Razer Blade (2015)

• Processor
  Sleek, light design. Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO) display with 3,200-by-1,800 resolution and touch capability. Intel Core i7-4720HQ CPU and 16GB memory. Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M GPU. Improved performance and battery life over previous iteration.
• Cons Gets very hot. Discrepancy between graphics and display capability.
• Bottom Line
  The newest Razer Blade boasts impressive features and great performance, making it the ultraportable gaming machine to beat.
  
  
  The 2015 version of the Razer Blade ($2,199.99) is the latest in the company's highly influential ultraportable gaming laptop line. The previous model, the Razer Blade (2014)$1,899.00 at Amazon left us feeling a bit disappointed, with a short battery life and despite an impressive high-resolution display—which actually outstripped the capabilities of the graphics hardware. As such, the ultraportable Editors' Choice has been the 2013 Razer Blade$1,699.00 at Amazon for the last two years, as nothing has quite matched the portability and overall value of that model. Well, the Blade is back for 2015, with new hardware that promises to polish out these rough spots and return the Razer to its preeminent place among other ultraportable gaming systems, like the MSI GS60 Ghost Pro 3K$1,974.99 at Amazon. But does the new Blade live up to the hype? Let's find out.
  
  
  Design
  The slim and sleek design of the Razer Blade is unchanged, looking very much like a MacBook Pro dressed in black. The aluminum chassis measures 0.7 by 13.6 by 9.3 inches (HWD) and the laptop weighs just 4.47 pounds, making it light enough to carry in a laptop bag. The aluminum is anodized a matte black, which is accented with bright-green touches—the USB ports, a glowing Razer logo on the lid, and the backlight of the keyboard all have the same verdant glow.
  
  
  
