6-year-old 4K Razer Blade Gaming Laptop: Can it still game?

A 1080p monitor externally is going to get way better performance than this person's got a 6-year-old Razer Blade. You're going to get way better performance on this person's laptop if you're going externally, because they've got a scout you're going to get way better performance oh look at that GTA 5 at 3200x 18800 and I mean this is very playable it's it's with lower settings so I did drop the settings quite aggressively but this is impressive.

Oh look at that. The temperatures on this laptop are skyrocketing really quickly though, I mean you can see there we're on 87c with the GPU and 96c with the CPU, which isn't great although the CPU utilization is only sitting around 40% so I think if we open it up and we do a bit of a CPU cooling mod on here and we attach an external GPU we could get much better performance than this but this is pretty impressive.

This is exactly why the lack of driver support is an issue because I think that this mobile GPU should be able to handle Doom Eternal but it doesn't work so you can say yes play and then it just it just doesn't launch. So let's try Shadow of the Tomb Raider, maybe maybe that'll work. The bezels on this display are real thick.

Problem has occurred with your display driver damn you Nvidia well, Battlefield 5 launched, so that's a good start what we're going to do crank it all the way up there we go to the highest to the highest resolution that we can. This is probably not going to go very well but you know this is like a console level frame rate, it's really difficult to aim cuz there's definite input put lag here.

Uh you can actually oh but it honestly the display on this laptop is one of the more beautiful displays I've seen in person dropping down to 1080p we're sitting at almost 50 FPS and it means it feels smooth the frame the frame pacing is good. This is actually a pretty good gaming experience with Battlefield 5 on, on low settings.

Okay well crisis remastered has launched but I mean it's based on a game from 2007 so I'm sure drivers aren't a huge issue for it, but let's see how it runs at nearly 4k on this system. It's actually kind of running which is pretty crazy and considering just the way that the movement mechanics and stuff feels like in crisis, 22 frames per second feels a lot like 60 frames per second on crisis remaster.

I mean I'm joking, it's not quite that bad, look at that at 1080p low settings we're almost at 60 FPS let's try let's try a slightly higher setting. Unfortunately High settings are not going as well but still we're sitting at about 23 FPS here so I guess it can kind of run the new crisis which is it honestly did a better job than I was expecting in conclusion this six-year-old Razer Blade actually held up a lot better than I thought.

It was going to usually in my experiences laptops don't age very well I don't know maybe it's because I naturally produce cottage cheese from my hands but yeah I'm surprised at physically how well the laptop aged and you can still game on it which is pretty cool especially considering the fact that I paid 550 Canadian Rand for it. So I'm I'm pretty impressed.

Although it has three pretty big downsides the first one and the biggest is the fact that Nvidia doesn't support the driver ecosystem anymore, which does have a suspicious stench of planned obsolescence to it but anyway we'll look past that. The second problem is the fact that this laptop runs hotter than the surface fires of mercury. And then the third problem is the fact that the RAM is soldered onto the laptop so yeah you can't really alleviate one of its biggest bottlenecks in my opinion.

So that's a bit of a bummer but what this experience made me really want to do is compare this six-year-old Razer Blade to a modern Razer Blade, so Razer if by some weird miracle you're watching this video please send me a Razer Blade 15 so that I can put these two laptops head-to-head in the Deathmatch Arena of death. So if you like the sound of that like and subscribe to the channel for that video and other ones like that.

