My razer blade pro is being returned to me this wednesday. From making my first contact with razer live chat to receiving my repaired laptop will have taken approx 3 weeks including weekends. My unit was sent from the uk to germany, i sent it next day express via tnt costing £46(not including shipping materials).
After it arrived i found out that the case wasnt warped but the battery had actually bloated. Thats why it wouldnt close properly, i presumed the case had warped out of shape. The touchpad was classed as a CID or Customer Induced Damage, this voided my warranty.
The bill i received said i could pay for the repairs or just pay the diagnostic fee and get my laptop back. The diagnostics fee was around 79 euros i believe. Anyway i decided to get it repaired, the invoice said it was approx 295 euro for a new top C cover which i presume was a new top case and keyboard. The battery replacement was approximately between 50 and 80 euros, labour was 50 euros, tax was approx 79 euros and return shipping was 16 euros(theyve shipped it back to me via ups standard which is between 3 and 5 days).
In total including me sending it and paying for the repairs it cost me £550 all in. Which i was actually happy to pay as i was told it would be like a brand new laptop. Saying that the repair center apparently dont delete any software or reset your laptop if possible.
So yeah i receive my laptop in 4 days from now if i dont add anything here it would mean that it was received by me in an acceptable condition. If not ill complain here, but it sounds like everything has gone well. So the entire turnaround time if u send your laptop express next day to the repair centre is 3 weeks. Which is good i think although the live chat reps were telling me 1 week which aint gonna happen.
Ive also read in places that if they dont have the parts available to repair your laptop at the repair centre it can add an extra month to your repair time as they have to order parts from singapore or something. Apparently that rarely happens, the parts for my laptop were available so 3 weeks.
Hope this has helped you out.
Thank You for reading. C ya.
Pictures before repair of bloated battery causing lid to not close properly below.
There were no pics of the trackpad because no damage was visible to the naked eye, you had to try and click the buttons which were moving in and out of place. When you report your damaged laptop, razer send you an email which contains your RMA number. This number should be attached to the outside of the box which contains your laptop. Also, you are asked to write a letter explaining whats wrong with the laptop. You should also write the RMA number on this letter.
One thing i didnt mention in the above post is that after the damage to the trackpad occured(the lid already wasnt closing because of battery) I tried to open the laptop and it sort of popped open then i couldnt get one of the screws out and wore the screwdriver threading down. I just screwed the other screws back in and informed razer of what had happened. A picture is included below.
I will post pictures of the repaired laptop asap, it still needs to be PAT tested before i can use it so may take a few days past its delivery date which is still due by the 3/7/2019.
UPDATE: 06/07/2019
So i received my laptop on 3/7/19 here are a few remarks.
I received the laptop from UPS about 11:27AM, when i opened the box first thing i noticed was there wasnt a lot of bubble wrap around my laptop box, 2 to 3 layers. it wasnt wrapped well at all.
Second thing i realized after contacting razer live chat was that i was only covered by UPS standard insurance of $100 when the laptop has cost me £4700 so far including repairs. WTH happens if it disappears? That probably would have been me down and out for the count, I wasnt happy with this at all.
So as for the repair it self theyve replaced the entire chassis which cost 259 euros i believe, they havent replaced the screen as my original stickers are on it. However i know they have changed the chassis because the i7 7th gen sticker is missing and its a oh so very slightly different shade of black from the screen panel.
Once i had the laptop on i soon realized that they had reset it to factory settings, luckily my steam and origin games are on an external ssd however i had to start everything from the beginning(programs etc). This is probably something you should expect them to do although razer tell you they will try to avoid it. My laptop had only hardware issues so i dont know why they reset it.
Recently i realized that while gaming the battery would say "Plugged In - Discharging", so when i was done playing a game the battery level would drop by about 1% per minute even though it was plugged in. I contacted razer today about this and one thing he recommended was, right click on the start menu go to device manager then batteries & uninstall the microsoft driver. He told me that once it was uninstalled to turn my laptop off and leave it(with the power supply plugged in) for 6 hours, then unplug it and turn it on. I uninstalled the microsoft battery driver and left it off for no longer than 10 minutes, my problem seems to be now resolved as the battery doesnt discharge after gaming for a long period. If this changes i will let u know here.
