but the TDP of the mobile 1060 is only 80 watts, for the 1080 it is 150 watts. You wouldn't have as pretty a package or as light/small form of a laptop with the 1080. This laptop is plenty capable, if you need more oomph, you either have to trade out aesthetics or save that for desktop use.
As previously mentioned, it isn't realistic to expect a 150W GTX 1080 in a 14" chassis. There are already very few 15.6" laptop with a GTX 1080, due to the challenge of cooling.
Also, there's no laptop with a GTX 1080 available for $2000. The least expensive that I could find start at $2100 and most are $2400+. And those don't come with an aluminum unibody or RGB keyboard. The Razer Blade Pro (17" variant with GTX 1080) starts at $3700...
Vincent, Spartan, I'm sorry and could care less who's right, who's wrong but as a long time OS X, now macOS 'user' primarily and secondarily... usually by necessity (job) a Windows users. I've a pair of 15" rMBPs, both of the top shelf, CTO variety and both still phenomenal computers I have the 2.7GHz/16GB/768GB/650m from 2012 and other than a display switch (to Samsung) & overnight logic board change (650m;)) - first year for both, I've not had a single issue since and she's used daily. I also bought the 2015 for a steal around Christmas '15 on sale @ Best Buy, again with the top shelf build w/2.8GHz, 16 GB, & 1TB SSD - w/$300 off, a $200 rebate for 'working Mac' (had a '07 MacBook, 13" 2.16GHz w/1GB RAM and needed battery. Plugged in it worked great! I was also shopping, ironically during an Apple holiday hundred sale of any computer purchase over a thousand. I had another bundle in awards and ended up paying less for the $3,099 model... maybe 3199?? But the base w/dGPU was $2,499 and I beat it. Love em both but unless I run into triple those type of deals, I'm out with the current offering at the current price running macOS. Therefore looking for a windows machine, Razer's caught my eye (& son owns all their peripherals;)) My understanding, but I've not seen one, was they're 'all metal' design. Whether shaved from a single block of aluminum? Could care less, but the plastic bottom is curious without access to upgrade memory or storage?
Check out either a Dell XPS 15 9550(great deals on refurb) or the ASUS Zenbook Pro. The Zenbook looks very similar to the MAC. Both can be installed with OSX for dual boot. Drivers and all that fun stuff have been worked out. Theyre both spec'd similarly. Dell has that zero bezel which makes it very compact, can expand mem to 32GB. The ASUS has a full num pad, mem only 24GB bc 8 is soldered. Zenbook is also much cheaper. Either way these are both good alternatives that wont break the bank. Proc, SSD(951) are the same for both.
some crazy people made a single slot desktop 1070, that fan could theoretically be shoved into a thin gaming laptop. OTOH at full load I suspect it sounds like a fully loaded B52 using afterburners on takeoff.
Not necessarily, I have an Aorus all aluminum x7v6 with a 1070 and it's was about the same price as the Razer Blade with the 512. They also make the x7 with a 1080. It's about as thick and yes it's as loud as the Razer - I had a late 2016 one so I know. The difference is for a 17" screen it weighs 7lbs vs 4lbs for the Razer's 14" screen. Also 4K with 1060 means you can't really game at native resolutions. Something people need to be mindful of. The 1070 can do 60fps at 1440p and the 1080 can push 4K native gaming on high end titles.
It's important to remember that the 1060 in this laptop has identical performance to a full-fat desktop card. It's essentially at a relative performance level of a *80m GPU from past generations. A 1060 is enough to play any modern AAA game at the highest settings with well over 60 FPS at 1080p. It's also enough to play esports titles such as CSGO at 4K with good framerate. I'd be willing to bet that even three or four years from now this laptop would still be perfectly capable of running modern titles with at least medium or higher settings at 1080p.
Find me a 1070 in this form factor with this battery life. They don't exist. This is literally maxing out the heat dissipation of a laptop of this size. It's a perfect laptop for gamers who don't want to lug around a heavy thick "GAMER LAPTOP".