And yeah until the next video bye-bye

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfor today's video I headed straight back into the sewer level that is Craigslist to try and Wrangle a razor branded crocodile actually come to think of it the last two things that I bought on Craigslist actually I had a pretty good experience with so it seems like with Craigslist there's no middle ground you either have an amazing experience covered in unicorn smiles and sunshine or you catch goria it's it's one of the two anyway getting back into the video uh I bought a 6-year-old razor blade gaming laptop which are supposed the cream of the crop to see how well it holds up in 2020 and if you can still game with it being a peasant gamer this is the first razor laptop I've ever interacted with it I'm genuinely really excited to have a look at it uh this is also a 6-year-old laptop so it's going to give us a good indication of how well these laptops hold up over time this 6-year-old Razer Blade 14 cost me 550 can drai which considering what it is I actually think is is a pretty decent price now as you can see uh it's got a dbrand skin on it which is a bit of a leather effect to it I I'm not sure but this may be as old as the laptop and if it is it's held up very well over six years dbrand can be can be very proud of themselves with this uh on the other side we've got a lot of fingerprints we've got these two vents um thermals will also test I'm going to open up the laptop as well and then we're going to repaste it and see what kind of temperature differences it makes yeah you can see here that the rubber feet are starting to come off but that's really easy to fix you can just kind of glue it back on on the sides of the laptop um as you can see we've got quite a bit of wear but what's really nice about it is that it wears very gracefully because with the more Plastic Fantastic style laptops after 3 years they feel kind of like they've been stored in an orifice for centuries whereas this like the paint just gets worn off of the metal and it has a really nice kind of used vibe to it it reminds me a bit of a nicely worn in Guitar here we've got the power jack Port thing and then we've got two USB 3 ports a microphone headphone jack and then on the other side we've got another USB port an HDMI port which is also very well well used and a Kensington lock but anyway let's open it up and see if it passes the single-hand open test yes it does very well actually I've never had a laptop do that so so well so that's nice uh on the inside you can see we've got another debrand skin on the actual trackpad uh with the little clicky buttons on the bottom the person I bought it from did tell me that these clicky buttons aren't aren working very well anymore so we'll have a look at that later the keyboard's nice and oily which we'll also try and clean off but the key strokes still feel quite nice we've got the speaker GRS and then the power button again the laptop still feels really nice it still feels like a like an expensive device which is pretty cool uh the screen you can see has a glass front which again is something I really like it makes it feel much less cheap uh there are some very big bezels around here this is the 4K EXO display which is going to impact gaming performance quite hard but we'll have a look at that a bit later but one of the advantages of the big bezels even though it does date it a bit compared to something like the blade 15 is that you've got a really nice webcam placement with what looks like two microphone holes now we're going to open it up and see what it looks like inside and how well the thermal paste is aged and stuff like that okay let's lift this off there we go it's a fairly sturdy bit of metal and then that is the bottom of the laptop oh that looks pretty good there's not much battery swelling so that's a good sign that's interesting that looks like the ram has actually been soldered on which is not great because it means that you can't really upgrade it after the fact as far as I know I think this laptop has has 8 gigs of ram in it which kind of sucks one of the things that makes this razor blade interesting aside from its very emo name is the GPU that it has in it which is an NVIDIA GTX 870m now there was never a desktop 800 series of gpus they only had them in Mobile form so this is the first 800 series GPU I've ever SE scene and that's the kind of thing that makes a nerd like me all hot and bothered with that let's take this cooler off and have a look at the thermal paste situation which may be pretty dry yeah it looks pretty straightforward to get off you just kind of okay so now we're just going to gently lift this bad boy off okay there doesn't seem to be much of a gentle involved here gently start prying things oh there we go there we go there's some movement so many thermal pads on the base for that that's all for the power delivery which I'll show you more closely just now uh and then the thermal paste is still nice and wet you've got some real chunky heat pipes going here uh to these to these little heat sinks so on the bottom of that we've got a huge GPU look at that beast and then this is the CPU over here and then the power delivery is what those heat pipes uh helped cool I really love making content like this because it's just always so fun having a peak under the dress of some sexy Hardware that thermal paste is