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Razer Announces Dedicated Gaming Laptop
An anonymous reader writes "After recently running a full-page ad in the WSJ saying, 'PC gaming is not dead,' Razer has now announced a new laptop, the Blade, for the express purpose of playing video games. Its most distinctive feature is what they call the 'Switchblade' UI, which is an area next to the keyboard that has a multi-touch LCD screen and 10 dynamic keys. The screen can receive and display information from games, and the keys can show unique icons particular to the game you're playing. The requisite hardware for a gaming laptop makes it weigh almost seven pounds, but it's less than an inch thick. Another distinctive feature is the price — at $2,800, they price a lot of gamers right out of the market. As the article says, 'It's a gamble, but an exciting one.'"
but "gaming laptops" where never alive. The concept is kind of silly given the rate at which gamers upgrade hardware and how static a notebooks configuration is.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's spec'd at around a $1400 normal gaming rig (that's being generous). It sure looks cool though. Thin too. You have to wonder how good the cooling system is on that thing...
I'll stick to gaming on a desktop for now, thanks.
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
Too expensive, but damn that is a badass looking laptop. You could bring it to the hipster coffee shop and look cooler than all the mac users.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation
"320GB 7200rpm SATA HDD"
For a gaming laptop? With games now taking 10-20 GB of space each? You'll either need a hell of an connection and stay deleting/redownloading using steam or whatever, or an external drive which will ruin the look.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
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Its gorgeous. Simply beautiful. I know I won't buy it. I like games, but if I want to PC game, I can get a great experience for so much less money with a desktop. Also I don't have to worry about switching out hardware nearly as much. If I wanted to spend that much money on a good-looking laptop I would get another Macbook Pro... then it will have the added benefit of running OS X. Of course it wouldn't be a gaming laptop then, but who really needs a gaming laptop AND has almost 3 grand to spend on it? My guess is this is SUPER niche.
I own and use a gaming laptop. I travel for business on a regular basis, and spend about 20 weeks a year living in various hotels. Being able to play a few rounds of Starcraft or TF2 with my friends in the evening is well worth the $1400/3 yrs I end up spending on hardware.
It's a niche market, to be sure, but I'm glad it's being served. (Although this particular laptop is well outside my price range.)
And they are especially useful for all those times you are looking at your keyboard while playing a game. I know I spend at least 50% of the time I play video games staring at the keyboard thinking "What does W do again?" Now it'll change to an arrow or a picture of a person walking or something.
Up until now, gaming computers really dropped the ball because they were only displaying beautiful game content on the screen. Razer has stepped it up a notch by bringing game content to where your eyes are always looking: the keyboard.
I take back everything terrible I ever said about Razer. It is now obvious that they have a firm understanding of how gamers use their input devices.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
What's going to convince a game developer to spend significant resources to develop a second-screen interface for the limited number of people who buy this laptop? It's doomed to live in the same world as Aureal A3D or other hardware sound accelerators, non-HID joysticks, or any other technology that never had a big enough market to be worth developing for.
$2800 bucks and they didn't even think it out? Most gamers are right handed, and PC gamers still predominately use a mouse in their right hand. so the special keypad should have been on the left, not on the right side of the keyboard (or for $2800 bucks I would expect to see a keyboard system that would let the special keypad be moved to either side).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The dual mode is interesting. I don't game enough to have an opinion but how many gamers need to look at the screen in display mode?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"PC gaming is dying! Quick, save it by giving us all your money!"
Also, as far as I know, pillows don't block electromagnetic radiation.
No of course not. You need pyramids to do that.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Gaming on a laptop with a "mobile" GPU sucks compared to the discrete GPU, unless there are some FutureMark 3DMark numbers that show otherwise ...
Gaming is not an adjective to describe a laptop. Anyone that is willing to spend that much for a gaming computer, they will build their own desktop that would put their laptop to shame.
I think it's cool. Gaming PCs have always been expensive. This one looks pretty good and should avoid sneers and giggles if you take it out in public. I won't be buying one, of course, because I don't have that kind of money to drop on games, but I WANT it.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
That's all I have to say. Show me a laptop that will let me run video cards in 3 or 4 way SLI. Oh, and my water cooled screaming 4 monitor system costs less than your shitty laptop. About half as much.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I would like to take that cancer-and-subluxation-reducing pillow and put it over your face and smother you with it, Bob.
