Hey, how's it going guys?
This is Dave 2d. And this is my review of the 2016 Razer Blade highly anticipated product in comparison to last year's Model
This one's thinner more powerful and yet somehow It's 400$ cheaper
Sounds pretty good, right?
Let's take a look
So the box this year is pretty similar to last year's it's black box with a bright green trim and inside to get the laptop
Ac adapter and a pack of Pamphlets with the cleaning cloth and some stickers the top surface is a black anodized aluminum
It's a different material from the 2015 blade, that was rough and not pleasant to hold
This is the same smoother finish as a Razer Blade Stealth
The razer logo lights up and even if you turn off the logo lighting, the backlighting from the screen still gives it a glow
It has the same aluminum material on the bottom and you can access the internals by removing some screws
The drive in here is yet again that PM951 from Samsung where the smaller the drive is the slower they are
This is a 256 gig read speeds are good
But the write speeds aren't so hot the 512 gig will have faster writes
It's around twice as fast
But it's still not amazing and I'd like to see better drives at this price point
The good thing is that if you want to swap it out
It's easy to do the ram is soldered on it's got 16 gigs which is plenty for gaming and the fans have been
Redesigned if you take a look at them they have a bit of a concave shape to them
And they're also easy to access if you ever need to clean them out
the screen
Construction is super solid there's essentially no flex to it and same with the hinge excellent tension out of the box and it's a one-hand open
The keyboard Air is also very rigid now
I'm critical though build quality and in terms of the exterior build of the razor
It's awesome It's better than last year's model
And I'd say it's equal to the build quality of a macbook. If I had to nitpick at something
I guess the plastic hand cover here could be better
But that's really all I got now it looks super cool to have a black anodized laptop
But underneath this black is a super shiny silver and nick and chips are going to sparkle like a diamond
[I] highly recommend getting a sleeve or skin for the laptop
dbrand skins even have an option to hide the logo if you want
I'll put a link down below. For ports it has 3 USB 3 a combo audio Jack
an HDMI port and of course a Thunderbolt 3 port that you can connect to the razer core
There's no SD Card slot again this year now for kicks
I try charging it with the Thunderbolt 3 port
But it didn't seem to work with the razer blade stealth charger if you're unfamiliar with the core
It's an external box that you can connect to boost your graphics performance if you want to learn more about it
There's a link up top and I'm going to be doing a review of the core with both razer laptops shortly
So be subscribed for that the chroma key board is pretty cool. You can do lots of fun stuff with it
There's a lot of options [in] the menus to make it go from Rainbow to solid to breathing to reactive buttons
It's pretty neat but don't make it the main reason that you buy it the novelty will probably wear off quickly
The keyboard itself is really good
it definitely feels better than the stealth keyboard because each keystroke has a little bit more travel it also still has the
Anti-ghosting feature for maximum spam and I think it's a keyboard that most people will like the glass trackpad is good
It's an excellent texture not too smooth and the controls actually feel better than the stealth trackpad what I don't like are the buttons
They feel like they're the same buttons as last year they feel and sound cheap, and they're small alright
So it took me over a week to get used to it and once you've been spoiled with a Force touch trackpad
Where you can click wherever you want kind of sucks to be clicking on a tiny sliver of a button?
The screen on this model is a 14 inch IGZO touchscreen running at 3200:1800 viewing angles and color gamut are pretty good
But I would calibrate it if you can. It gets pretty bright 333 nits it's but it's a glossy screen
So it's not great outdoors
The weird thing is that the lowest brightness setting isn't very dim so if you plan on using in the dark a lot
That might bug you the webcam up top is 2 megapixel looks pretty good the bezels on the sides aren't too bad
But the top bezel is pretty big. I'm not in love with that the speakers are pointing upward and for a thin laptop
They sound good. They definitely sound better than the razer blade stealth speakers
They sound clearer they get loud and the bass isn't bad, but they're not as speakers on the thicker laptops
It's running a quad-core skylake chip and a GTX 970m so the razor blade handles games well
It's an older chip so there's tons of benchmarks on the web
But you're going to get excellent gaming [performance] for light to moderately demanding titles 60 frames per second on max graphics settings 1080p
Something heavier like Rainbow six Siege will still get 55 60 frames per second with high graphics settings at 1080p
For extremely demanding titles you'll need to reduce your graphics quality or a resolution at 1080p
I had to play on low to medium settings to get smooth frame rates in the new doom granted
This is one of the most hardware demanding games right now and if you're thinking of playing at the native resolution of 3200 by 1800
Unless you're playing Agario or something don't do it
Last Year's razor blade Ran really hot this year the fans and heat pipes have been redesigned
And it's running a skylake chip so temperatures are better
It's still hot the good thing is the fans are strong enough to keep the clock speed up now these fans are quiet on idle
And even when watching a movie they spin, but you won't really hear them
But when you're playing a very demanding game the fans can get super loud you'll probably want headphones
It uses 165 watt adapter under normal use I was getting around five and [a] [half] hours of battery life the screen at 60%
playing games
I got around one and a half hours and to charge the battery up takes around two and a half hours
Alright the 2016 razor blade 14 starts at around two thousand dollars. It has a really solid unibody Chassis
Excellent build quality but get a skin or a sleeve for it it has a 14 inch touch screen
That's bright and color accurate
But the bezels are a little big
The speaker is well positioned and sound pretty good for a thin laptop the keyboard has fun chroma lighting and it's a good typing experience
the trackpad is good the buttons are not so good on the
inside the Skylake quad-Core I7 and the GTX 970m are strong performers
But the system can get pretty hot the 16 gigs of ram can't be upgraded
But it's more than enough for gaming the 256 gig drive is a little [slow] on writes
but it is [upgradeable] and
powering all of this is a 70 watt hour battery that gets around five to five and a half hours [of]
Regular use so this year's razor blade
It's still an expensive laptop
but it's a better product at A
significantly cheaper price compared to last year in
terms of its thermals it still runs hot hotter than I'd like it to but that's just the nature of the beast when you
Build something this thin and this powerful
It's going to run warm, but if you are looking for a laptop that's thin and powerful and can crush games
This is one of the best available on the market right now. That's the end of this video
Hoped you guys liked it thumbs have you liked it subs if you loved it? It's been nice. I'll see you guys next time