I have an Aorus all aluminum x7v6 with a 1070 - it's larger but just as thin and all aluminum with an RGB keyboard. I had the late 2016 Razer Blade and they are comparable. The x7 is heavier because it sports a 17" screen at 7lbs but you get a 1070 or 1080 as an option.
I'm sure people out there are falling all over themselves to throw money at pushing lower-than-native resolutions on their 4K gaming laptop packing second-from-the-bottom-end GPU!
According to Anandtech around the time of the 980m's release, the claim was 75% performance when compared to the desktop version so I think "nowhere near" is a bit of an inflation for the sake of argument. Here's a source:
Depends what you want it for. I'd buy a laptop with a 4K screen to game at 1080p and use 4k for productivity. I fine half resolution quite usable for games on my 4K notebook.
That's a big step though. Additionally you're asserting yourself about something that simply isn't factual, and I'm not saying you're wrong per se, I just don't think these things are organized into high-mid-low-budget as concretely as you're implying that they are.
The fact that you seem to think the 1070 is mid-range holds no more weight than the fact that I think it's high-end, or the fact that Flunk thinks 1060 is mid-range. These things just aren't defined by an authority in that way.
That's precisely why I initially referred to it in its numeric stacking instead of assigning a performance range to it right away. I'm glad we can both agree that it's pretty silly to try to split hairs about where it is in performance rankings and that you can see my initial point clearly without putting up those same blinders to cover things up under a layer of intentional obfuscation.
When Apple introduced the marketing term "Retina Display" they backed it up with a metric that calculates resolution as a function of the viewing distance. PPD (Pixels Per Degree) is the number of pixels that you see in one degree of the viewing angle from the designed viewing distance. Apple engineers found that at 57 PPD was the limit that the human eye can perceive (My eyes are worse actually). Given an 18" viewing distance for a laptop the angular resolution the 14" 4K display is 98.87 PPD...That is overkill. The other FHD screen option (1920 x 1080) is only 49.43 PPD which isn't quite a retina display. Seems that Razor should have gone with something in between these two extremes...
Apple's metrics are actually just hand-waving. Want proof? Draw 2 parallel 1 pixel lines separated by 1 pixel of space. Can you discern the two lines on a Retina display? Yes? Then you can still discern individual pixels and there is room to improve. We're going to need to more than triple the resolution to really meet the actual limits of human vision.
I used to think 5.5" 4K smartphones were ridiculous and pointless however now after owning one there is something to be said for increased image quality at this res and size.
It's not something I think is necessarily worth much but if you can have it there is a difference in quality.
That said if I wanted a laptop for gaming only then this laptop having 4K is a bad choice because you can't use that res for gaming with the vidya card.
4K 14" touch screens are an exercise in studpidity. Esp. on a gaming laptop. Yeah, if you want a free mirror, it now comes with greasy fingerprint smudges.
I agree with you, I have a 15" 4K touchscreen laptop and I never, ever use the touchscreen. But I had to buy it anyway because there was no 4K non-touchscreen option.
That's incorrect. USB-PD is up to 100w; the USB Type-C Port, if it even has a specified limit, is higher than this. For example, the Dell XPS 15 (9550) charges at the laptop's full 130w over Type-C when using their WD-15 dock.
Complaining that this thing "only" has a GTX 1060 is completely missing the point. I travel *a lot* and a 4lb, 14" laptop is something I can chuck in my backpack and happily carry around. A 7 or 8lb 17" laptop is not a viable option. So, should I give up on any hopes of gaming while abroad, or should I spring for the best available option, with excellent build quality, and a CPU/GPU combination that will run games perfectly well at 1920x1080*. According to VRMark it'll even acceptably drive an Oculus Rift (which, by the way, I could also throw in the bag and it would still weigh less than one of these desktop-replacement 17" 1080-toting monsters).