very wet I I I think this laptop's been repasted at some point I don't think I'm the first person to dig around in here so just from trying to install the drivers you can feel that this is an old laptop it's it's definitely chugging along and then the other issue is that it doesn't really have driver support anymore I mean the latest driver is from just over a year ago which I find very weird because with older desktop gpus like the 600 series you still have modern driver support and this 870m is essentially just a slightly cut down version of the GTX 680 which still has current driver support So it seems as though Nvidia doesn't support the laptop versions of their gpus as long as as they do the desktop ones which is a bit of an arbitrary move if you ask me but anyway let's see what kind of gaming performance we can get because of the driver version unfortunately I'm not going to be able to use any screen capture so we're going to have to just do it over over camera I'm going to start off with csgo uh we're in the menus and we're already sitting at like 84c on the on the GPU so that's not ideal but let's have a look um okay we're not cracked resolution wise so let's go all the way to 3200 by 800 I mean we're gaming at almost 4K here with highish settings on csgo I'll drop them down a bit just now see how much of a difference that makes but look at that so we're running low settings now uh still at the max resolution of 3200 by 18800 and we're sitting at around 100 frames per second I mean this is this is playable and if you plug this into like a 1080p monitor externally you're going to get way oh this person's got a scout you're going to get way better performance oh look at that GTA 5 at 3200x 18800 and I mean this is very playable it's it's with lower settings so I did drop the settings quite aggressively but this is impressive o the temperatures did Skyrocket really quickly though I mean you can see there we're on 87c with the GPU and 96c with the CPU that's that's not great although the CPU utilization is only sitting around 40% so I think if we open it up and we do a bit of a CPU cooling mod on here and we attach an external GPU we could get much better performance than this but this is pretty impressive see this is exactly why the lack of driver support is an issue because I think that this mobile GPU should be able to handle Doom Eternal but it it it doesn't work so you can say yes play and then it just it just doesn't launch so let's try shadow of the Tomb Raider maybe maybe that'll work the bezels on this display are are real thick oh problem has occurred with your display driver damn you Nvidia well Battlefield 5 launched so that's a good start what we're going to do crank it all the way up there we go to the highest to the highest resolution that we can this is probably not going to go very well but you know this is like a console level frame rate it's really difficult to aim cuz there's definite input put lag here uh you can actually oh but it honestly the display on this laptop is is one of the more beautiful displays I've seen in person dropping down to 1080p we're sitting at almost 50 FPS and it I mean it's it feels smooth the frame the frame pacing is good this is actually a pretty good gaming experience with Battlefield 5 on on on low settings okay well crisis remastered has launched but I mean it's based on a game from 2007 so I'm I'm sure drivers aren't a huge issue for it but let's see how it runs at nearly 4k on this system it's actually kind of running which is pretty crazy and considering just the way that the movement mechanics and stuff feels like in crisis 22 frames per second feels a lot like 60 frames per second on crisis remaster I mean I'm joking it's not quite that bad look at that at 1080p low settings we're almost at 60 FPS let's try let's try a slightly higher setting okay well unfortunately High settings are not going as well but still we're sitting at about 23 FPS here so I guess it can kind of run the new crisis which is it it honestly did a better job than I was expecting in conclusion this 6-year-old razor blade actually held up a lot better than I thought it was going to usually in my experiences laptops don't age very well I don't know maybe it's because I naturally produce cottage cheese from my hands but yeah I'm surprised at physically how well the laptop aged and you can still game on it which is which is pretty cool especially considering the fact that I paid 550 Canadian Rand for it so I'm I'm pretty impressed although it has three pretty big downsides the first one and the biggest is the fact that nid doesn't support the driver ecosystem anymore which does have the suspicious stench of planned obsolescence to it but anyway we'll look past that the second problem is the fact that it runs hotter than the surface fires of mercury uh and then the third problem is the fact that the ram is solded onto the laptop so yeah you can't really alleviate one of its biggest bottlenecks in my opinion so that's a bit of a bummer but what this experience made me really want to do is compare this six-year-old Razer Blade to a modern razor blade so Razer if by some weird Miracle you're watching this video please send me a Razer Blade 15 so that I can put these two laptops head-to-head in the Deathmatch Arena of death so if you like the S of that like And subscribe to the channel for that video and other ones