Valerie was debuted at the CES technology show in Las Vegas today. It takes gaming laptops to the next level, bringing multi-monitor gaming to a mobile workstation for the first time. The machine is based on Razer’s conventional 17-inch Blade Pro and was “conceived with enthusiasts and power users in mind.”
Valerie has three 17.3-inch displays, each boasting 4K resolution, NVIDIA G-SYNC for higher refresh rates and NVIDIA Surround for multi-monitor gaming. The two side monitors are housed inside the primary one, letting you fold the whole thing up like a regular laptop.
When it’s time to work – or, more probably, play – an automatic deployment system slides the secondary monitors out of the main screen and manoeuvres them into position. There’s no need to adjust the angles or manually plug in cables.
The screens are IGZO panels from Sharp and boast 100-percent Adobe RGB colour accuracy. This would make Valerie well suited to content creation, although it’s doubtful professionals would adopt an all-in-one laptop system over a regular desktop.
As may be expected of such a high-end machine, Valerie includes some of the most powerful components currently available. Its NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card is capable of running demanding games without serious issues. It also supports the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive virtual reality headsets. Even the GTX 1080 will face crumbling frame rates when supporting Valerie’s multi-monitor mode though: at native resolution, the three displays have a total of 11,520×2,160 pixels.
Valerie is currently a prototype and it’s unclear whether Razer will ever put it on sale. It is possible to register for news announcements though, suggesting the project could see a consumer launch yet. Even Razer doesn’t seem too sure who would actually buy such a machine. The company’s press release notes the prototype’s benefits for content creators and gamers before suggesting it could be welcomed by people who want to run “virtually any PC task, anytime, anywhere.”
“The complexities of a traditional multi-monitor setup are a thing of the past with Project Valerie,” said Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan. “Equally important, the power of a desktop computer and graphics capabilities of three top-end monitors are included in the system. There is no shortcoming in the way of performance in the face of its amazing portability and features.”
If Project Valerie does get a public launch, the “desktop replacement” laptop category may have a new flagship option. Expect availability to be strictly limited and pricing to be high. The same can’t be said for battery life, which is unlikely to last much longer than an hour or two when in multi-monitor mode.