I have an Asus G73JH-A1 with one of the HD's upgraded to a SSD from http://www.xoticpc.com/.
It has a better processor and cost $1000 or so less.
Amazing. They are awfully proud of something that doesn't even include an SSD, thus bottlenecking the entire system.
The setup I'd want is even more expensive than this one though.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Damn that's expensive, but it looks really sharp. I really like the idea behind the multitouch panel to the right of the keyboard.
I dunno, their mouse *hardware* seems of good quality. My left-handed Deathadder's seen many many drops onto a hard floor, and it still works.
The Windows drivers however... I've heard they can be poor. I've had little trouble with the Linux drivers(once I got razerd compiled and working) over the last year+ I've used it.
With moderate sucess, they managed to pull it off with great fun. But they are a little more modest with an average $2,000 pricepoint and nothing too rediculus.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
You know that Dr. Bob can cure your laptop of viruses by carefully manipulating the hinge. In fact you should entrust your laptop to Dr. Bob on a weekly basis to keep your laptop virus free and in good health.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
That thing is hot. Actually just the keyboard is hot! I want that keyboard in standalone form!
Balderdash!
Now, I'm actually in their target market - I generally game on a laptop, and I'm actually looking for a replacement (current one is ~3 years old, starting to run current games badly). But this one isn't good. Why?
1. Heat. There's barely any vents on this, and a LOT of hot gear on the inside. I wouldn't be surprised if this has actual problems functioning like it is.
2. Battery life. 60Wh sounds like a lot, but there's a TON of stuff trying to eat that battery. The CPU draws 25 watts, the GPU 35, 7200RPM hard drives tend to eat battery quickly, and I don't even want to think about how much power that big backlit screen draws. My laptop lasted about 2 hours with 40Wh, and it drew about half that much power. I'd put money on this thing lasting under an hour under a heavy gaming load.
3. Specs too low. The GPU is good, and the amount and speed of RAM is good, but the CPU is really lacking. Dual-core? Not good - for $3K, I'd expect quad- or even hexa-core. Sure, it's clocked well, but remember, half the time a laptop CPU is running at a reduced clock to save power.
4. Hard drive space. 320GB? My laptop from 3 years ago had that much, for half the price! There's no excuse not to have at least 500GB. Hell, put a Momentus XT in there - 500GB of hard drive, and a 4GB SSD in the same package. Or do it yourself - there's laptop-sized terabyte hard drives out there now, put one of those in beside a 16GB SSD and you'll still both impressive performance and capacity. And trust me - gamers need a lot of hard drive space. Some games I've played will suck up 20-40GB, and I haven't seen a non-indie release in years that was under 10GB. So that's AT MOST 30 games, possibly as low as 10. Not going to happen.
5. Gimmicky. The touchscreen/buttons that replaced the number pad are honestly just tacky. You'd need to get game devs to specifically support it in their games. If you had made it compatible with the G19 or G15 keyboard, you might have gotten somewhere, but at this point, it's a gimmick that won't get much dev support unless it sells REALLY well. It's not even positioned well - most games use the left half of the keyboard, where the WSAD is. Reaching over to the touchscreen would be like putting key macros on the number pad - slow, hard to hit accurately, and difficult to use. It should have been on the left of the keyboard, or maybe in that big empty space below it. On my current laptop (and most others), the trackpad is below the spacebar; I often use it with my thumb when gaming, mainly to turn faster in the tanks in BC2. You could move it to the bottom, and then have room for a proper number pad as well.
Whatever library they are giving to game makers to make that keyboard display happen, let it ALSO display the same control surface on a smartphone or iPad with custom app... then game makers would be a lot more inclined to add support.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Depending on the pillow, of course. Looking at wikipedia, I see that light falls under EMR, which I probably knew. But still, how much light does the bottom of your laptop give off that you need a pillow to block it?
