the Razer Blade 14 2015 it's really not
that different from the two previous iterations both of which I described as
engineering Marvels and one of which W an editor's Choice Awards so when I got
too many requests to ignore to review this thing I said to myself okay well if
I'm going to cover the same product again for the third time I'm going to do
a couple of things number one is I'm asking Razer for a keeper unit this time
and number two I'm going to throw the toughest test I can at it one that the
Surface Pro 3 a very widely respected
device failed miserably I'm going to leave my xps2 behind for a 3 we trip to
Southeast Asia and bring only the new blade to see if it's as suitable as an
ultra portable gaming rig slw workstation as my previous test drives
would indicate that it would be or if
it'll end up grinding my gears until I'm forced to just stop using it since it's
my only choice for
computer Intel's new 750 series ssds
utilize the NVMe standard providing speeds that never before seen on
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laptop or here to learn more so I worked on the general overview
for this review in Singapore which I would describe as um Asia with train in
wheels for Americans it's hot and humid there's a lot of Asian people there and
the availability of Burgers and Fries is pretty limited compared to chicken rice
but all the signs are in English and most of the toilets I encountered had
seats anyway just like its predecessors the blade 14 2015 features a hyper thin
aluminum unibody design with only a dual fan intake hinge exhaust cooling
solution and a couple of long rubber feet adorning the bottom a simple
illuminated razor logo on the top and otherwise a very clean and beautiful
design that is without completely forgetting functionality so while the
unit is thinner than a dime as Razer loves to say it's still got three USB
3.0 ports and an HDMI 1.4 output to go
along with a headphone SL microphone Jack power plug and lock on the sides
front-facing speakers and razors trademark solid and satisfying chicklet
style keyboard complete with weird type face and unnecessary 20 levels of green
light adjustment some of the stuff about it is not unnecessary though the Wi-Fi
coverage was so spotty in the house where we were staying in Singapore that
I ended up upgrading their access point but the good news is the blade dropped
fewer connections than my other mobile devices from the start and while the
screen could take some pointers from Apple to be usable in the car since
higher brightness is required to compensate for the bouncing types of
Reflections caused by vehicle movement it was definitely suitable for
stationary use Outdoors near the famous simem Square Tech mall and while
lounging in the yard with the parrot who lives there but it's time to move on to
my next part of this video as well as my next destination brunai where thanks to
some lazier days when my son got sick I spent most of my computer time replying
to emails or watching movies the latter of which led to a couple more
observations about the blade on the subject of the screen I'm still really
not sure how I feel about the 3200x 1800 resolution it's harder to Drive natively
than a theoretical 2560 x440 panel would
be and requires very aggressive scaling
to be usable for most people Razer actually sets it to 250% out of the box
but viewing angles motion blur colors
and of course smoothness of on-screen elements without anti-aliasing are all
solid selling points and made watching videos on the device really enjoyable
but that didn't impress me nearly as much as the time I pulled the HDMI cable
out of our host's satellite box and plugged it into the blade so everyone
could watch Penguins of Madagascar and it took me until halfway through the movie to realize the TV didn't support
audio over HDMI and we were actually listening to the laptop speakers the
entire time a fact that made me happy
then but continues to infuriate me actually it turns out Razer does know a
thing or two about audio product engineering which makes it that much
more tragic that they insist on their gaming tuned headphones and headsets
when it's obvious that they can do better but I guess this is doomed to
remain a philosophical agreeded disagree point and since Razer is min's company
and not mine I guess they'll keep doing it his way until I enter in agreement
with them to do a limited like Linus Edition run of Kraken forged headphones
that actually sound good or something actually that'd be kind of badass men if
you're watching we should do that another thing I noticed in brunai since
it was the only time on my trip where I used the blade fairly extensively
without a wall plug I ended up waiting around an hour during a lady's trip to
the salon and did a fair bit of riding in the car is that this aspect of the
device has improved a lot to the point where while on the original blade 14
battery life was good considering the other positive points of the product now
I'd actually call it a fairly strong point I was able to work in airplane
mode for anywhere from 4 to up to almost
6 hours in a light productivity setting
definitely something that pleases me gaming well you're still going to be
looking at a little over that you know hour mark unless you're using some
pretty aggressive NVIDIA battery saving features like capping your FPS at 30 or
something along those lines the good news about which is that thanks to its 970 GPU it does support that feature but
I still consider it mostly a mobile
workstation and you're going to want to plug in if you if you want to do any kind of extremely long gaming session in
Malaysia our next stop our host had one of those 4G mobile hotspot Internet
plans so I was able to use the blade to get racket advice with my helper at the
mall then I was able to use it again and oh wait no I didn't our host's 4G data
cap got wrecked by having six house guests so even though my brother-in-law
was giving me crap about why are you pulling out your laptop in the you know
upside down house and this cool castle
SL church thing in Mala where there's no
Wi-fi I persisted and at the very least I got I hope some Neato shots of it
sitting on the stone walls of the church and wow I sure wish Brandon had been
there cuz with his knack for b-roll I'm sure that uh these shots would have been
better but he's just plain too expensive to take with me on a trip like this so
whatever the last stop in my vacation was Thailand and while my plan was to
finally find some time to game on the bloody thing since I finally had decent
or at least consistent internet without giving too much detail traveler's
diarrhea totally sucks and I spent most of my mere two days in puket in bed
sleeping off the wicked headache that came along with it so I guess all that's
left is the conclusion about this notebook again there are some small
things that definitely became bigger to me now that I'm using it as a daily
driver versus when I was just using review units I'd like a wider opening
hinge full-sized up and down arrow keys series seriously please fix this a
larger trackpad with larger buttons that go to the edge of the laptop so that I
can just kind of casually lean against the bottom of the laptop rather than
like really intentionally pressing it when I'm using it two-handed and while
I'm Dreaming how about a um I don't know slightly more fingerprint resistant
finish but that's about it they fixed the crummy RAM capacity of the last gen
and they beefed up the graphics what's not to love it's powerful enough that I
can do any kind of work or gaming I could want while on the go it's portable
enough to be practical something I value
a lot as someone who used to carry a thick gaming notebook everywhere and
honestly if you're into that kind of thing it gets a lot of compliments
people were we were staying with security checkpoint officers you name it
people kept asking me what that cool laptop was too bad their jaws all
probably collectively hit the floor when they looked it up later and saw how much
it costs but that's the price you've always had to pay to be on the bleeding
edge and in the case of the blade 14 I know at least some of you will decide
it's worth it even if it has no landport
and I have to carry a dongle with me all over the
place but I guess it's not like I can travel without a certain number of extra
Essentials anyway like the great bathroom supplies from the guys at
dollarshaveclub.com for a few bucks a month you can get highquality razors
straight to your door so you always look good and okay I'm not going to focus on
the razors in this spot today too much because one wipe char
need a spotlight here I'm going to confess I left for my trip to Asia
without some of the travel packs of one wipe Charlies which was a huge and brown
mistake there's no toilet paper at all in public bathrooms in some of Southeast
Asian countries with the expectation being that she'll shoot water from a
hose at your butt and hope you don't manage to make some kind of a mess a
pack or two of one wipe Charlie would have been way better anyway that's
dollarshaveclub.com join the club now shave time and shave money and shave
your butt I guess or yeah the whole save
sounds like shave thing doesn't really work as well in that instance or maybe
it does anyway guys thanks for watching
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