Razer Blade 14 Inch Touchscreen Gaming Laptop 512GB - Windows 8.1 - Nvidia GeForce GTX 870M

Update 9/12/14 - I continue to be impressed with the Razer Blade. It's been used pretty heavily over the last few days and it's been working beautifully. The display is impressive. I wasn't sure about getting a 14 inch screen thinking it would be too small, but it's so crisp and clear and the resolution so high that it seems much larger.I also wanted to tell you that unlike most computers you get these days, the Razer came with NO crapware, scamware, spam or other garbage installed on it! I was enormously pleased with that and it is a definite plus for Razer.I had some qualms about buying the Razer Blade, not because of the tiny number of poor reviews, though. I immediately discounted most of those because they seemed to be written either by people who had an axe to grind, or people who didn't seem to know how to change settings, or other trivial reasons. No, I was put off by the price. This is NOT a cheap laptop. Unless you have a very specific set of needs as I do, you will not be spending your money wisely. You can get a perfectly adequate laptop for a fraction of the cost. But that being said, if you are a gamer, need the fastest laptop you can get your hands on for some heavy duty number crunching, video processing or other intensive task, this computer is definitely something you should be looking at.This is not an in depth review. I've only had the Blade for a few days and the most stress it's been under has been running Skyrim, so I haven't yet come close to pushing it to its limits. I won't go into the specifications either. You can read those on the information page here at Amazon or at Razer's website. I am just going to talk about the computer.It is surprisingly small and relatively light for the horsepower under the hood. It's about the same thickness as my new MacBook Pro, but it does weight a bit more. As for build quality, it is excellent. Fit and finish is superb. Everything is tight, sleek, well built and reasonably well designed. I'm not thrilled with the connector that goes to the power brick. It is, frankly, massive, a far cry from the sleek magnetic connector on the Macbook. The brick itself is surprisingly small and slim, far smaller than I'm used to seeing on most laptops.External connection options are limited to 3 USB 3 ports and an HDMI connector, and that's it. I would have liked to have one or two additional USB ports because I use external hard drives, pointing devices, etc. Plus this thing is eventually going to be connected to my amateur radio equipment, and that is going to use two of the three ports all by itself. An SD card reader for importing video/photos would have been nice too. That can be dealt with by the use of an external adapter, but even Apple includes one these days.Keyboard looks good, and the feel of the keys is decent, but not as good as the Macbook. Extremely short strokes on the keys and it takes getting used to.The HD display is superb. I've never seen one as crisp and crystal clear on a laptop before. It is far, far superior to Macbook Pro. And I have no idea what one reviewer was complaining about when ranting about the small size of text. Totally wrong. Text is not too small to read, does not require magnification or zooming to read it. I don't know what their problem was. Possibly they had the settings messed up. The display is absolutely stunning.It's also a touch screen and I'm still trying to get used to the fact I can use the display like a mouse or a tablet. I suppose it's nice to have, but I don't want to smear up the screen and I find it more convenient to just use the touchpad or a mouse.Touchpad works about as well as any I've ever used. It's sensitive, very responsive, no problems at all. The only thing I don't like is that when I'm typing the sides of my thumbs will sometimes hit the pad causing the cursor to move where I don't want it.Sound quality has been surprisingly good. The audio has been crisp, clear, with surprising depth and richness for such small speakers.The video is simply stunning. I've been playing Skyrim with the video quality maxed out, and I've never seen anything quite so good on any of my computers. The combination of the HD screen and the Nvidia graphics card in this machine works beautifully.It is breathtakingly fast, at least when compared to the MSI it's replacing. But with it's SSD, the Core i7 processor and Nvidia graphics it damn well should be. I'm not used to having a Windows machine booting this fast. It takes all of 10 seconds to go from complete shut down to ready to run when I hit the power button.All in all, my opinion of the Blade is that it is a fantastic computer and well worth the money if you need this kind of speed and graphics.Drawbacks? Sure there are some. I'm not fond of the keyboard, as I mentioned earlier. Oh, it works well and feels reasonable, but with the very short keystrokes, I wouldn't want to type on it for extended periods of time.I'm not sure about the utility of the touch screen. I think I'd have rather saved a few bucks on the price and given up the touch screen. I doubt if I'll ever use it.A couple of reviewers commented on the amount of heat it produces. I haven't had it reach the point of becoming uncomfortably warm, but it definitely does produce a significant amount of heat.All in all, I'm enjoying the Blade enormously. If anything pops up up or I have other observations, I'll alter this review at that time.