like that and yeah until the next video bye-byefor today's video I headed straight back into the sewer level that is Craigslist to try and Wrangle a razor branded crocodile actually come to think of it the last two things that I bought on Craigslist actually I had a pretty good experience with so it seems like with Craigslist there's no middle ground you either have an amazing experience covered in unicorn smiles and sunshine or you catch goria it's it's one of the two anyway getting back into the video uh I bought a 6-year-old razor blade gaming laptop which are supposed the cream of the crop to see how well it holds up in 2020 and if you can still game with it being a peasant gamer this is the first razor laptop I've ever interacted with it I'm genuinely really excited to have a look at it uh this is also a 6-year-old laptop so it's going to give us a good indication of how well these laptops hold up over time this 6-year-old Razer Blade 14 cost me 550 can drai which considering what it is I actually think is is a pretty decent price now as you can see uh it's got a dbrand skin on it which is a bit of a leather effect to it I I'm not sure but this may be as old as the laptop and if it is it's held up very well over six years dbrand can be can be very proud of themselves with this uh on the other side we've got a lot of fingerprints we've got these two vents um thermals will also test I'm going to open up the laptop as well and then we're going to repaste it and see what kind of temperature differences it makes yeah you can see here that the rubber feet are starting to come off but that's really easy to fix you can just kind of glue it back on on the sides of the laptop um as you can see we've got quite a bit of wear but what's really nice about it is that it wears very gracefully because with the more Plastic Fantastic style laptops after 3 years they feel kind of like they've been stored in an orifice for centuries whereas this like the paint just gets worn off of the metal and it has a really nice kind of used vibe to it it reminds me a bit of a nicely worn in Guitar here we've got the power jack Port thing and then we've got two USB 3 ports a microphone headphone jack and then on the other side we've got another USB port an HDMI port which is also very well well used and a Kensington lock but anyway let's open it up and see if it passes the single-hand open test yes it does very well actually I've never had a laptop do that so so well so that's nice uh on the inside you can see we've got another debrand skin on the actual trackpad uh with the little clicky buttons on the bottom the person I bought it from did tell me that these clicky buttons aren't aren working very well anymore so we'll have a look at that later the keyboard's nice and oily which we'll also try and clean off but the key strokes still feel quite nice we've got the speaker GRS and then the power button again the laptop still feels really nice it still feels like a like an expensive device which is pretty cool uh the screen you can see has a glass front which again is something I really like it makes it feel much less cheap uh there are some very big bezels around here this is the 4K EXO display which is going to impact gaming performance quite hard but we'll have a look at that a bit later but one of the advantages of the big bezels even though it does date it a bit compared to something like the blade 15 is that you've got a really nice webcam placement with what looks like two microphone holes now we're going to open it up and see what it looks like inside and how well the thermal paste is aged and stuff like that okay let's lift this off there we go it's a fairly sturdy bit of metal and then that is the bottom of the laptop oh that looks pretty good there's not much battery swelling so that's a good sign that's interesting that looks like the ram has actually been soldered on which is not great because it means that you can't really upgrade it after the fact as far as I know I think this laptop has has 8 gigs of ram in it which kind of sucks one of the things that makes this razor blade interesting aside from its very emo name is the GPU that it has in it which is an NVIDIA GTX 870m now there was never a desktop 800 series of gpus they only had them in Mobile form so this is the first 800 series GPU I've ever SE scene and that's the kind of thing that makes a nerd like me all hot and bothered with that let's take this cooler off and have a look at the thermal paste situation which may be pretty dry yeah it looks pretty straightforward to get off you just kind of okay so now we're just going to gently lift this bad boy off okay there doesn't seem to be much of a gentle involved here gently start prying things oh there we go there we go there's some movement so many thermal pads on the base for that that's all for the power delivery which I'll show you more closely just now uh and then the thermal paste is still nice and wet you've got some real chunky heat pipes going here uh to these to these little heat sinks so on the bottom of that we've got a huge GPU look at that beast and then this is the CPU over here and then the power delivery is what those heat pipes uh helped cool I really love making content like this because it's just always so fun having a peak under the dress of some sexy Hardware that thermal paste is very wet I I I think this laptop's been repasted