Hands-on with the 17-inch Razer Blade Pro gaming laptop

Razer went all-out with the design of its new 17-inch Razer Blade Pro gaming laptop. I went to the Razer office in San Francisco to get a hands-on look at the machine that the company calls the “desktop in your laptop.”

Desktop replacements are popular now with the availability of the Nvidia Pascal-based graphics chips, which have performance on-par with bigger machines and low power consumption as well. Razer is reaching for the no-compromise laptop, one with no tech trade-offs and no price limits (it’s $3,700). What you start asking when you get this kind of machine, with such a full 4K screen, is why would I need a desktop? I got a good look at the machine yesterday at a Razer press event, and it’s clear that we are near the day where desktops and laptops are more about a usage choice — whether you want to be mobile, or whether you want to have multiple screens — than just the pure performance of the machine.