Yeah, Razer does their own thing and they do it poorly. I do a lot of laptop and PC repair, and I take some pretty tough jobs. Razer jobs range from insane to impossible and will just break again a month later. They have awful cooling, their screens are completely glued, their hinges fail constantly, their motherboards popcorn if you try to replace components on them, and almost every one routes the screws on the motherboard through the power plane somewhere on the board, making even a hair of an overtightened screw cause a fried board.

Did I mention the ribbon cables? They make them out of the most fragile material and use way more than is necessary. They are worse than a New 3DS as far as how easy it is to break both the ribbons and sockets.

They are so bad. I will take a recent Alienware or a new MacBook any day of the week.

I checked into the ODM, since that's who actually engineers the laptops. Dell primarily uses Compal (which also supplies Toshiba), HP uses Quanta and Wistron, etc. The ODM designs to the OEM's specs, but it's still the ODM's engineers and often warranty work.

Razer uses BYD Electronics, and they are apparently the ONLY one to use that ODM. They really don't have the experience/skills to handle laptops.

Razer is one of the very few devices that I refuse to attempt a repair on. Their build quality is awful and their engineers don't understand how to make motherboards that don't actually destroy themselves. Add some industrial glue to the screens and worse ribbon cable use than a Mac and you get a recipe for an overpriced, slow, unrepairable mess.

Spend your money on anything else, Razer is garbage.

would look great with the 4 dead razor mice that all failed in the first year

Your New Laptop, Now With Added Spyware!® But don't worry, that's not all -- our proprietary SpyBot© pops up on screen every four seconds to give helpful suggestions like:

"Toppings not sticking to your pizza properly? Try glue!" "You're absolutely right; you've found God in the machine!" "You should kill yourself!"

And many, many, many, many, many more.

Looking for a way to atrophy your ability to think for yourself and find information on your own? Look no further than our powerful, intelligent SpyBot© Search®! Why waste time thinking about a solution to your problems, researching, and building an opinion and understanding of your own tasks? You could be using that time to shop! Now with SpyBot© Search®, you can just ask SpyBot© a question and get a list of helpful products, results, and adverts determined by our algorithm!

As a bonus: order now and receive the Sound Just Like Everyone Else® bundle! Tired of expressing yourself through the way you phrase things in writing and speech? So are we! If you order now, you'll receive the Sound Just Like Everyone Else® bundle and you can finally adopt the chirpy marketing-speak of a painfully out-of-touch millennial and start sounding just like our SpyBot©! Get those fingers ready to crank out emoji lists, em-dashes, and "it's not X - it's Y" comparisons every other sentence!

Is it really a marketing necessity to put "AI" on every single piece of tech now?

Mostly college students. Most the gaming laptop are just fancy portable desktops and thats how i used mine too

It's a better fit if you travel a lot (especially going to other countries for weeks or even months).

I'm not sure. Maybe they had some useful IP?

As far as I'm aware, killer branded NICs are entirely distinct from the AX series, maybe Intel borrowed from Killer designs in more recent hardware?

Yeap, and they sucked, at least the ones I saw compared did.

I guess M&A wanted the branding?

Intel has been going downhill ever since they became a household name. AMD all the way!

iirc, Killer was an external company they acquired

Intel Killer Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, Killer Ethernet E5000B

Did not know about Intel's "Killer" nomenclature in networking.

The Core Ultra 9 285HX holds it's own in both ST and MT against both Apple and AMD. Although I wouldn't get a computer without AMD's X3D cache if you are interested in more than casual gaming.

scam I swear, I've seen top of the line $5k laptops that run worse than my $2k desktop

I mean, they can't dissipate anything like the amount of heat or use the amount of power. A desktop is going to outperform a laptop.

And while you don't mention it, most laptops like that can't run long at full CPU+GPU load on a 100Wh battery, and virtually no laptops have more than a 100Wh battery. So you have to plug in or at least carry a power station.

But I don't see how that makes them a scam. There are people who really and honestly have to move around. Windows in particular is not very friendly to being used remotely, so if they can't be mobile, they can't use it, much less for gaming.

The only thing I think I could call scammy is that there are some items that have the same laptop and desktop names, like, oh, the laptop and desktop Geforce RTX 4090, which do not remotely perform the same. I think that it's pretty fair to say that Nvidia did that to exploit user confusion.

I think that it's more accurate to say that laptops come with some substantial performance tradeoffs, and that it's important to be aware of those. It's not that it's unreasonable to play games on a laptop, and there are people who are going to want to do so.

Isn't the price premium to be expected with anything from Razor.

I would imagine people buying are also willing to pay for the brand. Not saying this is good or bad, it's just how it is.

Lmao gaming laptops are a scam I swear, I've seen top of the line $5k laptops that run worse than my $2k desktop. Being able to bring it someplace doesn't warrant such a steep price, just get a cheap laptop if you need to work in a variety of places, and then just move your desktop if you want to game somewhere else for some reason. True gamers stay in their room lol.

Buy a new laptop with Zen 4 (especially a really expensive one) does not sounds like a smart idea.

Oh no, now we are going to get the MSN Messenger Ultra E-Sports Marathon EZPZ Laptop, and then the Yahoo! Messenger Blade Elite Destiny 2 Stealth Edition.

What's old is new again.

I paid 600 for a laptop that plays about half of the games I like smoothly. That's mid-tier to me 😂

For a laptop with a dGPU (and not the cheapest one there is), ~$1,400 is indeed mid-market.

The price listed by TPU was actually $1,309, I am referring to a rough estimate of the real price (the measured used in much of the world).

If 1400 is mid-market, just fucking kill me 😅🔫

Feel like a pretty good option for the mid-market (~$1400), although I wouldn't get this a screen with a resolution higher than 1920x1200.

It's not going to age well, but seems like a decent option if you are low on cash and you need a dGPU.

I'm not brave enough. It is the same die though. My understanding is that the only fundamental difference is extra temperature controls are broken out for OS management.