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Razer has been making a name for itself in the PC marketplace the by few years, after starting life as an accessory manufacturer with products named after various types of snakes. The company has been backside some far-out proposals for next-generation hardware, worked with Intel and AMD to bring external dock support to marketplace, and has pushed hard to position the Razer Blade (thin-and-light ultrabook) and Razer Blade Pro as high-end systems for enthusiasts who are oftentimes spoiled for choice. Reviews of the updated 2016 Razer Book Pro take dropped, so how does the hardware await?

Both PCMag and Engadget accept published reviews of the new system and they both concur — this is by far Razer's strongest offering. As a 17-inch system the Razer Blade Pro is a large laptop, just information technology still manages to weigh in below 8 lbs (7.77lbs to be exact). It's likewise much thinner than competing designs, though Razer compensates for that with some keyboard innovations (more on that shortly). The Razer Blade Pro features a 4K display with 100% Adobe RGB output. The display is based on Precipitous'south IGZO (Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide) technology and features support for Nvidia'southward G-Sync as well. Keyboard lighting is adjustable via Razer'due south Chroma settings.

The trackpad is a major betoken of differentiation betwixt this laptop and other systems — we can't recall the terminal time we saw a company put the pad in a identify like this:

Keyboard

Engadget is quite fond of the keyboard, which is built with Razer's ultra-low-profile mechanical switches. Both PCMag and Engadget like the trackpad as well, though Engadget found it a niggling odd to use after two decades of putting the trackpad right below the keyboard. Frankly, putting it besides the keyboard does make practiced sense, fifty-fifty if it also risks making the keyboard area more cramped — there'south much less chance of resting your palm on the trackpad when typing if the trackpad itself sits to the correct of the keyboard. The speakers on the Razer Blade Pro are too manifestly first-class — more so than one expects from a typical laptop.

Performance is excellent, courtesy of the Core i7-6700HQ, 32GB of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1080 all packed inside the chassis, though PCMag noted that the system could get quite hot under load, and it lagged some of the other laptops they tested. Engadget, in contrast, thought performance was easily the best they'd ever seen, though they didn't compare their Razer Bract Pro to any other systems equipped with a GTX 1080). Here'southward how I'd separate that deviation: The Razer Bract Pro probably sacrifices some operation to striking its size target, since the laptop is just 0.88 inches thick (other laptops in the higher-end gaming categories are more like 1.half dozen – one.viii inches thick). Run time, co-ordinate to PC Gamer and Engadget, is just shy of four hours. That may not sound like much compared with a conventional laptop, just gaming systems often fence with sub-two-hour battery life.

Razer Blade Pro

The one downside to the Razer Blade Pro is the heart-watering price. Organisation configurations start at $iii,700 for a machine with 512GB of SSD storage. Storage is provided by a pair of SSDs in RAID 0; a 1TB configuration costs $4,000, and a 2TB drive is $4,500. Information technology should get without saying that $300 for an extra 512GB of storage is a poor deal these days, while $500 for a 1TB drive isn't much ameliorate. That's roughly 2x what such drives cost on the retail market, and you can bet Razer isn't buying hardware off Newegg.

Withal, if you lot take a lot of cash you can beget to drop on a laptop and y'all want a system that balances gaming, weight, size, and battery life, the Razer Bract Pro is well-reviewed and well-liked. It'south non hard to find less expensive gaming laptops, even those equipped with a GPU similar the GTX 1080, but information technology's not piece of cake to think of some other organization that offers about 4-hour battery life, is less than an inch thick, and packs a GTX 1080. If you desire that combo, you're going to take to pay for it.