so this is an engineering sample which means that i can't do any benchmarks and
i can't do any thermal testing or anything like that but if you guys have
been following along with me for the last couple of years you'll probably
know that while i wouldn't describe myself as a razor fan by any stretch of
the imagination sorry racer i am partial to their
laptops whether it's the blade formerly blade 14 formerly blade 14 mere 2014 or
whatever or the blade stealth which has actually been my daily driver lately so
when razer offered to send over their new blade
15.6 bench whatever it is they're calling this thing
their latest cutting edge gaming laptop
for an early sneak preview i couldn't resist
humble bundle lets you save money on games while supporting charitable causes
and you can learn more at our link in the video description
so any first look starts with the unboxing experience
oh oh you want to see oh sure here so
this has actually been opened up already by tyler because he had to take it out
and put a label on it all that kind of stuff so i'm getting like that this is a
very sub-par subpar on box this is like sloppy seconds unboxing experience
that's okay i think i think i'll get over it so
they have actually finally changed their packaging for the blade and i think they
managed to make it even more bare bones which is
a feat so you get a letter from this is
interesting he changed his title we've dropped the chief gamer charade
huh oh good for them you get some instruction manuals you get a microfiber
cloth you'll need one of those and you get a shiny multi-colored razor logo
with some other razor chroma stuff that you can stick all over your your stuff
you also get a plea not to return the razor blade
don't take it back to the retailer razer has revised their power brick because of
the increased power requirements of this new blade so
gone is the sleek small rounded 165 watt
brick and here is the 200 watt sort of
blockier and larger brick the one thing that they did manage to keep is my least
favorite thing about it and it's the right angle cable that comes off of it
like this is the problem with it this happens
all the time it puts constant strain on it and while they've reinforced it and
it's wow it's really thick i'm still really not a fan of that
design so if you were hoping for type c power
you will be sorely disappointed not only
do you not get a standard power connector you get a new proprietary one
from razer that i have not seen before
fortunately it's reversible so you can plug it in either this way or that
i'm going to go with this way so my initial impression when i first
touched this was that it was a lot bigger than the old blade 14 even though
razer's marketing is all about how it's a really similar size but
what i also thought was that maybe i just felt that way because i've been
using the blade stealth as my daily driver lately and that one really is
a lot smaller like we're talking an inch here an inch and a change there
but i think what makes it feel so big is not just that it is taller
so you can see it's got a significantly higher profile
off the table almost the entire thickness of the screen
even though its actual x and y dimensions
aren't that different those are really close
but the squareness makes it feel just because of kind of
it's it's sharpness and blockiness it makes it feel a lot bigger
i'm really not sure if i prefer this
new design language from them on the bottom there's another big change
here too so while these feet
used to hold the blade a little bit off the table that was actually one of the
fundamental problems with its design was it had a hard time sucking air into
these bottom fans now they're really tall like they're less um
you know anti-slip feet and they're more like a built-in laptop stand to hold the
thing off the table and you should be able to really see that if i put it up
next to the other one another big change is that those two bottom fans
are now actually metal blades as far as i can tell so they're super thin blades
they should be more efficient and because they're jamming up to a gtx 1070
in this thing you can also see a huge
change to the way that they're doing the venting at the back so on the old blade
it was just like the old macbooks where it came out from behind the hinge here
and then the air vented up towards the screen
now air gets sucked in here and it can go out any which way it can come out
these holes here it can go out this way and it's like quite open in fact you can
even see that the display cable is exposed there that is a very strange
design choice i have never seen anybody do that before but for all the bigger
rareness we're definitely getting some benefits so we've got Thunderbolt 3 yet
again we've got a usb3 HDMI and been asking for this for a
while mini DisplayPort on the one side so you can drive up to
three displays off of this thing externally at a time that's freaking
awesome then we've got a couple more usbs and a headphone microphone combo
jack so we do get an i o upgrade for the size increase
and of course all of the internal upgrades
so they're now shipping with 8th gen core i7 processor so that's up to six
cores gtx 1060s or 1070s and i think
we've got that's one 1060 or one 1070
and i think we've got more competition to thank for all of that stuff because
razer has done hardly anything with this design over the last four years but now
this really does look like a 2018
notebook my biggest complaints about the last gen blade were the very outdated
looking thick bezels the 60 hertz refresh rate which in my
mind is unjustifiable on a gaming machine in this day and age
and the lackluster performance being limited
to a gtx 1060 rather than up to a 1070
even if that 1070 is a uh a max q one so
that's a lower TDP version and they've actually fixed some things that i hadn't
even really complained about that much so like the blade stealth
the regular blade now has an oversized track pad
and really it's especially noticeable if you go and put the old one up next to it
but one thing i have to confess i'm a little disappointed about is they've
actually done away with the hardware clicky button something that i i really
like and i do use in place of
just a sort of push a push in trackpad one that
doesn't have like it's hinged up at the top so it
doesn't have an even amount of force required everywhere that you press on it
you know even though it feels a little stiffer
it's not a it's not in a bad way and there's less key wobble already
like that's something that was a bit of an issue with the old blade definitely
some backlight bleed i can even see it in the studio lighting but i'm not going
to ding them too hard on that when this is a pre-production model
the Thunderbolt connector is still on the right which is a real drag
because that's where my mouse goes so we've got some dongle mouse interference
and this power button
was an opportunity to include a touch sensor
in 2018 everything should have biometrics even if you choose not to use
it and they've opted not to include either ir emitter Windows hello or a
touch sensitive power button both of which make logging into the machine a lot faster so the two different
resolutions they're shipping 1080p at 60hz so that's the one that starts at
18.99 which to me is crazy a 2 000 gaming
laptop with a 60hz display or 1080p with 144hz those are both meant
to be the gaming models and then what's interesting to me is the
4k one so the gaming one has a 100 srgb
coverage while the 4k one has a 100
adobe RGB coverage and because it's 4k
only a 60 hertz refresh rate and touch
so what's interesting about that to me is it seems like razer's actually only
got 1080p gaming models and then the 4k one
is positioned more like a creative or
professional option man with the game running over 144
frames per second this looks so smooth
even though every machine ships with 16 gigs and i don't disagree with that
configuration what's really cool is that it is now upgradable for the first time
on a razer blade so i shouldn't have to be impressed by that but it's 2018 so
i am and acoustics i mean that was the first thing brandon asked was is it as loud as
the old one reserving full judgment for the full
review but actually it's not bad so far
like even though i've had this running for 10-15 minutes now so we're at full
heat it doesn't have that shrill wine
that the old blade did though i've yet to see how it behaves with the 1070
max-q so on the surface the all-new blade and
that really does seem to be what they're calling it addresses pretty much every complaint i
had about the way that the old blade was aging it's got two more CPU cores it's
got a bigger display it's got a high refresh rate display but
the industry has come a long way since the original blade and the competition
is a lot better so whether i would recommend it over
something like an ASUS zephyrus is going to come down to raw performance as well
as thermals and acoustics and for that we need
a finished unit so stay tuned guys because this is going to be an
interesting showdown
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affordable so thanks for watching this first impressions of the blade the
all-new razer blade if you guys dislike this video you can
hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider
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full review in the video description also down there
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