 You guys asked for it and I delivered eventually. This is the Razer Blade. I am doing an unboxing of, this was an E3 demo unit, so yes, it's already open, but I think you'll mostly get the point. So what do we have inside? We have peel off, oh okay, interesting. Place the film over here and apply the film to the, oh okay, I'll explain what this is after, so that's sort of probably supposed to be actually inside the package somewhere. So the Razer Blade is a gaming notebook from a legitimately gaming company, Razer. There's a lot of gaming notebooks from, and I speak from first hand experience, from companies that don't actually understand what gamers want and what gamers need. And not every notebook solution that is high performance or that is high quality is necessarily great for gaming. For example, Lenovo Thinkpads. Great notebooks, not great for gaming. More designed for corporate use, rugged portability, that kind of thing. So it's all about what you actually need and Razer believes that this notebook is entirely focused on what the gamer needs. Razer, as always, just like brilliant packaging, that's how they roll. They've got like kind of a carbon fiber-esque sort of look to the top of the box here and that's all the time you get to look at it because we have to keep things rolling here and have a look at the notebook itself. So this is a 17-inch gaming notebook. It has a quad-core 2.8 GHz mobile processor that turbos up to 3.5 GHz. Did I say quad-core? I'm sorry, I meant dual-core. Thank you for the correction, Slick. So it has a dual-core processor. However, if you checked out my recent episode on NCIX Tech Tips on the NCIXCOM channel, you'll see that actually beyond two cores hyper-threaded in modern games, there isn't really much benefit assuming the same clock speeds. However, for mobile CPUs, making the same clock speed assumption isn't really fair because most mobile quad-cores are not clocked at the same kind of speed as most mobile dual cores. So there you go. Something to be aware of, you guys. It has 8 gigs of DDR3 memory. It has a GT550M graphics card. And at.88 inches, it is phenomenally thin. So it uses an aluminum construction, which feels just absolutely beautiful. Wow, that's quite nice, actually. And the weight is actually pretty manageable, too. So the unit is about 7 pounds, which for a 17-inch notebook is already pretty good, plus the fact that it uses a metal construction, which doesn't really help with the weight factor but does help them keep it significantly slimmer. So let's start with the overall... Oh, right, right, right. Okay, let's finish with specs. So, spec-wise, right? So it's got a 17.3-inch LED backlit screen. It has a 256-gig boot SSD. It has... Let's just open this up here. It has a full anti-ghosting keyboard. So what that means is that you're not going to have any issues or problems if you accidentally press... Some keyboards, if you press sort of a combination of keys, it can ghost and it can actually interject additional characters or not register key presses correctly, all that kind of stuff. So it has a gaming-grade keyboard. It has a power button up here, which has a green halo. It also has a fully backlit keyboard. And it's got an integrated sound bar. So instead of doing stereo speakers, they've gone with a sound bar. And this, this is the coup de grace of this particular product. This is the Switchblade interface. So instead of a traditional touchpad, it is... Booted up now. It is a glass surface here. Glass, plastic, feels like glass. So whatever. It's a surface here that has two buttons and then 10 fully customizable display buttons. So these... Okay, if you guys remember that... I forget what it was called. It was like that Art Lebedev keyboard. That it was the full keyboard with individual OLED screens and all the keys and it was fully programmable for whatever you wanted to do, whatever language you wanted. This is basically that, except actually made commercially viable. So you use their Synapse 2.0 software, which allows you to customize what shows up on these little screens. It allows you to customize the functionality of the buttons. You can have profiles for various games. And the Synapse 2.0 software actually allows you to save a variety of different gaming settings in the cloud so you can take them with you wherever you go. So let's finish up with the exterior of the unit before we get too much further into more details of the Switchblade, which is... Whoops, now I'm breaking everything. Okay. So let's do the traditional iPhone thickness comparison. There you go guys. That gives you some idea. So the laptop is actually less than seven pounds. The seven pound travel weight is assuming you're carrying around the adapter as well, which is extremely small and slim. So you can see it's even... Ah, here we go. iPhone size comparison. Whether you guys like it or not, now you know how big the adapter is. So