Razer Blade wows with sharp display

SINGAPORE — Fire up the 2014 Razer Blade and you’ll be struck immediately by the stunning 14-inch display, with its excellent definition, vivid colours and unrivalled 3,200 x 1,800 pixel resolution display.

The screen offers amazing colour-correctness and clarity even when viewed close to edge-on, while adding only a hair’s breadth of additional thickness to the sleek black aluminium and blazing green LED Razer chassis gamers already know and love.

There’s also the wonderfully-responsive capacitive touchscreen — all the better to make full use of Windows 8.1, which comes installed.

There is no doubt the fabulous display is the Razer Blade’s strongest suit, but while it does beautiful work, there are also a number of issues.

The first is that barely a handful of games actually support the native resolution of the screen. This means that, for the most part, a portion of the Razer’s graphics processing power — a respectable NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M GPU — goes towards anti-aliasing to ensure your display remains free of the dreaded “jaggies”, jagged lines that denote sub-optimal resolution configuration. This, coupled with the serious power draw from the screen and i7 processor, puts a serious damper on battery life.

Still, no diehard gamer plays without a wall socket, and Razer has made sure that the cabling for charging on the go is beautifully streamlined.

Another point to note: The Razer Blade is hot. Literally. Despite the dual fans mounted on the underside, my palms were sweaty from the heat after about 30 minutes playing Company Of Heroes 2 on “show-off” settings. With the Razer Blade wafer-thin at only 1.78cm thick, this means you are reliant on a wireless connection to play games via LAN with your friends.

In all, the Razer Blade rates best-in-class for display, form factor and aesthetics. Putting aside the quibbles about battery life and wiring, the price tag — S$3,499.90 for the 256GB version — remains the biggest stumbling block for the average gamer. However, for the diehard gamer in the market for serious bragging rights, the 2014 Razer Blade is surely a contender.

The 2014 Razer Blade is available at www.razerzone.com.