But before you run out and buy a new Blade, let's talk about the elephant in the room: not everything plays nicely with that 3200 x 1800 resolution. Older games like Portal 2 weren't designed for screens this crisp, and their artwork doesn't hold up under close scrutiny. It's a little bit like when HDTVs were first introduced and newscasters realized they needed to do a more careful job with their makeup. And unfortunately, some recently released games are just too demanding to run with both high resolution and the artwork that would let you appreciate them at high resolution, like BioShock Infinite.

Many games require lots of tweaking to look good

That could pose a problem with future games too. While you can turn down games like BioShock and Crysis 3 to 1080p and use the laptop's extra headroom to crank up the level of detail, not all games will properly fill the screen unless you also switch your Windows desktop resolution to 1080p. That’s a bug: Razer says a fix is underway. And because 1080p isn't the screen's native resolution, you'll need to spend some of that graphical muscle on anti-aliasing to get rid of jagged edges you wouldn't normally see.

And like last year's Blade, the laptop gets seriously hot if you crank all the settings up. There's a new cooling system that directs the heat away from the all-important WASD keys, but I still had extremely sweaty palms after a single hour of gaming due to the way the anodized aluminum frame conducts heat.

Hardcore PC gamers will anticipate and negotiate these issues, but not everyone wants to spend their time tweaking things to look and feel right. And even if you’re not gaming, you’ll run into issues with Windows applications that look blurry or unreadably tiny. Internet Explorer looks great, but Google Chrome is a bit of mess. High-res photos and videos look fantastic, but the interfaces to actually flip through them may be ugly or unusable if software companies haven’t updated them to support high-density screens. There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of new high-res laptops and tablets coming out, though, so hopefully that problem will eventually go away.

What won’t get better is the new Blade’s sub-par battery life. While last year's model lasted 6 hours and 49 minutes on our Verge Battery Test, the 2014 edition was a full two hours shy at 4 hours, 48 minutes in all. When I integrated the Blade into my actual workday, writing stories and answering emails with a little music in the background, I barely made it through four hours on a charge. Though Razer's custom power adapter remains delightfully portable, you’re still just as screwed if you leave it at home before hopping on the train to work.

It’s a shame, too, because otherwise this is the best laptop that Razer’s ever built. The keyboard feels more responsive somehow, even if it’s a tad stiff to start, and the trackpad’s two dedicated buttons are clickier and more comfortable to press compared to their shallow predecessors. Though pinch-to-zoom detection on the trackpad is still a bit overzealous, it’s smooth and glassy when simply flinging the cursor around, closer than ever to the high bar set by Apple’s MacBook Air. Even the speakers provide a surprisingly clear, crisp, and wide audio field thanks to freshly tuned Dolby software.

Photography by Michael Shane