[Intro music playing]
Hey how's it going guys? This is Dave2D,
and this is the 2016 Razer Blade Pro.
Now before I get into the review,
I want to address the guy that goes into the comments,
and talks about how,
they can build an equivalent PC for like $7.
I get it. Custom PC's are awesome.
They have their place. I'm running a Hackintosh back there.
I like builds myself, but this is a laptop.
Let's just focus on the engineering marvel that it takes
to stuff this kind of technology into a package this small.
Here's the review.
Ok, this is a Razer product, so, the build quality is great.
Aluminum all around, but it actually feels like a step up from the Razer Blade Stealth,
and the regular 14-inch Blade.
Maybe because it's thicker, it feels sturdier.
It still has the same black anodized finish, so if you want to protect that,
you should get a sleeve or a bag if you carry this thing around.
The port selection is ok for a 17 inch device.
It has ethernet and three USB 3.0s and HDMI 2.0 and it has an SD card reader.
There is a Thunderbolt three port, but there's only the one.
I wish there were more, because on a device like this you kind of want to last as long as possible
and USB-C is the future, but yeah there's only the one.
This uses a 17-inch IGZO touch panel.
It has excellent color gamut and accuracy.
Visually it's actually one of the best screens I have used on a laptop for content creation.
It's nice and big pretty bright and it supports G-sync at 60 frames per second,
so games look really nice on this thing.
The two megapixel webcam up top looks like this.
The keyboard is a mechanical keyboard and it's very tactile,
but i wouldn't say it's as enjoyable to use as a regular mechanical keyboard.
People tend to fall in love with those really easily.
This keyboard isn't like that.
It has good travel, but the response on the keys aren't as snappy as you might expect.
I still like it a lot especially with the individually lit keys, but i wouldn't
call it like the universally best laptop keyboard.
Most people will like it, but there are some people that won't.
[Clicks Real Mechanical Keyboard] Ouch....
[Clicks Razer Blade PRO Keyboard] Not Bad...
There is one issue I have with the layout.
When i'm trying to type a question mark,
I often press shift up instead of shift question mark,
because of the location of that up arrow.
Aside from that though, it's a great keyboard.
The trackpad is good, it uses Windows precision drivers, so that's a win.
Great texture and button mechanics. Having it located on the right is really weird at first.
You do get used to it pretty quickly though.
There are media keys and programmable scroll wheel here,
I have it set to control the volume,
because I like to being able to adjust game sound on the fly, like if I'm the last
person left on my team and it's 1v1 time, I gotta focus, right?
I gotta get my game on , so I crank up the volume real quick to listen for footsteps a little better and
I usually still get owned but seriously it's a really cool feature.
And as usual you can customize all this stuff through software.
The lighting, the key mapping, how the scroll wheel functions.
All of it can be controlled through Razer Synapse, but I've said this before.
RGB lighting is cool and Razer actually does it the best,
but the novelty of it wears off relatively quickly, so don't purchase this thing just because it looks really cool.
You probably won't though, because the price is $3700 at the base model.
That's expensive. It's expensive for a laptop.
It's even expensive for a laptop from Razer.
But with that price tag comes some really good components on the inside.
The ram is soldered on. It's running 32 GB.
Now, my video edits aren't crazy complex or anything but I haven't been able to max it out on ram usage.
There are two SSDs.
They're upgradeable and they come set up as RAID-0 out of the factory.
It's super fast, faster than the 2016 Macbook Pro.
Granted it is RAID-0, but even if you ran the 2 drives individually without RAID they're still very fast.
It has a 99 Wh battery over here, which is the legal limit to bring it onto a plane
and battery life is around 3, three-and-a-half hours of regular use with screen at 215 nits.
It's decent for a 17 inch gaming laptop, certainly not amazing.
But remember it is running a G-Sync panel so there's no Nvidia Optimus for power savings.