  The display is just as impressive as the one on last year's Razer Blade (2014), with QHD+ (3,200-by-1,800) resolution, with an Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO) panel that offers stunning color quality and excellent viewing angles. That resolution is actually higher than those seen on systems like the MSI GS60, and it's one of the most impressive aspects of the previous iteration. The screen also boasts 10-point touch capability, which is still relatively rare on gaming systems. Whether or not that higher resolution is the best choice for an ultraportable is still up for debate. If you want avoid the issues of better-than-HD altogether, Razer also sells a version of the Blade equipped with a 1,920-by-1,080, non-touch display ($1,999.99).
  The chiclet-style keyboard is
  (predictably) quite good, as Razer's bread and butter has long been gaming peripherals. It's optimized for gaming, with full anti-ghosting, meaning you can press any number of keys without the input locking up or slowing down. The keys have a solid feel to them, and the key travel is deeper than you'll get with most chiclet-style keyboards, which I greatly prefer. It's also programmable, letting you remap keys or assign macro commands in Razer's Synapse control dashboard.
  The mouse is similarly optimized, with its size and touch calibration set to require less lifting of fingers for smooth tracking across the display, and separate right and left buttons with firm feedback. On either side of the keyboard are built-in speakers, providing stereo sound with enough volume to fill a room, and even a bit more bass than we expected. Razer also bolsters the sound with its own audio software, Razer Surround, which offers 7.1 surround sound for both speaker systems and gaming headsets.
  Heat is a significant problem, and it's little wonder with high-performance components packed into such a narrow space. Though Razer does tout its thermal management, I still felt the heat, with temperatures hitting 128 degrees during testing (as measured with a Fluke IR thermometer). Fan noise doesn't seem to be as big a problem this time around, but it's still quite noticeable.
  Features
  The connector options are unchanged from the previous model, with one USB 3.0 port and an HDMI-out port on the right side of the system, and two USB 3.0 ports and a headset jack on the left. For connectivity, there are dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. For improved portability, the power adapter also has a compact design, with the 150-watt brick measuring just 0.87 by 2.36 by 5.9 inches (HWD), and weighing less than a pound, significantly smaller and lighter than the power bricks included even with competing ultraportable gaming systems.
  Our review unit is configured
  with a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), though Razer also offers the Blade with 128GB or 512GB SSDs (for $2,199.99 and $2,699.99, respectively). That solid-state memory promises fast performance, but can't match the overall capacity of a standard hard drive, or multiple drives, like the 1TB drives with additional SSD storage found in the MSI GS60, the Maingear Pulse 15$2,299.00 at Microsoft Store, and the Maingear Pulse 14, all of which combine a 1TB hard drive with dual 128GB SSDs.
  The system doesn't have anything we'd classify as bloatware, though there are a few preinstalled programs. Several of these are Razer-branded utilities: Razer Synapse 2.0, which manages settings and customization for all of your Razer products, like the Ouroboros$125.26 at Amazon mouse or the Tartarus$66.99 at Amazon gaming keypad; Razer Comms, a gaming-friendly messenger and voice chat platform; Razer Cortex, a unified game launcher that collects all of your games from Steam, Origin, and the like; and Razer Surround, a surround-sound utility that Razer normally sells separately for $19.99. The system also has Nvidia's GeForce Experience, which serves as a dashboard for managing driver updates and GPU settings, but also includes features like Battery Boost, which offers dramatically improved gaming performance when the system is on battery power, ShadowPlay, which lets you record in-game video, and Game Stream (for streaming your games to an Nvidia Shield). Razer covers the Blade (2015) with a one-year warranty.
  Performance
    Razer has outfitted the new Blade with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4720HQ quad-core processor, along with 16GB of RAM—doubling the 8GB allotment of the previous model. This combination makes for some excellent general-use performance, leading in Photoshop CS6 with 3 minutes 25 seconds, and topping Cinebench with 675 points. In terms of productivity it was good—well ahead of most consumer laptops—but landed in the middle of the pack for ultraportable gaming systems. It completed PCMark 8 Work Conventional with 2,955 points, ahead of the 2014 Razer Blade (2,787 points), but behind the MSI GS60 (2,988 points) and the Maingear Pulse 15 (3,047 points).
  With an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M and 3GB of dedicated memory, the graphics performance is very good, and does a lot to fix some of the problems seen in the previous iteration. On 3DMark CloudGate it scored 19,454 points, and on Fire Strike Extreme it scored 3,270 points, beating out all of the comparable systems. This isn't a huge surprise, since the GTX 970M is Nvidia's latest mobile graphics card.
  Gaming performance is also significantly improved, and baseline gaming tests (run at 1,366-by-768 resolution) are the best we've seen. Unfortunately, the improvements in graphics processing aren't quite good enough to fix all of the problems seen with the display/GPU disparity. There are still some scaling issues when playing at a lower resolution, and the GPU still doesn't have the oomph to really match the 3,200-by-1,800 resolution of the display with playable performance. That said, if you back off on the resolution, and do some tweaking of graphics settings, you can play demanding current titles at better-than-full-HD resolutions, though not a lot better.
  
  
  
  The system also showed significant improvement in battery life, lasting 4 hours 52 minutes in our battery rundown test. This isn't just an improvement—though it does add more than a half hour of usable time over the 2014 Blade (4:15)—it also leads the current crop of gaming ultraportables, tying the Maingear Pulse 14 (4:52). The previous Editors' Choice, the Razer Blade (2013), still holds the record with 6:52, but it's a two-year-old system that didn't have the extra power demands of a 350-nit, QHD+ display.
  Conclusion
  With a new processor and graphics card, the Razer Blade (2015) delivers better graphics performance and longer battery life than its predecessor, fixing two of the bigger problems I had with the 2014 Blade. Heat is still a big concern, but that's a problem endemic to the category. As it stands, the Razer Blade 2015 not only outshines the 2014 model, it also offers a better overall value than the previous Editors' Choice, the Razer Blade (2013). If you still aren't sold on the new Razer Blade, the MSI GS60 Ghost Pro 3K is a great alternative (and our top pick for midpriced gaming laptops), but the Razer Blade (2015) is our Editors' Choice for ultraportable gaming.
   

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