Our benchmarks here include
Futuremark’s PCMark and 3DMark. PCMark 8 v2 is a cross-platform suite that gauges a system’s capabilities in several usage categories. The venerable 3DMark also has a suite of cross-platform tests, but these are tailored to measuring a system’s graphics chops.
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PCMark 8 Benchmarks |
| Productivity and System Level Benchmarking |
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We selected three tests from the
PCMark 8 benchmark suite: Home, Storage and Work. Futuremark recently improved its tests with PCMark 8 version 2. We selected the Open CL "Accelerated" options for both Home and Work.
The Razer Blade delivers near top marks in both productivity tests. The Storage score is a little lacking due to the poor write speeds seen in ATTO, but overall the Razer Blade can rise to meet your needs, no matter the task.
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3DMark Sky Diver, Fire Strike Extreme And Time Spy |
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Synthetic DirectX Gaming And Graphics Testing
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Futuremark designed
3DMark Fire Strike for desktop PCs, but today’s heavy-duty gaming laptops have the chops to take on the high-resolution texture, tessellation and other components of the test. Sky Diver, on the other hand, is aimed directly at gaming laptops and mid-range desktops.
In both of these tests, the Razer Blade sits right with the pack of other GTX 1060 equipped notebooks. We will take this time to point out that, all else being equal, Kaby Lake does not appear to offer concrete performance advantages for gaming over the Skylake counterparts. Just remember, Kaby Lake brings other improvements including a new decoding engine and 4K playback for the latest codecs utilized by Youtube, Netflix, and other video streaming services. Kaby Lake also brings better power efficiency which helps allow the laptop to hang with its larger competition.
Finally, we wrap up 3DMark with the more recently released Time Spy benchmark. Unlike Fire Strike and Sky Diver, which utilize DirectX 11, Time Spy is built on
DirectX 12. This gives Time Spy access to newer API features, including asynchronous compute.
Despite the newer DirectX 12 graphics engine, our story has not really changed here. The Razer Blade continues to deliver performance dead on with expectations - great news.
Enough jostling with artificial benchmarks, let's find out how the Razer Blade fares in real world titles...
