Razer Edge Pro Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
3,442 words · ~17 min read
0:00
for a limited time only buy an Intel Core I5 or core i7 CPU and get a free
0:04
3-month subscription to iracing.com available from participating retailers
0:09
click the link in the video description for more details welcome to my unboxing
0:13
and overview it's not a first look
0:16
because I broke the seal already this is
0:20
the Razor Edge gaming tablet what makes a tablet a gaming tablet well for one
0:25
thing if a tablet's performance was measured by weight then the Razor Edge
0:29
would defin itely be the highest performance tablet out there the other
0:32
thing is if a tablet's performance was measured by performance then the Razor
0:37
Edge would be the highest performance tablet out there so yes it is a gaming
0:42
tablet what comes inside is pretty straightforward Razor's usual attention
0:46
to detail with the packaging with their matte black whatnots and all that the
0:50
first thing we find is a power brick so it's got a short AC cable right here
0:56
quite short see only about one Linus ARM length long okay so that plugs into the
1:01
wall wart which you'll notice doesn't look much like a tablet wall wart this
1:06
looks like a notebook wall wart because this basically is a notebook in a tablet
1:11
form factor it's got all the power you'd expect from a notebook so it needs all
1:15
the power you'd expect to need to give a notebook now it has a much longer thin
1:19
cable so that's the DC power cable that goes out to the tablet itself and
1:24
terminates in a proprietary connector on a right angle I would have liked to see
1:28
some kind of a connector that was nonproprietary in some way um I mean I
1:32
guess I can kind of understand why Razer did this it gets it sort of out of the
1:35
way while you're holding the device so next up inside here we've got just
1:39
basically some documentation welcome to the cult of Razer and all that sort of
1:43
good stuff that they usually include with their gear for gamers by Gamers why
1:47
do we make these products because well no one else did so we thought we'd do it
1:52
there's are some razor stickers as well as oh look a little cleaning cloth for
1:55
your product that's all good stuff all right so that's pretty much it that
1:58
comes with the tablet now this is the Razer Edge Pro which is the
2:02
$1,500 version of the tablet and this is
2:05
the but wait there's more moment because the $1,500 version of the tablet doesn't
2:10
come with everything you need necessarily there's a couple of other
2:14
accessories that razer's been shipping out to the press that really help you
2:17
have the full experience so number one is The Edge docking
2:21
station so the docking station is pretty straightforward you plug that same
2:25
proprietary power connector into it you can plug headphones microphone so
2:30
dedicated headphone and microphone jacks as opposed to the integrated one that's
2:33
on the tablet itself you've got an HDMI port three USB port so it also acts as a
2:39
USB hub uh the tablet itself only has one USB fre port and then
2:44
finally the actual dock
2:48
itself yeah right there so it sits just like that it's a little bit of an angle
2:52
so you could sit and use it connected to the dock it's got some heft to it so I
2:55
would actually trust my $1,500 tablet to not be dropped by it and it has one of
3:01
the best rubberized sticky bottoms that I think I have ever encountered if I put
3:05
this down on the table I couldn't move it pretty much no matter how hard I
3:14
tried so oh my goodness it's like stuck look at this I can't even lift it oh
3:19
there it goes detached now so it's an excellent rubberized grip I wish
3:23
everything had Supple soft rubber like this on the bottom of it it's
3:26
outstanding so there you go the D the dock is intended for people who are
3:30
going to use the Razor Edge as something like a gaming console where you leave
3:34
the dock next to your TV for example and then you plug in the edge whenever
3:38
you're going to use it with a wireless controller say for example now not
3:41
everyone's going to use it like that a lot of people are going to go well if I wanted to play games on my TV I could
3:46
build a media PC or I could um use a
3:49
console or I could do any number of those other things that people do to play games on their TVs so that's where
3:54
this one comes in this is the game controller accessory so it's got a
3:58
welcome to the cult of razor piece of soft foam inside and the game controller
4:04
itself so the game controller adds some functionality that you don't have with
4:08
the tablet on its own for example it adds a game
4:11
controller which I'm sure you didn't figure out based on the name of the
4:14
device so let's go through and let's have a look at what buttons it adds so
4:17
you've got two auxiliary auxiliary buttons here on the left and here on the
4:22
right handles you've got a dad on the left with abxy buttons on the right so
4:27
that's how you could play your your legacy game all right then you've got
4:31
two analog sticks one on the left one on the right nice rubberized Tops on them
4:35
that feel like they're should be quite durable then on the shoulders you've got
4:40
three buttons each so two top buttons L1
4:44
and L2 R1 and R2 and then two triggers
4:47
so left trigger and right trigger you've
4:50
also got an extended battery included in this unit that adds while in sort of a
4:55
hardcore gaming scenario probably about 45 minutes of extra battery life and
4:59
while not in a hardcore gaming scenario up to a few hours of extra battery life
5:04
and then you've got an illuminated razor logo on the back you've got pass
5:07
throughs for all of the important functionality on the top of the tablet
5:11
so your keyboard um button your rotation
5:15
lock your power button your volume rockers your headphone port and your
5:18
usb3 Port ventilation ports here and
5:21
you've got nice little rubber pieces here that are going to keep the tablet
