Why on Earth did they choose to compromise the weight? Razer should have used a slower GPU if necessary and kept the weight at 3 kg - just as the previous 17" Blade. This new Blade Pro is too heavy at 3.54 kg - lots of options around that weight. Slick, lightweight notebooks are Razer's cream and butter. What the heck has happened?
There is no modern, high-end slim & light 17" notebook on the market today. This could have been it. This could have been the new 17" MacBook Pro. What a shame.
There would likely never ever be a 17" MacBook Pro again. Or any high-end, slim and light 17" laptop. The new 17" Razer Blade could have been one, but it's not. That's the point.
I'm really surprised - I recently started travelling less and I must say 15" MBP is much better for everyday use - I lug it around the house and I think if there was a 17" I'd go for it now. With the advances of unibody and slimmer bezel, the new 17" could be not much bigger than many 15" laptops...
I've become less of a gamer as I age so im not too excited about onboard graphics.
However the idea of a thin, light high performance 17 inch laptop with 4 or 5k display plus massive onboard raid storage would make me drool. Be nice if it had the option to connect to an external gpu as well to drive triple 4k displays when at home.
I'd like 8 core, 32gb, 4 x pcie raid...and great battery life too (maybe in 10 years lol)
The Aorus X7 DT v6 has a 1080 GTX in it, comes with a superior 17" 120Hz 3K screen (regular 4K is an option) and a superior 6820hk processor to make the best out of the 1080. Weighs the same as the Blade, but slightly thicker at 1". Honestly, I think the 120hz screen and 6820hk is a better deal than the mechanical keyboard.
Again, I notice 100% of AdobeRGB. No P3 support. The first one is actually enough. It's the defacto standard for printing/photography. I raised this issue on the iphone review. You checked for P3 color space but not for AdobeRGB - where other sites found the iphone to lag at 60%.
Why would you want AdobeRGB on an ipad/iphone? There's no "standard" when it comes to printing, and both AdobeRGB and P3 are good enough - P3 matters for movies though, so that's a huge plus. Let's also not forget that P3 is basically going to replace sRGB at some point on the web.
This is easily Razer's most powerful system but what really surprises me is that it has two PCIe M.2 running in a RAID 0. Doesn't a striped volume with SSD's remove the advanced features like TRIM? I've been looking online and haven't been able to find a definite answer.
Why the large bezels? I realize that they likely need the chassis room for cooling, but in that case why not do an 18.4 inch display with tiny bezels (like a large XPS laptop). Other than that I think this looks good (albeit a tad pricey). The 15 inch version should be a nice thin and light and I would guess much of the mass is dedicated to being able to cool a 1080.
My first throught would be to wonder if there was a suitable 18.4" panel available. There was a year or two interval when 1440p or higher panels were available for 13.3" laptops but high DPI was still niche enough that nothing better than 1080p was available at the 15 or 17" classes.
A potential secondary factor could've been durability/damage resistance. Bigger bezels give more room for energy from landing on a corner to be dissipated before cracking the display. For ultra-portables that's a much more acceptable tradeoff than for something that's going to be big and bulky no matter what.
Agreed, but other than aesthetic symmetry arguments that only requires a non-negligible top bezel; and the bezels in this look like they're bigger than many ultrabooks. You can go smaller than 3/4ths of an inch without contracting XPS Nosehair Camera Syndrome.
Thinking a bit more, the limiting factor might be the keyboard/etc tray layout. Narrowing the laptop as a whole would require either moving what I believe are the speakers somewhere other than the sides of the keyboard/touchpad or shrinking the touchpad itself. Putting the speakers elsewhere would likely degrade their effectiveness; up pointing speakers are more efficient than side/down firing ones at delivering sound to the user. The unconventional touchpad location was done in part to make it easier to game without an external mouse; and while gaming on the touchapd is probably still more an aspirational goal than anything else, shrinking the pad would make it harder to do so.
18.4 is an odd panel size, and someone the size of Razer isn't going to be able to go full custom and maintain any sort of margins, even on a device like this. There's no high res panels that size that I know of, let alone IGZO.
