Razer Blade 14-inch (2013) - The Supermodel of Gaming Notebooks
Performance Benchmarking (I) - PCMark 8 & PCMark 7
Test Setup
To test the Razer Blade, we will be putting it through our usual benchmarks. You will find the full list below. As for comparison, the Razer Blade will be pitted against the recently reviewed MSI GE40 and other gaming notebooks that we have tested recently, namely the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500, Alienware M17X R4 and MSI GT70 0NE and the old 17-inch Razer Blade from last year.
This is the full list of benchmarks used:
- PCMark 7
- PCMark 8
- 3DMark 11
- 3DMark 2013
- Far Cry 2
- Crysis 2
Razer Blade 14-inch (2013) | MSI GE40 2OC Dragon Eyes | Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 | Razer Blade (2012) | Dell Alienware M17XR4 | MSI GT70 0NE | |
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Video & Display |
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Connectivity |
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Audio |
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I/O Ports |
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Miscellaneous |
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Battery Type |
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Dimensions |
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Weight |
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Optical Drive | — | — |
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PCMark 8
PCMark 8 is the latest benchmarking utility from Futuremark and was designed to measure the performance of Windows 8 systems. We will be testing the system using four different scenarios, Home, Creative, Work and Storage, which simulates different workloads that a user might subject the system to.
Scores on the “Home”, “Work” and “Creative” scenarios were all pretty comparable with the Lenovo taking the lead for “Home”; Razer coming in tops for “Creative”; and the MSI GE40 claiming first prize for “Work”.
Coming to the “Storage” scenario, the Razer and MSI notebooks left the Lenovo for dead thanks to their fast flash storage. Interestingly, despite having two mSATA SSDs in RAID 0, the Razer Blade outscored the MSI GE40 by around 9% on “Storage”.
We also included benchmarking scores determined based on real-world tasks involving Adobe CS6 applications and Microsoft Office 2010. Here, the Razer Blade outscored the MSI GE40 by around 15%.
PCMark 7
The Razer Blade was our top performer on PCMark 7, recorded a score of 5893 - 16% more than the second-placed MSI GE40. Looking at the results breakdown, we saw that it was the top performer for nearly every workload. Specifically, its scores on the “Creativity” and “Computation” workloads were the highest we have ever seen.