there. And this is actually kind of cool. It comes with a nice rubber strap for strapping the cable. So instead of one of those Velcro ones that will wear out eventually because Velcro inherently will, you get that instead. Okay. So ventilation is here on the side. You can see the heat sink fins. Power in is here. Gigabit ethernet, HDMI out, SuperSpeed USB 3, color-coded green, two USB 2.0 ports and a headphone out port on this side. On the front of the unit, you find not a whole lot in terms of I.O. And on the other side of the unit, you find just a Kensington lock, which as you can see, based on that this is a demo unit, has been used. You can also see another cooling vent here as well as a heat pipe in there. So obviously, like pretty much every laptop that exists right now, it is using a heat pipe for cooling. Is that more vent? Oh yeah, more ventilation here. So this must be the intake and that's probably the exhaust. So you're going to want to make sure you don't use it on a soft surface because those are your intakes right there. Make sure they don't get covered when you are, especially when you are gaming. So the Razer logo on the back, which I think is great and Slick apparently doesn't like the Razer logo as much as I do, but whatever. He's not the one who gets to stand in front of the camera and give his opinion anyway. So the Razer logo, which I love, looks absolutely fantastic on the all aluminum top here and it does have a backlight so it glows and looks all baller. I mean, come on, it's better than Apple or Dell with their logos on the back of a laptop. See now he's nodding in agreement. It's awesome. The keyboard itself has almost no flex, which is of course one of the advantages of using an aluminum construction for the notebook. The notebook itself has, this is actually pretty good considering how thin this is. So this is a very thin screen as you guys can see now that I'm holding my iPhone up against it and it only has just a touch of flex to it. That's really good. And then the bottom is just absolutely no flex at all, completely rigid. So this thing is going to, that really helps. It adds to the durability of a notebook when the parts aren't constantly being stressed and it happens whether you're aware of it or not when you're putting it in a bag or moving it around, it will happen. I mean, have you guys ever used a notebook like this? I walked around like this. If you have done that, you're putting stress on the internal components because you're only supporting a small part of it and you're straining the PCBs. It's not good for it. I mean, it's not going to kill it immediately, but it's just one of those things where having a more solidly built notebook is definitely a good thing. Oh yeah, I want to show you guys how nice the backlight is on that keyboard. That's awesome. So beautifully backlight keyboard. You can't really see much halo around the outsides of the keys at all, but the lettering themselves are very, very well lit up. So those look like they must be, I mean, they must be etched keys because I can't imagine any other way you'd get an awesome backlight like that. Right, so let's talk Switchblade 2.0. So the Switchblade 2.0 UI, and so you can see guys, this is a trackpad. It's also like a glass touch thing. Now, not everyone likes glass. Wait, okay, no, let's talk Switchblade 2.0, or Synapse 2.0 before we go any further. So Synapse 2.0 is compatible with this as well as future Razer products and some legacy products like the Naga. It actually allows you to save a variety of different things like macros, any kind of programming, any kind of sensitivity settings, even things like lighting effects. You can actually save in the cloud and then you just go to a land center or go to wherever you want and you can make sure that everything's set up exactly the way you want it. So that's cool. The Switchblade is fully compatible with it and it can serve as one of two different things. So it can either be a four point multi-touch trackpad or it can be an 800 by 480 resolution display, which is actually a phenomenal resolution to have in such a small space. These are also LED backlit displays. I think I covered that already. And ha ha, if you don't like the glass feel of the touchpad, it actually includes a couple of different feeling covers that you can put on it that'll A, protect the screen and B, give you a bit of a different feedback experience depending on what you prefer. So that's really good. What else do we have here guys? Oh yeah, we haven't really covered the keyboard much. Let's have a look at the layout of the keyboard because that can really make or break a laptop for me. Because the keyboard has kind of a fail layout. So can I reach the backspace? Yes. Can I reach shift and shift? Yes, I can. Caps lock can be off. This is a good keyboard layout. Yay! Or at least in my opinion. You know, not everyone agrees with me about