Install the Qualcomm drivers, they are less crappy and that all Killer is, buggy drivers on top of crappy silicon that will see one or two software updates.. But it baffles me, there is ethernet interface in the chipset, why go for that crap?..
How many PCIe lanes does the HM170 chipset have? How can they have 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3, two PCIe NVMe SSDs, and x16 to an nVidia 1080 without knocking Thunderbolt 3 down to 20Gbps or the video card down to x8? Most laptops advertising that many devices are doing it with a desktop chipset and CPU.
Does any gamer really care THAT much about the weight? I mean, this is clearly aimed at gaming with a 1080. As a matter of fact, I think it was Dell that released a liquid-cooled laptop with 1080 SLI. The liquid cooling would go through the GPUs and the CPU/RAM. I couldn't imagine they made that for a "thin" laptop.
One major mistake Razr made. Made a gaming computer "touch-screen"? WTF... wouldn't it be better with 1080 SLI? Who the hell uses a touch-screen in real gaming?
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yhselp - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
Why on Earth did they choose to compromise the weight? Razer should have used a slower GPU if necessary and kept the weight at 3 kg - just as the previous 17" Blade. This new Blade Pro is too heavy at 3.54 kg - lots of options around that weight. Slick, lightweight notebooks are Razer's cream and butter. What the heck has happened?There is no modern, high-end slim & light 17" notebook on the market today. This could have been it. This could have been the new 17" MacBook Pro. What a shame.
nerd1 - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
MBP will never, ever have anything close to 1080.yhselp - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
There would likely never ever be a 17" MacBook Pro again. Or any high-end, slim and light 17" laptop. The new 17" Razer Blade could have been one, but it's not. That's the point.xchaotic - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
I'm really surprised - I recently started travelling less and I must say 15" MBP is much better for everyday use - I lug it around the house and I think if there was a 17" I'd go for it now.With the advances of unibody and slimmer bezel, the new 17" could be not much bigger than many 15" laptops...
dsumanik - Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - link
I've become less of a gamer as I age so im not too excited about onboard graphics.However the idea of a thin, light high performance 17 inch laptop with 4 or 5k display plus massive onboard raid storage would make me drool. Be nice if it had the option to connect to an external gpu as well to drive triple 4k displays when at home.
I'd like 8 core, 32gb, 4 x pcie raid...and great battery life too (maybe in 10 years lol)
SilthDraeth - Saturday, December 17, 2016 - link
It can, it has Thunderbolt 3, which is capable of handling an external gpu enclosure.JoeyJoJo123 - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
>too heavy at 3.54kg!>too heavy for a desktop-replacement (which weighs several dozen kg) laptop!
Go to the gym, man.
beck2050 - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link
Incredible power. A few extra pounds is too much for these pitiful weaklings lol.TareX - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
The Aorus X7 DT v6 has a 1080 GTX in it, comes with a superior 17" 120Hz 3K screen (regular 4K is an option) and a superior 6820hk processor to make the best out of the 1080. Weighs the same as the Blade, but slightly thicker at 1". Honestly, I think the 120hz screen and 6820hk is a better deal than the mechanical keyboard.Gunbuster - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
But it has the "do you even lift bro" gaming chicken/eagle logo... Uggnegusp - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link
You must be quite a shrimp to not be able to carry around a 3.5 kg laptop- in addition, the Blade Pro is awfully slick and svelte.id4andrei - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
Again, I notice 100% of AdobeRGB. No P3 support. The first one is actually enough. It's the defacto standard for printing/photography. I raised this issue on the iphone review. You checked for P3 color space but not for AdobeRGB - where other sites found the iphone to lag at 60%.Toss3 - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
Why would you want AdobeRGB on an ipad/iphone? There's no "standard" when it comes to printing, and both AdobeRGB and P3 are good enough - P3 matters for movies though, so that's a huge plus. Let's also not forget that P3 is basically going to replace sRGB at some point on the web.Adm_SkyWalker - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
This is easily Razer's most powerful system but what really surprises me is that it has two PCIe M.2 running in a RAID 0. Doesn't a striped volume with SSD's remove the advanced features like TRIM? I've been looking online and haven't been able to find a definite answer.ganeshts - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
I believe TRIM passthrough on RAID implemented using Intel's RSTe has been resolved for a few generations now.ganeshts - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6161/intel-brings-tr...bug77 - Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - link
Does it work outside Windows?(Yeah, I know, this is a gaming machine, thus it will run Windows, But I'm curious.)
