Razer has updated its Blade laptop for 2014, significantly improving upon the specs of last year’s model. The new system features NVIDIA’s latest notebook graphics solution and what the company is calling “the highest resolution 14-inch notebook display on the planet.”
The original Razer Blade was a capable gaming machine in its own right, and bucked the market trend of thick and heavy systems that push the definition of portable. The new machine features similar internals to its predecessor, but with some notable upgrades.
The new laptop ships with an Intel Core i7-4702HQ processor, 8GB DDR3L RAM running at 1600MHz and, perhaps most importantly, NVIDIA’s newly-announced GeForce GTX 870M graphics card with 3GB of dedicated GDDR5 VRAM. In terms of connectivity, the laptop provides three USB 3.0 ports, a microphone/headphone combo port and an HDMI out. As you would expect from a gaming machine, the new Blade comes fitted with a backlit anti-ghosting keyboard and built-in stereo speakers.
Though NVIDIA hasn’t been specific about which cards in the new line provide the most notable performance increase, it claims that the updated GPUs provide 30-60 percent more raw power than their predecessors.
The new cards also feature built-in game recording and streaming support, GameStream support and deliver “up to twice” the gaming battery life through Battery Boost – a technology that targets a user-defined frame rate and throttles the system’s hardware accordingly.
While the machine's graphics have been given a significant upgrade, the new laptop’s stand-out feature is its impressive 14-inch 3200 x 1800 multitouch display. For anyone who’s counting, that’s a PPI rating of 262 and a total of 5.76 million pixels, four times that of its predecessor.
The laptop will come in 128, 256 and 512 GB SSD configurations. It ships with Windows 8.1, is just 0.7-inches (17.8 mm) thick and weighs in at 4.47 lb (2.03 kg). The system costs between US$2,200 and $2,699, dependent on storage configuration, and is available to pre-order now, with orders shipping in the next 3-4 weeks.
Source: Razer
