Every year, CES has its choice of memorable products on display, and this year the Razer Project Valerie experimental laptop is certainly one of them. It's a laptop, but with a trio of built-in displays.
Each display is a 17.3-inch IGZO panel offering a 4K resolution (3,840 by 2160). Housing all three screens while allowing the laptop to remain portable meant designing a novel "automatic deployment mechanism," which sees the second and third panels slide out from behind the central panel. There's no cables to mess around with, it's all handled automatically.
Powering what is effectively 12K (11,520-by-2160) of screen requires some serious performance, so Razer opted to use the new Razer Blade Pro laptop components. That means an Intel Core i7-6700 quad-core processor, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU coupled with 8GB of dedicated GDDR5X VRAM.
Those components will need to run at their maximum performance in order to cope with a game at 4K resolution across three displays, so Razer had to rethink heat dissipation. Project Valerie includes a custom-designed fan, dynamic heat exchangers, and a vapor chamber in order to handle the thermals and ultimately not overheat.
Razer decided to use aluminum for the casing, which somehow manages to only be 1.5 inches thick. This isn't a laptop you'll want to carry around for long, though, as it weighs just under 12 pounds. Battery life isn't mentioned, but then the answer I'd expect is "what battery life?" or simply laughter. The included AC adapter is compact at least, because you're always going to need access to it.
The keyboard uses Razer's Ultra-Low-Profile Mechanical switches requiring 65 grams of force per key press, and the trackpad is integrated to the right of the keyboard rather than below it. There's also Razer Chroma, which gives you an unlimited number of key lighting effects.
For now, Project Valerie is a concept gaming laptop and an experiment to which I'm sure Razer will be gauging reaction this week. So far it looks very positive and I wouldn't bet against Valerie being turned into a real product in the not too distant future.
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