Stefan Mileschin

We’ve spent a fair amount of time with the first two generations of Razer Blade, and honestly really enjoyed most of it. The original Blade released as a highly ambitious 17” Sandy Bridge gaming notebook from a company that previously had no history in the PC space. While the design was very polished, it had issues with performance, thermals, driver stability, and above all, price. The second generation Blade released with Ivy Bridge and improved on all of its predecessor’s issues - far more compute and GPU horsepower, a refined cooling design, and it was a good bit cheaper, to boot. Now, with Haswell right around the corner, we have the third generation of Blade. And this time, there are two of them.

The 17” is still around, now known as the Blade Pro, but the big news here is the new $1799 14” Razer Blade. It’s a 0.66” thick notebook with a quad-core i7 Haswell mobile processor and NVIDIA’s new GTX 765M graphics with 2GB of GDDR5 video memory, along with an mSATA SSD and 8GB of DDR3L-1600 memory. It’s a little bit smaller than the 15” retina MacBook Pro in all dimensions - 13.58 x 9.25 x 0.66” versus 14.13 x 9.73 x 0.71” - and takes a healthy amount of design inspiration from the latest Apple portable. Given the form factor and weight (4.1 pounds), the Blade 14” has a staggering amount of compute on board.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6998/r...ming-notebooks