As far as publicity stunts go, the PC gaming peripherals manufacturer Razer has certainly done a good job with their (perhaps) soon-to-be-released Blade gaming laptop. [Update: Razer has sadly announced that the Blade will be delayed until late January pending more publicity stunts]
The Blade is definitely a cool-looking laptop that looks sort of like a black version of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, but with some interesting extras including a touchpad/LCD combo and dedicated gaming buttons. It has received plenty of publicity and Razer has even had the balls to call it the “world’s first gaming laptop”, which is interesting considering that it comes with a mere dual-core processor and the upper mid-range NVIDIA GT 555M, which is a good GPU (included in the Alienware M14x), but hardly on par with the fastest mobile GPUs on the market.
On top of that, it is actually more expensive than its Apple counterpart, with a $2,800 price tag (the MBP 17 starts at $2,499, with a quad-core CPU and a HD 6770M from AMD, which is roughly equivalent with the GT 555M in Windows gaming). On the plus side, Razer has apparently decided to exchanged the hard drive for a sizable and fast 256GB SSD, which takes it a bit further towards justifying the high cost.
According to several sources, the Razer Blade will be be up for pre-order soon and ready to ship in time for Christmas, but no exact date has been specified. [Update: not specified for January as of now]
If you want more detailed specifications, the Razer Blade includes a dual-core Intel Core i7 running at 2.8GHz or 3.5GHz in Turbo Boost mode. 8GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM is included. The display is 17.3 inches with a 1920×1080 pixel resolution (Full HD) and the graphics card is the GDDR5 version of NVIDIA’s GT 555M, which has fewer shaders/CUDA cores than the DDR3 variant (96 vs. 144) but obviously faster video RAM. We have no data on how these versions compare in real-world gaming, but the 144-core version is likely the more capable GPU. The SSD’s type or brand has not been revealed.