The cpu is here and the GPU is here: the laptop GTX 1080.
This graphics chip fitted into a system this thin is why the price tag is so high,
because it's incredibly difficult and expensive to do this properly.
This is why Razer is the only company to have a GTX 1080 in a laptop this thin.
Performance is obviously really good.
In terms of video editing the GTX 1080 is faster than any other laptop GPU I've used
but Adobe Premiere has its limitations with GPU acceleration,
we're not getting massive performance gains over something like the GTX 1060
or even something like the 960M. At least not with GH4 footage.
Now if you're working with red raw footage the difference is more noticeable.
Using 5k raw footage from the Scarlet W, the GTX 1080 starts to show some bigger gains.
But where the GPU really gets to flex its muscles is in games.
Something relatively light like Overwatch will break 100 fps on Ultra graphics, while playing in 4k.
It's nuts! Playing something heavier, like Doom, on ultra graphics and 4k
we're still looking at 65 frames-per-second.
Fire up the G-Sync feature and you'll have some of the smoothest and highest resolution
blood animations you'll ever see.
For really demanding AAA titles playing at 4k is possible you just don't have the best frame rates.
Far Cry Primal on Ultra at 4k isn't a very smooth experience,
I'd recommend switching to 1080p here.
And then really heavy stuff like Witcher3, you will need to drop down to 1080p,
but when you do you'll get around 75 frames per second on Ultra.
This is with hair works on.
The hardware in here is very powerful and will easily handle VR.
It has three fans, 2 of them to cool vapor chambers and then one of them to circulate air internally.
On idle this thing is surprisingly quiet, it's nearly silent,
which is crazy considering that there's a GTX 1080 in here.
When you do more CPU demanding stuff, so something like Adobe Premiere,
fan noise is louder but still very tolerable.
But when you're playing games and the GPU is going full tilt, it does get pretty loud,
you're going to want headphones.
But one thing I noticed about this fan system.
When you quit a game, normally like on a lot of other gaming laptops
the fans will still spin for a minute or two after you've quit the game,
just kind of cool everything down.
Not this laptop.
When you finish playing a game the fans ramp down almost immediately and I really like that.
The CPU and GPU temperatures are good even on stress test.
Externally the temperatures are also very comfortable.
It's actually way better than I thought it would be.
Razer did an outstanding job on thermals here.
The speakers are noticeably better than the 14 inch Razer Blade.
They're definitely louder and the bass is cleaner,
you're getting audio firing up and out of the sides,
but during games if you need to hear positional audio you still need headphones.
The fans will drown out the audio details.
The AC adapter is 250 watts and it's pretty slim.
That will fit into your bag nicely.
So, with the 2016 Razer Blade Pro you're getting one of the best built laptops on the market,
super-powerful, super-thin, the 17 inch touchscreen is fantastic for content creation and gaming.
The mechanical keyboard isn't as clicky as you might expect but it's still really good.
The trackpad has a position that takes a bit to adapt to but it's enjoyable to use especially with the scroll wheel.
The Skylake i7 and the GTX 1080 are extremely powerful and are surprisingly
well cooled considering how hot the components get and how thin this laptop is.
The 32 GB of Ram are soldered on.
The two SSDs are upgradeable but they're already super fast.
The 99 watt hour battery is big but you'll only get around three hours of battery life.
Now is this thing like the best value in gaming laptops?
Hell no, but you are getting a very unique product in this market space.
No one else is building a laptop this powerful into a chassis this thin.
Literally no one else is doing it.
Apple, I mean they're all about thin right now, they're not doing it.
Alienware is not doing it, Gigabyte is not doing it,
this is literally the only one that has a GTX 1080 in something this thin
So if that's what you're looking for and you have the budget, go for it, you won't be disappointed.
But for everyone else there's probably a better laptop that's a better fit for you.
That's the end of this video.
I hope you guys liked it.
Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it.
It's been nice, see you guys next time.