* Which *is* native resolution if you go for the anti-glare non-touch FHD screen, and why you'd pay all that extra for a higher-resolution glass touchscreen that, let's be honest, you're not really going to actually touch anyway, so it's just going to (a) drain the battery, (b) make the thing heavier, (c) be unusable in bright light, and (d) make games look worse than they would on the FHD.
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Infy2 - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
For $2000 I would expect nothing less than GTX 1080.cyrusfox - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
but the TDP of the mobile 1060 is only 80 watts, for the 1080 it is 150 watts. You wouldn't have as pretty a package or as light/small form of a laptop with the 1080.This laptop is plenty capable, if you need more oomph, you either have to trade out aesthetics or save that for desktop use.
Inteli - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
Cooling a 1080 in this sized chassis would be very interesting.Mathieu Bourgie - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
As previously mentioned, it isn't realistic to expect a 150W GTX 1080 in a 14" chassis. There are already very few 15.6" laptop with a GTX 1080, due to the challenge of cooling.Also, there's no laptop with a GTX 1080 available for $2000. The least expensive that I could find start at $2100 and most are $2400+. And those don't come with an aluminum unibody or RGB keyboard. The Razer Blade Pro (17" variant with GTX 1080) starts at $3700...
Morawka - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
unibody.. funny.. half the razer blade is plastic on the bottomSpartanJet - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
Do you even own one? I can tell you its an aluminum uni-body, no plastic at all.vincentlaw - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
It is most definitely not plastic on the bottom. It's very similar to the older unibody macbooks.akdj - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link
Vincent, Spartan,I'm sorry and could care less who's right, who's wrong but as a long time OS X, now macOS 'user' primarily and secondarily... usually by necessity (job) a Windows users. I've a pair of 15" rMBPs, both of the top shelf, CTO variety and both still phenomenal computers
I have the 2.7GHz/16GB/768GB/650m from 2012 and other than a display switch (to Samsung) & overnight logic board change (650m;)) - first year for both, I've not had a single issue since and she's used daily.
I also bought the 2015 for a steal around Christmas '15 on sale @ Best Buy, again with the top shelf build w/2.8GHz, 16 GB, & 1TB SSD - w/$300 off, a $200 rebate for 'working Mac' (had a '07 MacBook, 13" 2.16GHz w/1GB RAM and needed battery. Plugged in it worked great! I was also shopping, ironically during an Apple holiday hundred sale of any computer purchase over a thousand. I had another bundle in awards and ended up paying less for the $3,099 model... maybe 3199?? But the base w/dGPU was $2,499 and I beat it.
Love em both but unless I run into triple those type of deals, I'm out with the current offering at the current price running macOS.
Therefore looking for a windows machine, Razer's caught my eye (& son owns all their peripherals;))
My understanding, but I've not seen one, was they're 'all metal' design. Whether shaved from a single block of aluminum? Could care less, but the plastic bottom is curious without access to upgrade memory or storage?
Manch - Saturday, February 18, 2017 - link
Check out either a Dell XPS 15 9550(great deals on refurb) or the ASUS Zenbook Pro. The Zenbook looks very similar to the MAC. Both can be installed with OSX for dual boot. Drivers and all that fun stuff have been worked out. Theyre both spec'd similarly. Dell has that zero bezel which makes it very compact, can expand mem to 32GB. The ASUS has a full num pad, mem only 24GB bc 8 is soldered. Zenbook is also much cheaper. Either way these are both good alternatives that wont break the bank. Proc, SSD(951) are the same for both.DanNeely - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
some crazy people made a single slot desktop 1070, that fan could theoretically be shoved into a thin gaming laptop. OTOH at full load I suspect it sounds like a fully loaded B52 using afterburners on takeoff.ckbryant - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
B-52 isn't an afterburner capable jet engine. It would do no good for a sub-sonic plane to have afterburnersckbryant - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
It does have a water inject feature to use water to increase spool speed for rapid takeoff but thats banned at most airports and etc...due to noisevincentlaw - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
A single slot card is still about twice as thick as what this laptop could fit in its form factor.Wolfpup - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
Or at least a 1070.A 1060 for something being bought for high end work or games is ridiculous. I mean unless you replace your PCs yearly...
