Razer debuts the most advanced gaming laptops ever

With my nose inches from the screen, I could barely see the pixels.

As Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan looked on, I gazed at the crisp screen on the newest Razer Blade model, a supercharged gaming laptop Razer announced Wednesday. The 3,200-by-1,800 pixel touchscreen display held up even from absurdly close distances.

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Razer announced two new laptops today, actually: the 14-inch Razer Blade and its older cousin, the 17-inch Razer Blade Pro. Anyone can use the slick, black machines — they’d be great for video editors or graphic designers, for example — but they’re unabashedly targeting gamers who want to run the latest, computationally-hungry video games.

Razer is going the opposite direction of the industry — as more hardware makers embrace mobile devices for gamers, Razer continues to court the hardcore of the hardcore PC market.

“This is, by far, the highest performance per cubic inch laptop,” said the 37 year-old Tan of the Razer Blade. “Still, it’s super thin and super light — thinner than a MacBook Pro Retina.”

The Razer Blade and Razer Blade Pro feature ultrapowerful Nvidia graphics chips — the Nvidia GeForce GTX 870M and 860M respectively — which “will make your laptop fast without melting it,” according to VentureBeat’s chip guru, Dean Takahashi. These new chips enable Razer to make these laptops superthin: The Razer Blade is just 0.7-inches thick, and the Pro is only a smidgen thicker at 0.88 inches. (The last Razer Blade model was actually a tad thinner, though.)

The Razer Blade and Pro are also packing top-of-the-line Intel processors — the fourth-generation Intel CoreTM i7-4702HQ and 4700HQ respectively — and 128GB solid state drives.

Either laptop is capable of running the most graphically intensive games on the market now in full HD, promised Tan. But even though “the specs are out of this world,” he said, “it’s pretty competitive [price-wise] with other [gaming] PCs out there.”

The Razer Blade starts at $2,200 and should ship in early April, while the Pro starts at $2,300 and is available today. We’ve included the full specs for both below.