iGame Radio

The Razer Blade, Razer’s entrance into the world of hardware systems, was announced last weekend. Not content to produce peripherals, Razer has created what they call the “World’s First True Gaming Laptop”. Measuring at 0.88 inches thick and less than 7 lbs, the Razer Blade is intended to be a light weight machine despite the 17 inch wide screen. And it may just be Apple’s lesson in high-end gaming for laptops.

Razer has apparently taken some hints from Apple, in that they have housed their gaming devil inside an aluminum frame, helping in weight reduction. The Intel i7-2640M inside the Razer Blade is a dual-core processor running at 2.8 GHz (3.5 GHz at turbo), with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M and a whopping 8 GB of RAM.

In comparison, the 17 inch Macbook Pro, the nearest Apple equivalent, is 0.98 inches thick and 6.6 lbs (the Razer Blade is 6.75 lbs). It also runs an i7 Intel core processor, but this one is a quad-core running 2.2 GHz, with an AMD Radeon HD 6750M and 4 GB of RAM (though you can customize up to 8 GB).

As many of you know, quad-core won’t mean much if a game isn’t geared towards quad-core gaming. So a slower quad-core machine will do worse in benchmarks compared to a faster clocked dual-core one for most games.

We took a look at the Razer Blade that was revealed at PAX 2011, but like most everyone else our eyes gazed through a plastic box. There was no hands-on at this point. But what we did see was pretty impressive…from the outside.

The Razer Blade sports a unique user interface. The Switchblade UI allows you to bind an infinite number of commands, skills, and macros to the 10 dynamic adaptive keys with matching icon overlays for the game you’re playing. The trackpad also functions as an LCD panel, and can be used to view mini-maps or other game information. This LCD panel can keep changing as you need it to as well.

And the opening price? A hefty $2799.99. Yep, definitely taking notes from Apple (the Macbook Pro is $2499). Razer President Robert Krakoff believes that the company is there to bring true gaming performance to PC gamers, and believes that no one else has provided a real gaming laptop. He aims to bring that high-end gaming performance to the market with the Razer Blade.

But does the Razer Blade really perform? Can you really play high-end games with this supposed high-end machine? The proof is in the pudding, and that hasn’t been eaten yet. Once the benchmarks for various games are out, we’ll be able to speak more to that.

If so, it really shows that a thin, light laptop can also be a gaming machine. Apple, are you listening?