Of course people buy stuff all the time for thousands of dollars that's still much worse than my Alienware with a 680m I bought in 2012!
Flunk - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
You want performance, buy a big heavy laptop or a desktop.sundragon - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
Not necessarily, I have an Aorus all aluminum x7v6 with a 1070 and it's was about the same price as the Razer Blade with the 512. They also make the x7 with a 1080. It's about as thick and yes it's as loud as the Razer - I had a late 2016 one so I know. The difference is for a 17" screen it weighs 7lbs vs 4lbs for the Razer's 14" screen.Also 4K with 1060 means you can't really game at native resolutions. Something people need to be mindful of. The 1070 can do 60fps at 1440p and the 1080 can push 4K native gaming on high end titles.
MamiyaOtaru - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link
oh yeah really similar. just heavier and biggerDestoya - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
It's important to remember that the 1060 in this laptop has identical performance to a full-fat desktop card. It's essentially at a relative performance level of a *80m GPU from past generations. A 1060 is enough to play any modern AAA game at the highest settings with well over 60 FPS at 1080p. It's also enough to play esports titles such as CSGO at 4K with good framerate. I'd be willing to bet that even three or four years from now this laptop would still be perfectly capable of running modern titles with at least medium or higher settings at 1080p.vincentlaw - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
Find me a 1070 in this form factor with this battery life. They don't exist. This is literally maxing out the heat dissipation of a laptop of this size. It's a perfect laptop for gamers who don't want to lug around a heavy thick "GAMER LAPTOP".sundragon - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
I have an Aorus all aluminum x7v6 with a 1070 - it's larger but just as thin and all aluminum with an RGB keyboard. I had the late 2016 Razer Blade and they are comparable. The x7 is heavier because it sports a 17" screen at 7lbs but you get a 1070 or 1080 as an option.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
I'm sure people out there are falling all over themselves to throw money at pushing lower-than-native resolutions on their 4K gaming laptop packing second-from-the-bottom-end GPU!Lonyo - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
It's at least midrange, especially in historic pricing terms. And it would be third from bottom anyway, 1050 and 1050Ti.It's faster than the previous gen high end (980), extra so on the laptop front since the 980M was nowhere near a 980.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
According to Anandtech around the time of the 980m's release, the claim was 75% performance when compared to the desktop version so I think "nowhere near" is a bit of an inflation for the sake of argument. Here's a source:http://www.anandtech.com/show/8585/nvidia-geforce-...
As for the 1050 (even the Ti variant) being faster than a 980m...no, it really isn't and here's some numbers for you to use to compare them:
980m
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-98...
1050Ti
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-10...
Any other thoughts?
ciparis - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
I think he was pointing out the the 1060 (not the 1050) is faster than the 980.MamiyaOtaru - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link
who taught you how to readBrokenCrayons - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link
Likely the same people that taught you to use proper punctuation and capital letters.Flunk - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
Depends what you want it for. I'd buy a laptop with a 4K screen to game at 1080p and use 4k for productivity. I fine half resolution quite usable for games on my 4K notebook.P.S. 1060 is top of the midrange, not low-end.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
The 1070 is the top of the midrange of discrete GPUs. A 1060 is low end, one step up from NV's budget model 1050.lazarpandar - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
That's a big step though.Additionally you're asserting yourself about something that simply isn't factual, and I'm not saying you're wrong per se, I just don't think these things are organized into high-mid-low-budget as concretely as you're implying that they are.
The fact that you seem to think the 1070 is mid-range holds no more weight than the fact that I think it's high-end, or the fact that Flunk thinks 1060 is mid-range. These things just aren't defined by an authority in that way.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
That's precisely why I initially referred to it in its numeric stacking instead of assigning a performance range to it right away. I'm glad we can both agree that it's pretty silly to try to split hairs about where it is in performance rankings and that you can see my initial point clearly without putting up those same blinders to cover things up under a layer of intentional obfuscation.Diji1 - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
" I'm glad we can both agree that it's pretty silly"Yes, it was pretty silly when you jumped in and commented on the thing your claiming is silly.
vincentlaw - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
Actually, no, you're wrong.1. 1080 is high-end.