5:25
from getting scratched up as you insert it into the controller dock now it does
5:29
add here I'm just going to put this in you can do it pretty quickly so you pop
5:33
that in pop this in here and then lock it in from the bottom it does add a fair
5:37
bit of heft to the tablet in fact with the whole setup configured I'm just
5:42
going to get this box out of the way oops with the whole setup configured
5:47
the total weight in pounds all right is
5:51
about pounds 3 lb 11 o and I can't remember
5:57
how many ounces there are in a pound but that sounds to me like about 3 and 3/4
6:02
lb with the whole thing set up so it does get quite heavy and I it's not the
6:07
kind of thing where you'd be sitting and gaming with it like this sort of like
6:13
holding it up like this for an extended period of
6:16
time so let's now that I've covered all the accessories which I sort of meant to
6:21
do near the end let's talk about the Razor Edge itself so it's over 2 lb just
6:25
with the tablet alone it's thick so if I pull out my HTC1 I can do my trademark
6:31
size comparison here which don't worry about getting too close to cuz I'm going
6:34
to do an overlay for this and you can see that this is not a thin tablet by
6:38
any stretch of the imagination if you want a thin tablet you're going to want to be buying yourself something ARM
6:43
based or something with an apple processor such as an iPad uh this is
6:48
pretty much a PC it has a core i7 processor that's clocked at 1.9 GHz so
6:53
this is the pro model and up to three gigahertz when using turbo boost which
6:57
means you've got great performance but you compromise that thickness it's got
7:01
an aluminum backing which feels really nice it feels really premium and it
7:06
should help to dissipate some of the heat from the tablet itself particularly
7:10
when you're gaming this side acts as an intake and this side acts as an exhaust
7:15
so what I found was that while holding the device my right hand got significantly warmer where my left hand
7:20
was actually cooled by the device which created a bit of a weird effect but I
7:23
can understand why they did it this way because it makes the cooling extremely efficient they only have to have one
7:28
channel for the air moving through the entire tablet see I wanted to call it a
7:31
notebook there because the back of it really does look kind of like a notebook
7:35
and Razer is going to have a keyboard accessory that you can get in the future
7:39
as well so they've borrowed some styling from their uh from their blade which my
7:44
my razor blade video actually got blocked by YouTube because I had the
7:47
word switchblade in the description so I wasn't able to put ads on that for a
7:51
long time but that's just a random vent not really about anything uh the build
7:55
quality is outstanding it really does feel like a premium tablet so you can see here there's almost no flex to it
8:00
whatsoever no matter what I do to it part of this is going to be a function
8:03
of the glass top and aluminum back and part of it is going to be a function of
8:06
the fact that it's just thicker but remember guys thickness does not
8:10
necessarily make it well built whereas this one really does feel quite well
8:14
built the front is completely plain pretty much exactly what you'd expect
8:17
from a tablet these days 10in tablet wider than usual bezel which at first I
8:23
kind of went oh that's kind of weird but then I understood why it's got to be a
8:27
little bit thicker because of a couple things it's a thicker tablet so the the
8:31
the grip you have when holding it is going to be maybe a little bit bigger
8:34
and the other thing is if you're gaming on the device if you're meant to be sort
8:37
of holding it like this it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a bit of a wider bezel so I again I so I
8:42
understood why they did that other than that in the front all you've got is a 2
8:46
megapixel camera add that you can use for you know I don't know video calling
8:49
or whatever else and a dedicated Windows
8:53
button on the sides of the device you find nothing so there's completely plain
8:57
right side complet completely plain left side on the bottom you find two speaker
9:02
grills which actually worked surprisingly well I love the
9:05
front-facing speakers on the HTC1 and I think everything should be front facing
9:09
however if we can't have front facing then I'll settle for bottom facing
9:13
because at least with bottom facing you don't cover them up when you hold the
9:16
device by the side so many devices do this same thing with back facing a lot
9:20
of the time you'll cover them up when you're holding it bottom facing I don't
9:23
really see anyone using a tablet like this so should be fine not too worried
9:28
about that then on the top is where we find all the serious business IO oh and
9:32
I okay so I complained about the proprietary connector I do understand
9:35
why they have it because it acts as a dock and an HDMI and a USB hub and all
9:40
that stuff I just just don't necessarily like it that's all that's all I'm just
9:43
throwing that out there um so we've got our power button our keyboard button
9:47
which is awesome this was a lifesaver because the keyboard button just is like
9:54
okay if you're using it as a gaming device how often do you end up needing a
9:57
keyboard just to I don't know just get out of a menu or navigate something or
10:02
whatever else because many games for Windows are not optimized for a just a
10:05
purely touch device so it was really nice to have that dedicated keyboard
10:09
button you've got a rotation lock volume rocker as well as a headphone microphone
10:14
Jack and a single usb3
10:18
port spec-wise like I said this is the pro so I mentioned the core i7 processor
10:23
it's got 8 gigs of RAM a 256 gig SSD
10:27
which means you've got enough space toess put a fair number of games on it
10:31
and it has a GeForce gt640 Le that's
10:34
