Comment by acomjean

4 years ago

My partner bought a razer 13 inch to replace a MacBook Air. It wasn’t cheap, the build quality is excellent and it handles everything (she’s in an orchestra and records her parts on it, does graphic design and sometimes plays fortnite.). The screen is quite nice and the build quality is better than my system 76 (onyx pro) which I really like too.

Dave2d on YouTube gives pretty short and decent laptop reviews. I think he has a discord channel discussing the machines too

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acomjean

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sgtnoodle  4 years ago

My 2017 razer stealth 13" has rather questionable build quality.

* Once a month or so, the touchscreen flips out and starts registering dozens of random finger taps per second. There are tons of complaints on the internet, but Razer never acknowledged it as a known issue.

* One of the long rubber pads on the bottom fell off after about a year and a half.

* The USB-C power cord's insulation was frayed from day one.

* When running Linux, the kernel continuously reports "correctable" pci-e errors, indicating a signal integrity issue. I had to turn down the verbosity of the messages to keep from spamming the journal.

* When running Linux, a monitor connected via HDMI has random "snow" noise. When playing any sound through the builtin speakers, the monitor blacks out every 10 seconds or so. Plugging in headphones "fixes" it.

* The bios' ACPI implementation is buggy and doesn't properly report whether the lid is open or closed. As a result, the laptop sometimes fails to go to sleep when I close it, and sometimes fails to wake up when I open it. It works most of the time but not always in windows, and linux got into a perpetual sleep-wakeup-sleep loop until I found the right workaround.

* A plugable brand thunderbolt dock "glitches" every 10-20 seconds when typing on a USB3 keyboard. Plugable claims it's due to buggy Intel firmware in the laptop. To be fair, a different brand of dock works fine, though.

  • enkrs  4 years ago

    Many of the signal issues can be caused by a faulty or low quality power supply. It took me a good half year until I finaly fugured why my Thinkpad touchpad and screen was acting up similar to your description. Turned out that my 65W power supply from Amazon was causing all the issues.

  • jmnicolas  4 years ago

    I never bought a Razer product because every time I'm looking at one I see negative reviews about their reliability.

    It boggles my mind how they can be so successful.