2. 1070 is mid-high.
3. 1060 is mid.
4. 1050 Ti is mid-low
5. 1050 is low.
6. 1040 (whenever it's released) is budget.
Diji1 - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
Really it's rather arbitary whether you claim the 1060 is mid range or low range so it's an argument not worth having :).I think we can all agree though that if you want to run modern games you won't be running them at 4K which makes it rather pointless.
TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
When Apple introduced the marketing term "Retina Display" they backed it up with a metric that calculates resolution as a function of the viewing distance. PPD (Pixels Per Degree) is the number of pixels that you see in one degree of the viewing angle from the designed viewing distance. Apple engineers found that at 57 PPD was the limit that the human eye can perceive (My eyes are worse actually). Given an 18" viewing distance for a laptop the angular resolution the 14" 4K display is 98.87 PPD...That is overkill. The other FHD screen option (1920 x 1080) is only 49.43 PPD which isn't quite a retina display. Seems that Razor should have gone with something in between these two extremes...ciparis - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
I would love to see a 1440P option.vincentlaw - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
Apple's metrics are actually just hand-waving. Want proof? Draw 2 parallel 1 pixel lines separated by 1 pixel of space. Can you discern the two lines on a Retina display? Yes? Then you can still discern individual pixels and there is room to improve. We're going to need to more than triple the resolution to really meet the actual limits of human vision.Diji1 - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
I agree.I used to think 5.5" 4K smartphones were ridiculous and pointless however now after owning one there is something to be said for increased image quality at this res and size.
It's not something I think is necessarily worth much but if you can have it there is a difference in quality.
That said if I wanted a laptop for gaming only then this laptop having 4K is a bad choice because you can't use that res for gaming with the vidya card.
halcyon - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
4K 14" touch screens are an exercise in studpidity. Esp. on a gaming laptop. Yeah, if you want a free mirror, it now comes with greasy fingerprint smudges.Flunk - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
I agree with you, I have a 15" 4K touchscreen laptop and I never, ever use the touchscreen. But I had to buy it anyway because there was no 4K non-touchscreen option.Diji1 - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
Absolutely for gaming, it's ridiculous.But then again some Razer fans do seem to like big numbers etc.
ingwe - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
I like this but would like to see charging done via a second type C.RaichuPls - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
Can't, type C only allows up to 100w charging. This comes with a 180w adapter.ingwe - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
You are correct. I completely didn't think of that.tecknohow - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link
That's incorrect. USB-PD is up to 100w; the USB Type-C Port, if it even has a specified limit, is higher than this. For example, the Dell XPS 15 (9550) charges at the laptop's full 130w over Type-C when using their WD-15 dock.lazarpandar - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link
It's still got that thick bezel.........twtech - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
I would have liked to see that mechanical keyboard the pro version has make it to this model.admnor - Friday, March 17, 2017 - link
Complaining that this thing "only" has a GTX 1060 is completely missing the point. I travel *a lot* and a 4lb, 14" laptop is something I can chuck in my backpack and happily carry around. A 7 or 8lb 17" laptop is not a viable option. So, should I give up on any hopes of gaming while abroad, or should I spring for the best available option, with excellent build quality, and a CPU/GPU combination that will run games perfectly well at 1920x1080*. According to VRMark it'll even acceptably drive an Oculus Rift (which, by the way, I could also throw in the bag and it would still weigh less than one of these desktop-replacement 17" 1080-toting monsters).* Which *is* native resolution if you go for the anti-glare non-touch FHD screen, and why you'd pay all that extra for a higher-resolution glass touchscreen that, let's be honest, you're not really going to actually touch anyway, so it's just going to (a) drain the battery, (b) make the thing heavier, (c) be unusable in bright light, and (d) make games look worse than they would on the FHD.