at some point I don't think I'm the first person to dig around in here so just from trying to install the drivers you can feel that this is an old laptop it's it's definitely chugging along and then the other issue is that it doesn't really have driver support anymore I mean the latest driver is from just over a year ago which I find very weird because with older desktop gpus like the 600 series you still have modern driver support and this 870m is essentially just a slightly cut down version of the GTX 680 which still has current driver support So it seems as though Nvidia doesn't support the laptop versions of their gpus as long as as they do the desktop ones which is a bit of an arbitrary move if you ask me but anyway let's see what kind of gaming performance we can get because of the driver version unfortunately I'm not going to be able to use any screen capture so we're going to have to just do it over over camera I'm going to start off with csgo uh we're in the menus and we're already sitting at like 84c on the on the GPU so that's not ideal but let's have a look um okay we're not cracked resolution wise so let's go all the way to 3200 by 800 I mean we're gaming at almost 4K here with highish settings on csgo I'll drop them down a bit just now see how much of a difference that makes but look at that so we're running low settings now uh still at the max resolution of 3200 by 18800 and we're sitting at around 100 frames per second I mean this is this is playable and if you plug this into like a 1080p monitor externally you're going to get way oh this person's got a scout you're going to get way better performance oh look at that GTA 5 at 3200x 18800 and I mean this is very playable it's it's with lower settings so I did drop the settings quite aggressively but this is impressive o the temperatures did Skyrocket really quickly though I mean you can see there we're on 87c with the GPU and 96c with the CPU that's that's not great although the CPU utilization is only sitting around 40% so I think if we open it up and we do a bit of a CPU cooling mod on here and we attach an external GPU we could get much better performance than this but this is pretty impressive see this is exactly why the lack of driver support is an issue because I think that this mobile GPU should be able to handle Doom Eternal but it it it doesn't work so you can say yes play and then it just it just doesn't launch so let's try shadow of the Tomb Raider maybe maybe that'll work the bezels on this display are are real thick oh problem has occurred with your display driver damn you Nvidia well Battlefield 5 launched so that's a good start what we're going to do crank it all the way up there we go to the highest to the highest resolution that we can this is probably not going to go very well but you know this is like a console level frame rate it's really difficult to aim cuz there's definite input put lag here uh you can actually oh but it honestly the display on this laptop is is one of the more beautiful displays I've seen in person dropping down to 1080p we're sitting at almost 50 FPS and it I mean it's it feels smooth the frame the frame pacing is good this is actually a pretty good gaming experience with Battlefield 5 on on on low settings okay well crisis remastered has launched but I mean it's based on a game from 2007 so I'm I'm sure drivers aren't a huge issue for it but let's see how it runs at nearly 4k on this system it's actually kind of running which is pretty crazy and considering just the way that the movement mechanics and stuff feels like in crisis 22 frames per second feels a lot like 60 frames per second on crisis remaster I mean I'm joking it's not quite that bad look at that at 1080p low settings we're almost at 60 FPS let's try let's try a slightly higher setting okay well unfortunately High settings are not going as well but still we're sitting at about 23 FPS here so I guess it can kind of run the new crisis which is it it honestly did a better job than I was expecting in conclusion this 6-year-old razor blade actually held up a lot better than I thought it was going to usually in my experiences laptops don't age very well I don't know maybe it's because I naturally produce cottage cheese from my hands but yeah I'm surprised at physically how well the laptop aged and you can still game on it which is which is pretty cool especially considering the fact that I paid 550 Canadian Rand for it so I'm I'm pretty impressed although it has three pretty big downsides the first one and the biggest is the fact that nid doesn't support the driver ecosystem anymore which does have the suspicious stench of planned obsolescence to it but anyway we'll look past that the second problem is the fact that it runs hotter than the surface fires of mercury uh and then the third problem is the fact that the ram is solded onto the laptop so yeah you can't really alleviate one of its biggest bottlenecks in my opinion so that's a bit of a bummer but what this experience made me really want to do is compare this six-year-old Razer Blade to a modern razor blade so Razer if by some weird Miracle you're watching this video please send me a Razer Blade 15 so that I can put these two laptops head-to-head in the Deathmatch Arena of death so if you like the S of that like And subscribe to the channel for that video and other ones like that and yeah until the next video bye-bye