A gaming laptop

Razer Blade (2015, QHD+)

The Razer Blade is an impressive laptop thanks to its gorgeous display, responsive keyboard and touchpad and excellent gaming performance for its size. It looks good, too.Whether it's for gaming, multimedia enjoyment, work or all of the above, the Razer Blade is a fantastic choice if you need high performance but don't want to sacrifice mobility to get it.


Razer's Blade remains one of the thinnest, lightest gaming systems you can get. Clad in black aluminum like the 2014 version, the 14-inch notebook weighs just south of 4.5 pounds (2kg) and measures 0.7-inch thick (17.9mm).

Inside its 13.6-inch-wide-by-9.3-inch-deep frame (345mm by 235mm), you'll find a high-performance Intel mobile processor backed by 16GB of memory, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 970M with 3GB of its own memory and your choice of a 128GB, 256GB or 512GB solid-state drive.


Display size/resolution - 14-inch, 3,200x1,800 touchscreen

PC CPU -  2.6GHz Intel Core i7 4720HQ

PC Memory - 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz

Graphics - 3GB (dedicated) Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M

Storage -  256GB SSD

Networking - 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0

Operating system -  Windows 8.1 (64-GB)

Performance and battery life

Again, there are no configuration options beyond selecting storage capacity, and even that's limited to just three choices for its single SATA M.2 slot. The hardware here does deliver smooth gameplay -- even at full resolution -- but it's something you'll have to test on a game-by-game basis.

For example, Metro: Last Light, even though it's a couple years old, is still a challenge. With the resolution set to 3,200x1,800 pixels, quality set to high, texture filtering at AF 16X, Advanced PhysX and SSAA enabled, tesselation on high and motion blur on normal, the Blade hit just 14.3 frames per second. Dropping only the resolution setting down to 1080p, though, gets you a playable 34fps.