The 2014 14" Razer blade with QHD screen has a lot going for it. It combines a beautiful QHD screen with a high end quad-core i7 chip, a good SSD, and a powerful NVidia dedicated GPU (870). On paper it has more power than I need as a casual gamer, and if it hadn't been for the dramatic discount on the product ($1499 at purchase - assumed to be a result of clearing out last year's stock as 2015 models are on sale) I wouldn't have touched it. Having come from a mid-range desktop I built 6 years ago I assumed everything inside this laptop would blow away my prior system, but I was a bit disappointed in my findings.First and foremost, I don't see any reason to use a QHD screen on 14" form factor. Razer has done an admirable job in pre-configuring the system settings so that while on the default resolution (3200x1800) the icon sizes and web page zooming allows you to actually see what's on screen. However, as you would expect, having to adjust these settings creates some graininess. Downgrading the screen resolution to 1080P helps improve this significantly, but at a loss of some amount of visual fidelity (I've always found not running computers and laptops at their standard isn't ideal for general use, but if fine for gaming due to the 3D scaling). Having a touchscreen on a gaming laptop made even less sense to me in practice as using it even a few times immediately created smudges and fingerprints that I spent time wiping off and decided not to use again.The build quality is solid, and the laptop actually feels heavier than the 4.4lbs it is listed as (possibly in part to the added weight of a touch screen). Maybe this is a result of spending too much time using an iPad Air 2 and an old Asus Zenbook laptop. By no means does the construction feel flimsy - this is a well made and attractive laptop. The keyboard is very functional, although I found I did not care for the green backlighting of the keys while in use (they look nice in pictures, but I found myself wanting the option to change to a light blue or white instead). The touchpad itself is great, but I find the buttons to feel a bit cheap and the sound of clicks both hollow in sound and unsatisfying in feedback time. Perhaps this was only my model, and this isn't a deal breaker anyhow as most gaming would be done with an external mouse anyhow.Performance... my highest area of expectation. The night the laptop arrives I loaded it up and decided to download 'Neverwinter' to run through some casual gameplay. As this game is not an overly demanding title (yet my old PC struggled with it on higher graphics settings), I expected the Blade to tear through it - and it did. After spending some time tweaking a few settings (and ensuing the GPU was rendering instead of the Intel chip - Optimus still isn't as smart as it should be - I was flying through a few quests. I'll emphasis the term "a few", as within 45 minutes of playing (plugged into a charger btw, more on that in a minute) the laptop shut down completely. It had clearly become extremely warm (which I had not noticed, using an external mouse and keyboard at that time, and when it started a few minutes later I confirmed a kernel shut down which I understood to be a result of the laptop approaching critical temperatures. I would have expected this had I been playing the Witcher 3 for four hours or comparable, but not on a less demanding title for under an hour.I did reach out to Razer CS who was very professional and quick to respond to my ticket with a few points of feedback, but nothing that could help me indicate whether or not my machine was defective or this was expected behavior. I had known that going with a high-end set of components there would be thermal challenges, but did not expect them so severe or so quickly.I've spent a little more time using the machine the last two days and will run through some additional benchmarks before making a final decision whether or not to return the laptop (and potentially try the Gigabyte P34W v3, which while I assume will have similar thermal challenges brings some more efficient hardware, a lower (and more reasonable) non-touch 1080P resolution, and weighs almost a pound less. I'm going to run a few tests undervolting the Razer to see if it helps with the thermal issues, and would likely do the same for the Gigabyte to compare.In summary:PROs:- Striking appearance and styling- Gorgeous screen- Powerful hardware- Solid build qualityCONs:- QHD not right for all laptop users (and even the powerful hardware can't always keep up with the resolution in games)- Touchscreen unnecessary for a gaming laptop- Thermal issues a very concerning both for ongoing use and long-term hardware integrity[EDIT] Battery life is a huge issue, as even if just doing routine web surfing this will only last 2-3 hours from my experience so far. Then again, if you're buying a Razer product, you're likely not intending to just web surf all the time :). This does take away from having the laptop also function in a utility/productivity role due to the lack of mobility option, and was factored into my original 3 star review score.I'll update my review over the next few weeks when I make a final decision.

Fast was able to play dark souls on it. Battery could be a bit better but it last for like 3 hours ish. Nice keyboard very nice design. Lit and good for gaming and working as well.

I absolutely love this laptop, its kind of small but you get used to that. Its only real flaws are its lack of an ethernet port and that the bluetooth can sometimes interfere with your wifi adapterBut overall its a great product and you can buy usb ethernet adapters for around $20 anyways

Nice & sleek. Not a whole lot of hard drive space for the price, fingerprint magnet, & heats up quick when you push it.

Great laptop, a bit expensive. Razer went all out with this, every single little detail is well worked out. Works great for gaming, as well as 3d simuation. The keyboard, and track pad is phenomenal. Additionally, Windows 8 (despite uninformed users' claims) is an absolutely amazing operating system, made better by the touch screen. Battery life is questionable, but during productivity runs I can get minimum 4 hours out of it.

Really Amazing Laptop, everyone i show it to is confused hehThe mouse buttons are the ONLY thing that lets this laptop down a little imo, they lack the superior quality of the rest of the thing but i always use a mouse anyway.Plays all my steam games on high, does get pretty warm but its meant to as the case is a heat sink, worth the money to me but it depends how easily you can afford it, i paid for the quality and portability not the specs as you can get similar spec laptop for alot less.