High-res touchscreen puts Razer’s thin gaming laptop a cut above

Ah, to be thin and beautiful. In the world of laptops, that feels like the mission across the board, except when it comes to gaming laptops. But what if there were a Retina MacBook Pro of gaming? What if it had a super high-res touch display and outstanding graphics, and it weighed under 5 pounds? Does this sound like dream come true?

Razer has been chipping away at the “thin gaming laptop” category with the Blade for the last few years, starting with a 17-inch model and adding a 14-inch version in 2013. But the 2014 model makes some big improvements, mainly in its upgraded Nvidia graphics and seriously improved IGXO 3,200×1,800-pixel-resolution touch display. The Razer Blade is a beauty. And it is thin. And it’s probably the most exciting gaming laptop out there right now.

Specs compared

	Razer Blade 14 RZ09-0116 (2014)	MSI GE60 Apache Pro-003	Maingear Pulse 14 (2014)
Price	$2,399	$1,349	$1,399
Display size/resolution	14-inch, 3,200×1,800 screen	15.6-inch, 1,920×1,080 screen	14-inch, 1,920×1,080 screen
PC CPU	2.2GHz Intel Core i7-4702HQ	2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700HQ	2.2GHz Intel Core i7-4702MQ
PC memory	8GB 1,600MHZ DDR3 SDRAM	8GB 1,600MHZ DDR3 SDRAM	8GB 1,600MHZ DDR3 SDRAM
Graphics	3GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 870M	4GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 860M	2GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 850M
Storage	256GB SSD	1TB HD	500GB HD
Optical drive	None	DVD/RW	None
Networking	Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0	Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0	Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n wireless, Bluetooth 4.0
Operating system	Windows 8.1 (64-bit)	Windows 8.1 (64-bit)	Windows 8.1 (64-bit)

Design

Last year’s 14-inch Blade ditched the second-screen touch UI of the 17-inch Blade Pro and went for a look that felt like a Retina Display MacBook Pro clad in black. The look is the same this time, and there’s no problem with that; gaming laptop or not, the Blade is an all-metal stunner that’s wonderfully sleek and very solid.

At 0.7 inch thick and 4.47 pounds, this is a laptop that’ll slide easily into any backpack. The keyboard and touchpad are also really good, well-placed and responsive. The keyboard in particular has “antighosting,” which basically means multiple simultaneous keys pressed together register well. The two discrete touchpad buttons feel a bit flimsy, but that’s a minor quibble; for gaming you’ll probably use an external mouse, anyway. Navigating Windows 8.1 is a breeze thanks to the touchscreen, making this one of the best gaming laptops for those who might still want to do everyday tasks with touch.

From the glowing green keys on the keyboard to the glyphlike Razer logo that glows from the back lid, this is a gaming laptop that picks understated style over flashy rainbow LEDs and blocky chrome grilles. I appreciate it.

Screen and sound

The Blade’s new IGXO 3,200×1,800 display is its best new feature. The original Razer Blade I first reviewed had a spectacular display, but last year’s 14-inch model had an unimpressive non-touch, lower-res 1,600×900 screen. It was a major disappointment, considering how good the rest of the 2013 version was.

The new display is glass-covered, brighter, and very vivid, has excellent viewing angles, and it’s multitouch, too. Gamers may not care about that, but touch on a gaming laptop is an incredibly rare thing. It means that Windows 8 users can enjoy this Blade as an everyday laptop and not feel like they’ve compromised. Touch on Windows 8 is a very good thing to have.

Games, of course, aren’t really meant to be played at that absurd resolution, and some Windows gaming apps aren’t optimized for it, either. Steam’s main UI seemed to be downscaling to lower-res. But, for everyday app usage and extra desktop real estate, extra pixels are always good.

Gaming

So how does the new Blade handle games? An onboard Nvidia GeForce GTX 870M GPU with 3GB of DDR5 RAM stands towards the high end of the Nvidia laptop graphics spectrum (but not the absolute highest), and does very well indeed in our tests.

BioShock Infinite ran at 66 frames per second at 1,920×1,080 and high graphics settings with UltraDX11; or at 98.5fps at the same resolution and Medium graphics. The more rigorous Metro: Last Light test ran at 15.3fps. Games looked sharp — BioShock Infinite looked really good at 3,200×1,800 as well, but obviously at that high a resolution you’re better off ratcheting down the graphics level to medium or lower settings. The onboard speakers pump out surprisingly loud and crisp audio, too.

I really liked playing games on this Razer, but after just a half an hour the bottom of the chassis got seriously hot. That happens with gaming laptops, but this runs a lot hotter than last year’s Blade. And battery life while gaming drops pretty quickly. We got only around 92 minutes of battery life when playing games on medium graphics settings, which shouldn’t be surprising. After half an hour or so on high with speakers blasting, my battery dipped down to 60 percent.

Like all Razer laptops, this one is Razer Synapse 2.0-enabled, too, which means it saves game settings for keyboards and peripherals in the cloud and allows deeper customization.

Connections, performance, and battery

There are three USB 3.0 ports on the edge of the Blade, along with HDMI. It has Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. That’s all you’ll really need to stay connected. A 2MP Web camera and array microphone are better than you’ll find on your average laptop, in case you also want to do in-game chat.

Thanks to its 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-4702HQ processor, the Razer Blade 2014 edition performs fast — but not any faster, really, than the 2013 version. It’s still more than enough for nearly any computing task you’re likely to think of, but it’s not a pure speed gain. Gaming is another story, as you can see above: those tests took a big leap forward on the strength of Nvidia’s new generation of 800-series GPUs.