Razer has been busy building hype around a new, until Friday unannounced, product using the domain name ‘pcgamingisnotdead.com’. Now I for one had no idea that PC gaming was dying, let alone “dead”–quite the contrary; when even unlikely manufacturers like Samsung and LG have started to put their own gaming laptops on the market the message is loud and clear that PC and laptop PC gaming in particular is just getting started.
Nevertheless, some PR guy thought it was a good idea and the old domain now redirects to the new product page and the new gadget is nothing less than a gaming laptop with a very innovative design. They even call it “the world’s first true gaming laptop,” which is ridiculous of course but there’s no arguing that the laptop is one-of-a-kind and a very cool-looking piece of technology. Razer showcased another innovative concept laptop called Switchblade at CES, but this is something quite different.
It’s a very thin 17-inch laptop, with a chassis that looks like a black MacBook Pro 17 but built with gamers in mind. One of the most striking features besides the unusual design is an extra LCD next to the keyboard with customizable shortcut buttons and a multi-touch track pad that doubles as display that supplies you with some extra information from (some) games when an external pointing device is attached. This feature has actually been dubbed Switchblade UI.
Although it’s the “world’s first true gaming laptop,” it has fairly humble specifications. It comes with a dual core (four threads) Intel Core i7-2640M processor, 8GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive (misprint?) and an Nvidia GeForce GT 555M GPU. The 17-inch panel has a 1920 x 1080 resolution. On the plus side, it weighs just 6.9 pounds / 3.16kg, which is less than some 15.6-inch models.
Those are all decent specs, but if you also consider the $2,800 price tag that will be attached to this machine when it’s released in time for the holidays it suddenly becomes a great deal less interesting. You can get an Alienware M14x or a Dell XPS 17 with the same GPU but a quad-core CPU for much less than that.
Sure, it looks fantastic and the extra LCD is a neat feature, but $2,800? And a 320GB hard drive? Even the aforementioned 17-inch MacBook Pro starts at less than that with a quad-core CPU and a decent HD 6750M GPU. It also weighs less, has a higher-resolution panel and ships with a bigger hard drive.