Description from the article:
2.8GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 2640M Processor
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Memory
17.3" LED Backlit Display (1920x1080)
NVIDIA GeForce® GT 555M with NVIDIA® OptimusTM Technology
2GB Dedicated GDDR5 Video Memory
Built-in HD Webcam
Integrated 60Wh Battery
320GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
Wireless Network 802.11 b/g/n Compatible
16.81" (Width) x 10.9" (Depth) x 0.88" (Height); 6.97lbs (Weight)
It will ship in the fourth quarter of 2011 for $2,799.99.
Cost of an actual gaming laptop with a GTX and SSD $2400 http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Xplorer_X7_Xtreme_S2_Notebook/
While some may or may not like CyberPower, my main points are that you can't sell "gamers" a gaming system without a GTX card, the GT's just don't cut it and while a 320GB 7200 rpm drive is alright, you can get a 128GB SSD for about the same price, maybe around $30-50 more. No one uses anywhere near 320GB on their primary drive. I have Win7 with Office 2k10 Pro, Adobe CS Design Suite 5, LOTRO HR, DDO HR, WoW, Rift, EVE, STO, CO, PotBS, LoL and numerous web/net apps installed on my laptop and I'm using only 140GB of space.
Ave Molech Setting
Who do they think they are? Apple?
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
You insensitive clod... my laptop is nuclear powered! It glows green in the dark... ;-)
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
Oooh, I can throw an xbox, keyboard, mouse, monitor, a terabyte of storage and a standalone power source into my bag along with all the clothing I need for a week away at work and use it to play Napolean: Empire War or Football Manager 2011?
Or maybe it would be too fucking heavy, inconvenient, slower, unable to perform the general purpose computing tasks I also use my laptop for and still suffer a red ring of fucking death.
Yeah, those serious gamers with their xbox really showed me.
They on crack.
Makes apole look value
The best part is, pillows actually block heat from escaping from laptops, causing them to overheat.
I am surprised he didnt mention a cure for this low sperm count by recommending you see a "crack doctor".
A Macbook Pro has a better CPU and a hard drive over twice as large as this thing. The GPUs are roughly equivalent. Upgrade to 8GB of RAM aftermarket on the Macbook Pro and you actually get a better-specced laptop for less. They ARE off in lala land if they're actually exceeding what Apple charges for a lesser laptop.
Yikes. I'm sorry to say, you might have a little more to worry about than just the temporary sperm count reduction.
I have one of those lying around, too. Awesome machine. I don't have the Blu-Ray option, but I do have the SLI and the Ageia PhysX card in it. What amazes me about that thing is how quiet it is, even under super heavy loads.
I spend about that much for a Macbook Pro every 2-3 years, so the price isn't crazy.
What is crazy is spending that much money on a Razer product. Razer gear is real hit and miss in terms of build quality.
They know ergonomics better than anyone else in the business, but no fucking way I'd spend that money on a Razer. As a long time gamer, I have lost confidence in their ability to build a quality product. I know down in my gut that the trackpad's going to lose a lot of it's functionality in a few months, when it decides to actually work.
Fuck that, Razer. You've taken too much of my money and then gave me shitty service. I pay Apple prices to Apple because of their customer service. Razer customer support? HA HA HA.
3000 dollars and its only a 320 GB hard drive? WTF?
If i am gaming on a laptop i am using a mouse and not a touch pad. You don't think there is enough room in the laptop bag for a mouse do you? right or left handed even.
You know, us because i's called a "laptop" doesn't mean you have to put it on your lap.
It's like someone took a macbook and customised it for a teenager from 1996 and it comes complete with the shitty "i'm so manly" name of Razer Blade it's like it could be a graphics card. I'm hoping they'll make an extreme version.
Most games are around 8-10GB, because they have to fit on a DVD. WoW is my biggest at about 30GB, that and starcraft II (about 12gb) and are on my main drive (74gb raptor). I have another 74gb drive for my steam folder and i have, as far as large modernish games...
Borderlands
CS:S
DoD:S
L4D2
ME2
Portal 2
TF2
and about 20 other smaller games installed. Unless you cheaped out and have like an 80GB SSD or something, space isnt really an issue for your average gamer for games at least.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Dude, it's doctor bob. you must be new here.
it appears we have a serial, long winded troll in our midst.