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Razer Refreshes its Blade Gaming Laptop Line

03.09.2012
Gaming hardware maker Razer recently announced a refresh to its , a high-priced, yet unique gaming system that debuted in 2011. Razer's goal with the Blade line is to offer a powerful notebook with an attractive design that is as portable as possible. Last year's model was certainly a beauty, and the second iteration of the Blade looks to be pretty much the same on the outside.

But the good news is the specs have been bumped up a bit while the price has come down by $300 from $2,800 (original price) to $2,500 (new model). The new Blade is available for pre-order now and starts shipping in North America on September 30.

It's not clear why, but the new Razer Blade features an as yet unnamed quad-core Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7 processor. A quick search on Intel shows the chip maker offers 13 quad-core Core i7 chips that range in clock speed from 2.1GHz to 3.5GHz, in addition to the 3.8GHz Core i7-3920XM Extreme Processor. The original Blade has a dual-core 2.8Ghz Intel Sandy Bridge Core i7-2640M.

Graphics for the refreshed Blade include the NVIDIA GeForce GTX660M GPU with 2GB GDDR5. The main display stays the same at 17.3 inches with 1920-by-1080 resolution. The device refresh also features the unique touchpad from the original that can double as a secondary LCD display for waypoint maps and other data when you have a peripheral mouse plugged into the notebook.

The new Blade features a hybrid storage set-up with a 500GB hard drive and 64GB solid state drive. Other specs include three USB 3.0 ports, HDMI out, 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM, Gigabit Ethernet port, 802.11 a/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity. Razer also says the new Blade has a redesigned thermal system to get the heat out of the device more quickly--an essential feature for any system with such graphics-intensive components. The company says the new Blade has larger vents and specially designed heat pipes that allow for more airflow to the laptop's temperature-rising guts. The new Blade comes with 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium and lacks an optical drive just like the original.

Similar to the original, the new Blade is somewhat thinner and lighter than traditional gaming laptops with a depth of 0.88 inches and a weight of 6.6 pounds. Compare that to the desktop replacement/gaming laptop released earlier this year that tips the scales around 8.4 pounds and is more than 2 inches thick. The MSI GT70 has double the RAM than the new Blade as well as an extra 300GB of storage and a Blu-ray disc player--a big contributor to a laptop's thickness. The GT70, however, is also $500 cheaper with an MSRP around $2,000. Other are also significantly cheaper than the Blade.