what makes this tablet gaming grade as opposed to just another tablet that's
10:38
using the Onboard video on the processor built into the ivybridge pro CPU so okay
10:45
what does a 640m really mean in terms of a gaming experience I'm going to show
10:48
you guys how quickly it boots up there you go you can uh you can thank the SSD
10:52
for that so what does that mean in terms of oh it looks like uh oh that's kind of
10:58
funny my sibling were playing games on this thing and apparently they left it
11:01
in a game which is Handy for doing product demos there we go so let's reconnect
11:06
that controller and we got some Dirt 3 going on here so what does that mean in
11:09
terms of the gaming experience it's legitimately better it's way better than
11:12
on board is it a GTX Titan no it's not a
11:17
GTX Titan is it intended to be a GTX Titan no I mean this device actually
11:21
doesn't cost that much more than a Titan for the whole thing okay it does cost more but not that much more so what does
11:27
it actually do well it runs modern games with the exception of super super
11:31
high-end games like Crisis 3 at acceptable frame rates at the native
11:35
resolution so I've seen people complain about the 1366 X 768 display on the
11:41
Razor Edge and my response to this is well what else were they supposed to do
11:45
it's not like they could put a Titan in here and I would rather have a lower
11:49
resolution screen than deal with dithering so if this had a 1080p screen
11:54
what you'd run into is you would have it downscaling in order to run it
11:58
resolutions that the onboard GPU could handle so you'd actually have to have
12:02
did I say did the ring I think I meant interpolation one way or another they're
12:06
bad things and you don't want to do either of those things pretty yeah interpolation sorry my bad um it's an
12:11
IPS display so while it wasn't the most vibrant IPS display I've ever seen there
12:15
wasn't really any detectable motion blur or ghosting as it's colloquially
12:19
referred to so it delivered a very acceptable gaming experience so we've
12:23
got Dirt 3 going here and this highlights sort of what I meant before when I said the lack of a physical
12:28
keyboard hampers the gaming experience somewhat because how do I Alt Enter I
12:32
don't know how to full screen a program without Alt Enter I rely on my keyboard
12:35
a lot in a Windows environment and it's not the Edge's fault it's just the way
12:39
Windows Works they expect you to control C control V so now that the game isn't
12:45
in full screen if the game itself doesn't have an option to go to full
12:48
screen then you're just kind of boned because you've got control you got I
12:52
don't know where's like can you shift where's shift tab because shift goes
12:56
away when you go into the number pad here so how do you get rid of something
12:59
like a steam overlay um it can be a little bit frustrating but once you get
13:04
past the the issues that are present so
13:07
we're going to continue our race here whoops I'm going backwards there we go
13:12
the gaming experience is actually really cool so I hope you can get in close
13:16
enough that you can see this I did turn the screen resolution up so this is Dirt
13:19
3 which may not be the most hardcore title by any stretch of the
13:23
imagination but it is a totally
13:26
acceptable gaming experience on modern title that looks absolutely fantastic
13:31
which isn't going to prevent someone like me from crashing the car
13:34
necessarily so I'm going to go ahead and pause that and we'll move
13:38
into what's what's it what's it what's it like overall using this thing so I
13:43
was playing around with it for a couple days again so more difficulty with
13:46
things like an SNES emulator that runs in like Doss mode uh so it was difficult
13:51
to navigate through it with touchcreen things like that but if you use Steam
13:55
Big Picture which I found to be not that bad of of an experience I wish that
14:00
Steam Big Picture was a little bit more touch optimized but we know how Gabe new
14:03
feels about Windows 8 and all that noise I wish he'd kind of get over that and
14:07
and help us with the gaming experience as opposed to sit and be upset about it
14:11
um but with big picture it was a little bit better it did make navigation a
14:15
little bit easier there are ways to add here we go so I'll just click this
14:19
button there are ways to add your Steam games as tiles so there's a couple of
14:22
different apps that do that in the Windows 8 store and it was pretty it was
14:27
pretty darn cool the things to look out for is some USB devices won't work with
14:31
the game controller on because of the depth of the connector however I only
14:35
had one in the house that had that issue but check this out even though it adds
14:39
some uh some bulk to the key H to the
14:44
keyboard uh to the headphone microphone Jack I was able to plug in right angle
14:48
headphones without the the mic not working or the headphones not working or
14:51
whatever else like that so what does all this mean I
14:55
guess Graphics you can actually play PC games on in a tablet uh Power that is
15:02
really more equivalent to something like a low-end to mid-range gaming notebook
15:06
in a form factor that is phenomenally impressive looks
15:13
beautiful is different from anything else that's out there but at a price
15:18
where really um you got to pay to play
15:22
it's not cheap if you want this unique device that is able to game in a tablet
15:26
like form factor if you're willing to accept the hour and change of battery life that
15:31
comes with it when it's actually running games and the sort of you know three to
15:36
three and 1 half hours that you're going to get out of it when you're not running games it is a completely unique
15:41
experience that is unlike anything else thank you for checking out this unboxing
15:45
and overview of the Razor Edge don't forget to subscribe for lus Tech tips
15:48
for unboxings reviews and other computer videos