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I never hear anyone mention the Razer Blade's and yet they seem to be the best looking and spec'd non-Apple notebooks by far. They are almost too good to be tr

I never hear anyone mention the Razer Blade's and yet they seem to be the best looking and spec'd non-Apple notebooks by far. They are almost too good to be true. What's the catch? Have you had any issues running Linux on them?

mw42 10y ago
I upgraded to a Razer Blade from a 2013 macbook. Performance is great. It is very well built, I would say on almost on par with a Mac, except for thin grills covering the cooling fans on the bottom. Grabbing the laptop in the wrong spot can easily push the grills up against the fan. Battery life is terrible. Lucky to get 4-5 hours running a nothing but a browser and ssh client. (On windows 10. I haven't tried, but remember reading that power management on linux is even worse) The trackpad gestures are not as accurate as on a Mac. I don't know how much of that is Windows vs the hardware. Cooling fans are always on, and they are kind of loud even at low rpm. Not noticeable in a noisy office environment, but annoying in a quiet setting. The black chassis is a fingerprint magnet like no other laptop I've seen. The lit green logo on the lid is a bit obnoxious, and would not fit in at a very corporate environment. The actual display size is somewhat smaller than that of many similarly sized notebooks. I'm okay with the trade offs (though the battery hurts...) but its definitely not a clear-cut winner compared to the competition. Edit: the Blade Stealth may fare a little better battery wise, but even it doesn't have a stellar battery life.
extrapickles 10y ago
I run Linux as a VM on mine, which works fine for my use cases. I've heard the Wifi/GPU/Webcam can give you trouble in some cases depending on exact laptop model and Linux distro used.
sydd 10y ago
The price, they are in Macbook range.
cletus 10y ago
As a gaming laptop they're not great. The reason is that, for example, one model had a GTX 970M, which sounds good but the thermal performance is such that the GPU is near constantly throttled resulting in questionably worse performance than similarly sized and specked machines with a 960M part. That's just poor thermal design. You know you just don't get that with MacBooks (you don't get a 970M either of course). Personally I'm passing on this generation of MBPs. Will Apple wait another 2 years to update them? I'm just not convinced that this isn't now an iPod market for Apple. Instead I ended up getting a Dell XPS 15. Having a Linux subsystem is pretty nice. It's nowhere near as polished as the Apple experience but for $1300 (including upgrades) I got the base machine and put a Samsung 950 Pro and 32GB of RAM into it, so that's nice.
- throwaway188 10y ago
  I'm sorry, but you are just wrong on this. I own one of those 970M model Razer Blades and I can tell you personally that throttling is not an issue on my machine. At all. https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads/razer-blade-2016-ideas-suggestions-improvements-that-need-to-be-made.4407/page-2#post-134519 https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads/razer-blade-... Razer has superb thermal design.
op00to 10y ago
> What's the catch? What happens when you need hardware support? Lenovo gives you (shitty in my experience) on site service - if you pay. Apple has the Apple Store, superior if you have a store nearby. What's Razer got? Depot service for my main money making tool? Unacceptable.

mw42 10y ago

I upgraded to a Razer Blade from a 2013 macbook. Performance is great. It is very well built, I would say on almost on par with a Mac, except for thin grills covering the cooling fans on the bottom. Grabbing the laptop in the wrong spot can easily push the grills up against the fan. Battery life is terrible. Lucky to get 4-5 hours running a nothing but a browser and ssh client. (On windows 10. I haven't tried, but remember reading that power management on linux is even worse) The trackpad gestures are not as accurate as on a Mac. I don't know how much of that is Windows vs the hardware. Cooling fans are always on, and they are kind of loud even at low rpm. Not noticeable in a noisy office environment, but annoying in a quiet setting. The black chassis is a fingerprint magnet like no other laptop I've seen. The lit green logo on the lid is a bit obnoxious, and would not fit in at a very corporate environment. The actual display size is somewhat smaller than that of many similarly sized notebooks. I'm okay with the trade offs (though the battery hurts...) but its definitely not a clear-cut winner compared to the competition. Edit: the Blade Stealth may fare a little better battery wise, but even it doesn't have a stellar battery life.

extrapickles 10y ago

I run Linux as a VM on mine, which works fine for my use cases. I've heard the Wifi/GPU/Webcam can give you trouble in some cases depending on exact laptop model and Linux distro used.

sydd 10y ago

The price, they are in Macbook range.

cletus 10y ago

As a gaming laptop they're not great. The reason is that, for example, one model had a GTX 970M, which sounds good but the thermal performance is such that the GPU is near constantly throttled resulting in questionably worse performance than similarly sized and specked machines with a 960M part. That's just poor thermal design. You know you just don't get that with MacBooks (you don't get a 970M either of course). Personally I'm passing on this generation of MBPs. Will Apple wait another 2 years to update them? I'm just not convinced that this isn't now an iPod market for Apple. Instead I ended up getting a Dell XPS 15. Having a Linux subsystem is pretty nice. It's nowhere near as polished as the Apple experience but for $1300 (including upgrades) I got the base machine and put a Samsung 950 Pro and 32GB of RAM into it, so that's nice.

throwaway188 10y ago
I'm sorry, but you are just wrong on this. I own one of those 970M model Razer Blades and I can tell you personally that throttling is not an issue on my machine. At all. https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads/razer-blade-2016-ideas-suggestions-improvements-that-need-to-be-made.4407/page-2#post-134519 https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads/razer-blade-... Razer has superb thermal design.

op00to 10y ago

> What's the catch? What happens when you need hardware support? Lenovo gives you (shitty in my experience) on site service - if you pay. Apple has the Apple Store, superior if you have a store nearby. What's Razer got? Depot service for my main money making tool? Unacceptable.