Razer Blade - fall 2012 review: PC gaming's concept car

It seems like just months ago that Razer released the Blade, a superthin big-screen gaming laptop that favored sharp design over top-end specs. Actually, it was just months ago: the original Razer Blade was reviewed on CNET in March. Here we are in October, and Razer has unsheathed an update to the Blade -- call it Blade 2.0, if you will -- that looks exactly the same from the outside.

7.5

Razer Blade - fall 2012

The Good

The latest <b>Razer Blade</b> has improved graphics and a quad-core, more powerful Core i7 processor in the same thin body, with an excellent 17-inch 1080p display.

The Bad

The new Blade costs $300 less than the first one, but it's still very expensive compared with competitors. The unique Switchblade UI touch-screen interface doesn't have enough game support to be a killer app.

The Bottom Line

Faster and better than before, the improved Razer Blade is a better gaming laptop in an impressively thin form, but you're paying for design over practicality.

Inside, however, this Blade has many updated specs, starting with a 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-3632QM quad-core CPU, and finishing with a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M graphics card, and fitting in a larger hybrid 500GB hard drive with 64GB solid-state drive (SSD) cache, up from a 256GB SSD in the previous model. Razer's also dropped the price on the Blade down to $2,500. That's still incredibly expensive for a laptop, considering that most gaming laptops go for far less money (even the Retina Display MacBook Pro costs $300 less). Even so, it still manages to be $300 lower than the price of the previous Blade.

If you've read the review of the last Blade, read it again. That black metal design, that excellent 17-inch 1080p matte screen, that oddball, odd-duck touch-screen touch-pad Switchblade UI, are all back.

So, who is this 0.88-inch-thin, 6.6-pound laptop for? The gaming show-offs, the e-gamers who want a sports car for a laptop, the Razer hardware lovers who somehow have $2,500 to spend. This isn't for value shoppers, or the practical-minded. However, credit Razer for this: the compromise that the last Razer Blade had to make -- less horsepower for a thinner design -- is largely gone. The new Razer Blade may not be the fastest gaming laptop around, but it's a highly capable one, and a far better one than its predecessor. That may not justify the price (or its still not-fully-baked Switchblade UI), but it does make the Razer Blade undeniably a quality product.