus side as you heard during the game testing this thing can get really loud and the housing can get really hot hot enough near the key components that I would not want to have this laptop on my lap while gaming unless I was freezing to death and it was the only viable source of warmth of course there's also the price which at $2,000 puts it out of the range of many consumers so as expected there's a lot to be said for the price to performance ratio that you can get when building a desktop PC especially when you're comparing it to a laptop for around say a thousand to $1500 depending on where you're doing some give-and-take one could easily part on a system that would be equal if not surpass the razor blade in performance but you'd have to include a monitor a mouse a keyboard and a Windows license to be fair and you definitely would not be able to take it with you at least not without a lot of hassle and I guess a very large carrying case quick aside here don't ever put a monitor in a checked bag while you're flying it never ends well so if portability is high on your priority list I'd say about $600 is the premium that you're paying for it here at least compared to a desktop PC and having done a fair amount of travel myself in the past couple years I can totally see why that's more than worth it for some people that's all for this video though guys thank you so much for watching and don't forget to hit the thumbs up button and like it and comment subscribe and do other things down in the section down below also in the description you can find links to my store where you can buy merchandise as well as a link to where you can currently buy the razor blade 2016 we'll see you next time