Keyboard and touchpad

Display and sound

Performance



Despite being tuned for balance, the Blade eked out a rather respective showing in our usual collection of benchmarks. Armed with a 2.8GHz Core i7-2640M CPU, it notched a speedy 14,379 in PCMark Vantage. It wasn't nearly as triumphant in the graphics department, where it was held back by that GeForce 555M card, which managed 11,556 in 3DMark06 and P1,536 in 3DMark11.



Performance isn't all about raw numbers, though, and happily the Blade doesn't disappoint in real world use. Throughout our testing, the Blade was able to handle typical computing tasks aplomb: heavy web browsing, Photoshop editing and serving as an Engadget workhorse were all dealt swiftly and without complaint. It's when you ask the Blade to serve as your gaming compatriot, however, things begin to get a little murky. While after-work Starcraft II matches cranked just shy of ultimate posed no problem (with framerates consistently in the high forties to fifties), we can't say the same about newer titles which invoke strain, even after you reel in the visuals significantly. While playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, for example, we reeled graphical settings all the way back to medium to make the game passably playable -- we're talking frame rates in the high twenties at full resolution [Update: Fresh drivers from NVIDIA drastically improved performance for Skyrim, enabling the game to run on the GPU instead of integrated graphics card. With graphics cranked to high we saw frames hover around high twenties, and in medium a very playable low forties]. With something like Battlefield 3 on the other hand, we had more luck, eking out more respectable mid-30FPS from medium settings, again at full resolution.



When it came to heat dissipation, we had no complaints in our time spent with the Blade. As you'd expect, things get a little toasty while running full tilt, but even then it won't lacerate, and for general purposes it kept decently cool. Fans weren't loud obnoxiously loud either, however, in time you'll notice the fairly aggressive leftward unit which has a tendency to flare up any time you encounter peaky CPU work. We weren't particularly dismayed by the behavior, but it's definitively noticeable, perhaps more so here, as the Blade's SSD makes it silent otherwise.



Finally, thanks to its aforementioned reliance on flash storage, loading times, installs and boots were speedy, with the latter clocking in at 17-18 seconds from a cold start to the Windows login screen. Running the disk benchmark ATTO informed us that peak reads happened at 467MB/sec and writes at 362MB/sec. Finally, we'd like to applaud Razer for making the right choice in delaying shipment to opt for that SSD -- in 2012 as far as we're concerned, it's a must-have in a machine in this price range.



Battery life

Laptop Battery Life Razer Blade 2:57 MSI GT683DXR 2:40 Toshiba Qosmio X775-3DV78 1:26 2010 HP Envy 17 2:10 HP Envy 15 4:07 Dell XPS 15z 3:41 (Optimus disabled) / 4:26 (Optimus enabled) 15-inch Samsung Series 7 Chronos 5:47 2011, 15-inch MacBook Pro 7:27

So we've determined it isn't quite the graphical sprinter, but can the Blade still come out ahead in the marathon that's battery longevity? In a word no. As shown above, running Engadget's video-rundown test at roughly half brightness reveals things are a little more complicated than you might have initially thought. Yes, the Blade's less power hungry graphics are primarily responsible for it running circles around its more pudgy, brute-ish rivals. Still, that's not saying much, as being just shy of three hours, it falls considerably short when compared to more mainstream notebooks. Still, that bests MSI's 15-inch GT583DXR by a full 20 minutes despite wielding a larger screen (but with a lesser card) and demolishes the more comparable 17-inch Qosmio X775's by a whopping hour and a half -- all, in a thin profile.



Alas, if you were planning on a sojourn sans charger, you'll be out of luck. Even with casual use and exercising brightness restraint, we were only able to coax just shy of three and a half hours of work out of its 60Wh battery -- dwindling down to around three with full brightness. For those daring to game on the go, unlike other laptops which'll significantly pare down their performance, the Blade will cheerfully run at full throttle for about an hour before simmering down. Ultimately neither are legendary, we know, but compared to other laptops, definitely workable.



Software



Seeing as its exterior is devoid of all stickers -- save for one -- why would Razer go and mess with its innards? Thankfully it hasn't, leaving the Blade free of additional software or crapware, with an almost clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium. And we mean "almost," as you'll still get Dolby Home Theater software and a copy of Razer's Synapse app -- the later of which you'll want to configure that those LCD buttons. So we've determined it isn't quite the graphical sprinter, but can the Blade still come out ahead in the marathon that's battery longevity? In a word no. As shown above, running Engadget's video-rundown test at roughly half brightness reveals things are a little more complicated than you might have initially thought. Yes, the Blade's less power hungry graphics are primarily responsible for it running circles around its more pudgy, brute-ish rivals. Still, that's not saying much, as being just shy of three hours, it falls considerably short when compared to more mainstream notebooks. Still, that bests MSI's 15-inch GT583DXR by a full 20 minutes despite wielding a larger screen (but with a lesser card) and demolishes the more comparable 17-inch Qosmio X775's by a whopping hour and a half -- all, in a thin profile.Alas, if you were planning on a sojourn sans charger, you'll be out of luck. Even with casual use and exercising brightness restraint, we were only able to coax just shy of three and a half hours of work out of its 60Wh battery -- dwindling down to around three with full brightness. For those daring to game on the go, unlike other laptops which'll significantly pare down their performance, the Blade will cheerfully run at full throttle for about an hour before simmering down. Ultimately neither are legendary, we know, but compared to other laptops, definitely workable.Seeing as its exterior is devoid of all stickers -- save for one -- why would Razer go and mess with its innards? Thankfully it hasn't, leaving the Blade free of additional software or crapware, with an almost clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium. And we mean "almost," as you'll still get Dolby Home Theater software and a copy of Razer's Synapse app -- the later of which you'll want to configure that those LCD buttons.