ImSpartacus - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
They can probably get 4TB of storage on this bad boy with a pair of those new Samsung drives. Only about three grand in storage, lol.close - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
$1/gram. Great specs though.abrowne1993 - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
Say what you will about Razer or the price, it's pretty awesome to have so much power in a laptop as sleek and thin as this.Varjo - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
Why the large bezels? I realize that they likely need the chassis room for cooling, but in that case why not do an 18.4 inch display with tiny bezels (like a large XPS laptop). Other than that I think this looks good (albeit a tad pricey). The 15 inch version should be a nice thin and light and I would guess much of the mass is dedicated to being able to cool a 1080.Meaker10 - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
The panel options are massively inferior for the 18.4" size.DanNeely - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
My first throught would be to wonder if there was a suitable 18.4" panel available. There was a year or two interval when 1440p or higher panels were available for 13.3" laptops but high DPI was still niche enough that nothing better than 1080p was available at the 15 or 17" classes.A potential secondary factor could've been durability/damage resistance. Bigger bezels give more room for energy from landing on a corner to be dissipated before cracking the display. For ultra-portables that's a much more acceptable tradeoff than for something that's going to be big and bulky no matter what.
p1esk - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
Webcam's placement can also be a factor - some (most?) people don't like how Dell XPS's webcam is on the bottom.DanNeely - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
Agreed, but other than aesthetic symmetry arguments that only requires a non-negligible top bezel; and the bezels in this look like they're bigger than many ultrabooks. You can go smaller than 3/4ths of an inch without contracting XPS Nosehair Camera Syndrome.DanNeely - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Thinking a bit more, the limiting factor might be the keyboard/etc tray layout. Narrowing the laptop as a whole would require either moving what I believe are the speakers somewhere other than the sides of the keyboard/touchpad or shrinking the touchpad itself. Putting the speakers elsewhere would likely degrade their effectiveness; up pointing speakers are more efficient than side/down firing ones at delivering sound to the user. The unconventional touchpad location was done in part to make it easier to game without an external mouse; and while gaming on the touchapd is probably still more an aspirational goal than anything else, shrinking the pad would make it harder to do so.Brett Howse - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
18.4 is an odd panel size, and someone the size of Razer isn't going to be able to go full custom and maintain any sort of margins, even on a device like this. There's no high res panels that size that I know of, let alone IGZO.PVG - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link
Damned Killer NICs, spoiling good products since forever.keeepcool - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Install the Qualcomm drivers, they are less crappy and that all Killer is, buggy drivers on top of crappy silicon that will see one or two software updates..But it baffles me, there is ethernet interface in the chipset, why go for that crap?..
Ening - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Well you just don't complain about the price of such a thing. It is marvelous.cjb110 - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
The more important announcement was that Razer laptops are at last launching in Europeapriest - Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - link
How many PCIe lanes does the HM170 chipset have? How can they have 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3, two PCIe NVMe SSDs, and x16 to an nVidia 1080 without knocking Thunderbolt 3 down to 20Gbps or the video card down to x8? Most laptops advertising that many devices are doing it with a desktop chipset and CPU.Piiitabyte - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
Does any gamer really care THAT much about the weight? I mean, this is clearly aimed at gaming with a 1080. As a matter of fact, I think it was Dell that released a liquid-cooled laptop with 1080 SLI. The liquid cooling would go through the GPUs and the CPU/RAM. I couldn't imagine they made that for a "thin" laptop.Piiitabyte - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
One major mistake Razr made. Made a gaming computer "touch-screen"? WTF... wouldn't it be better with 1080 SLI? Who the hell uses a touch-screen in real gaming?