EDIT: The battery is still going down by approximately 1% every four minutes while gaming plugged in. Ive sort of sorted this problem pretty much and got the battery drain down to 0.2% every 10 minutes. To do this you will need to download MSI Afterburner and the XTU Tuning utility follow all the instructions in this link:http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/razer-blade-pro-early-2017-cpu-gpu-tweaks-some-tweaks-apply-for-late-2016-model.807563/
When writing this all the images had disappeared so follow this next link and make your afterburner settings the same as in the first post: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/razer-blade-pro-17-gtx-1080-gpu-7820k-cpu-2017-owners-lounge.803629/page-41
Dont worry if your afterburner lines and dots are greyed out its fine just change the dots around and hit close then click on the button to start it with windows. Be Sure to disable the rzperformance service as it says in the first link(just type in how to disable services in windows 10 into google) also type device manager into the windows search bar go to device manager control panel-click on "Human Interface Devices then click on HID-compliant touch screen then right click on it and disble it(this will obviously disable the touchscreen). After that connect your razer blade pro to a 4k screen. go to project(bottom right corner in windows 10) and click on second screen only also turn your chroma keyboard lighting off and the logo lighting to off. If you go to settings in windows then system then display you can also turn on HDR streaming for games and videos. After youve done all this you should now notice that on AAA games set on ultra in 4K HDR your battery drain should fall to around 0.1-0.2% every 8-10 minutes which is enough to game all day. However when your gaming on the move, if you suffer from this problem at all that is, your battery drain is gonna be about 1% every 3-4 minutes. But with the undervolting fan speeds and temps drop greatly although my laptop screen flickers and does a little funny blank screen for a few seconds on start up but then its fine. Cheers.
EDIT:13/07/2019 So with further testing you dont have to turn the keyboard lighting, logo lighting, touch screen or the screen off you just have to undervolt the cpu and then you have to undervolt the GPU properly the picture in the second link is a bit outdated so i will include a picture of my afterburner curve here. just make sure each dot is atleast a little bit above the previous dot or you will have crashing. Cheers.
EDIT:20/07/2019 reply/comment number 3 below
Over all very happy with the repair job, bloated battery replaced, chassis replaced along with a new touchpad & the laptop now closes properly as it should. Its like having a new laptop really i love it. They also cleaned my laptop and did a very good job of that. The touchpad clicking buttons are harder to push down then before the repair was needed you really need to give them a solid firm click. It also passed a PAT test with no problems.
I think i may know why the battery bloated. Firstly I was using the laptop with my 4K tv with the lid closed, for gaming and for everything else - My advice would be not to use the laptop with the lid closed in future. Second thing that i beleive may have caused the bloating is the fact that the laptop was kept in my room where i was keeping my clothes laundry on a maiden to dry. The damp in the room which was pretty bad a lot of the time may also have caused the battery to bloat. These 2 reasons i believe worked in conjunction with eachother to cause the battery to
bloat, the battery bloating caused the chassis to expand which is why it needed replacing.
Full Cost Break Down of Repair:
- Labour = 50.00 Euros
- Top Cover Assembly = 295.15 Euros
- Battery Assembly = 58.45 Euros
- VAT = 79.73 Euros
- Return Shipping = 16.00 Euros (uninsured, no options given)
My postage and packaging costs for sending the laptop were approx:
Packaging Materials(Box, Bubble Wrap & Sellotape) = £20
Delivery via TNT Next Day = £46 (uninsured)
I may post some pictures of the repaired laptop below but i dont think theres a point its just like a brand new razer blade pro without the i7 processor sticker pretty much.
Thanks for reading and I hope this helps you out. Bye!!!
