Razer’s latest project will have you wishing it was your new best friend. Why don’t you come on over Valerie?
We’re always fans of ideas that have the propensity to make our brain melt, and one of the ideas gaming computer and peripheral maker Razer is showing off at CES does just that.
Known as “Project Valerie”, it’s not a tribute to The Zutons’ well-covered song “Valerie” known mostly through the Amy Winehouse cover, but rather a computer, and one that presents itself in a different and potentially more interactive way for people who love to game, or even just get a monumental amount of work done.
Whether you work from a second screen or play games on one, there’s a good chance you value that second screen immensely, able to view more screen real estate with two displays in your life.
Well what if you could look at three, and what if they sat around you, with one on the very left, one on the very right, and then one in the middle? What if screens encircled you as you worked or played games, giving you an arc of displays to look at, almost like your own windscreen and dashboard?
For a long time, that’s been a relatively expensive dream of computer owners, requiring not just three computer monitors that fit together nicely, but a graphics card and computer capable of driving all three at once.
Razer’s Project Valerie, however, is a laptop that not only has the power needed to drive all three, but three screens built into the body, with Razer using a specially designed automatic deployment mechanism that slides each of the extra two screens out from the side of the main front screen to sit on either side.
“The complexities of a traditional multi-monitor setup are a thing of the past with Project Valerie,” said Min-Liang Tan, Co-founder and CEO of Razer.
“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.”
One thing of note is the size, and understandably packing in three displays into a laptop makes for a computer that isn’t small. In fact, Razer is using a 17.3 inch main screen for this computer, making it one of the few 17 inch computers around, though Razer does make one of these itself.
Each display built into Project Valerie is 17.3 inches and displays a 4K resolution, using IGZO panels to provide 100 percent of the Adobe RGB colour gamut and a staggering 11520×2160 resolution.
Driving these three screens is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics chip, and while Razer hasn’t revealed exactly what computer processor will be handling things, our guess is a relatively high end quad-core Intel i7 chip.
An aluminium chassis keeps all of this together, but it won’t be light, sitting at around 5 kilograms when all is said and done. Seriously, carrying three screens was never going to be light weight.
Or cheap, because while we don’t necessarily expect to have a price on Project Valerie yet, we’re already getting the feeling that this will sit over the $5K mark in Australia, though we’ll let you know the exact details when we know.