everything, but if they don't, then they can get their own YouTube channel. So the keyboard layout uses long shifts, a reasonably long enter, and a reasonably long backspace. When I see short and shift keys, short and backspaces, as someone with small hands, that's a real problem for me when the backspace ends right about here and you have a really short one because I just plain can't reach it, whereas this one I can. So in terms of hotkeys, you've got your volume controls, you've got your external display, your media controls, your brightness, as well as your other more different brightness. So your keyboard backlight brightness as well as your screen brightness. So let's see what it can do. There's your Razer logo for activating your hotkeys. So I don't know what brightness that is, but something's probably going on. Oh, please log into Synapse to access full switchblade functionality. So give me a sec, guys. So our wireless network isn't working, which means I have to sit here to log in, but either way we have now logged into the Synapse 2.0 software and this is really cool. So you can customize whatever these displays have on them. So let's go to Twitter, for example. Oh, cool. And then once you do that, apparently you have like navigation back, forward and refresh. So they dynamically change in terms of what they're displaying. Since we don't have a Twitter account set up, check that out. It's actually like a pretty ballin' out display. So to go back to home, you just click the Razer logo right here. And so let's try going to something that we actually can go to, like say for example, what's this? Oh, cool. Number pad. Okay. Back. Oh, cool. Touchscreen number pad. I'm actually kind of, I'm kind of liking this. Oh, macro recording. Okay. What's that? Gaming mode. Okay. So, oh, this is neat. So I'm gonna go up here. I was gonna show you guys the app on the screen. So everything that's here is also apparently here. So you got your lighting effects. So Switchblade module brightness, normal bright, screen brightness, all of that kind of good stuff. You've got your, that might be keyboard brightness. I don't know. Whatever. Something. There's touch, there's hotkeys for that anyway. So put them to sleep on this. Saving, power saving mode. Okay, gaming mode allows you to disable a bunch of different key combos. This is cool. I actually haven't, most gaming modes are like disable Windows key, but disabling alt tab and disabling alt F4 are sort of equally important. So yeah, okay. So anyway, everything that's up there seems to also be down here. So let's go ahead and press this. Apparently that's gonna, haha, go to Razor.com. Can we zoom or anything like that? Oh yeah. I don't know how to actually enter like a search. There we go. Reactive. Sweet. I mean, this is the kind of thing that if you're someone like me, okay, here, here, I'm going to show you guys something. When I'm using my computer at home, a lot of the time my smartphone is like propped up like this on my desk because I'll have like a YouTube video playing or something while I'm actually trying to use my computer. This is that now I can have like triple screens. So I can be like navigating the NCIX weekly special or like reading the forum without actually, okay, it's not super fast, but it is what it is. Forums, come on. Yeah, there we go. Nope, no, I clicked the wrong thing. Ah, there we go. So I'm lagged a little bit there. Oh, I missed. I hit the new arrivals. Forums, come on. Okay, so it's not quite an iPhone touch screen, but for basic functionality like watching YouTube videos or whatever else, this kind of thing would be absolutely perfect. So let's go back. Let's see what else we got here. So you can have a clock using Razer's like fancy thing. And okay, so this is just, so you see that Razer logo there. That is because the whole thing is a display. You can turn that off and you can just be blank in a four point multi touch pad. You don't have to have anything on the display. So in games, you can actually have additional information displayed here as well, which is really, really, really cool. So I'm going to open, sorry, I was looking for a touch pad there. I'm just sort of hardwired for that now, screen resolution. So let's see if it detects it as like a completely separate screen. Yeah, I don't know how they're doing this, but they're doing it and it's really cool. And there you go. What's that, is that the YouTubes? There, this is exactly like the only thing that I would really use this for when I'm not like other than games. I guess Twitter's not bad either to be perfectly honest. So you can watch later account most recent search. So we could search for, oops, minus tech tips. And we could watch my PZ 77 premium motherboard unboxing. So cool. Okay. So that is the razor blade. And the premium razor blade unboxing. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos. There goes my phone. All right.