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The author bought a Thunder Snake Blade 14 2022 out of his own pocket two months ago as my main computer. Over the past two months, I have been amazed by the exquisite craftsmanship, lightweight fuselage and super performance of the Ling Blade 14. Recently, Thunder Snake launched a new version of Ling Blade 14 in 2023. At first glance, it looks similar to the old model, but after it is really used, I find that it has made some obvious improvements in internal hardware configuration and external expansibility.

CTOnews.com has received the new AMD Sharon 9 7940HS + RTX 4070 Spirit Blade 14 2023. In this article, let's take a look at how its experience will be different and what its performance will be.

Design Thunder Serpent Blade 14 2023 is a rare 14-inch lightweight performance book. Its BWH is 17.99x228x310mm and weighs 1.84kg, which is slightly thicker and heavier than the previous generation, but the performance and scalability of the machine have been greatly improved.

The design of side An is still the traditional fluorescent green Thunder Snake Logo, which supports the real-time control of Razer Synapse Thunder Cloud software. Founder's pure black appearance is low-key and cool. Although it is a positioning game book, it has no problem even if it is taken to work.

When the B side is opened and closed with one hand, the maximum opening and closing angle is about 130 °. This screen is a big highlight. Thunder Snake Blade 14 2023 is equipped with a high-score, high-brush online competition-grade screen, and the screen share and look and feel have been greatly improved as the proportion has been upgraded to 16:10. And the hardware parameters of this screen also achieve a balance between games and productivity, it supports 2560x1600 resolution and 240Hz high refresh rate, the response time is less than 3ms, whether it is games, creative work or audio and video it can take care of.

CTOnews.com measured this screen with a color calibrator and found that it covers 99.5% of the sRGB color gamut and 97.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, with a maximum brightness of about 520nit. It is a good 14-inch screen with almost no shortcomings.

Windows Hello face recognition and PIN password-free unlocking functions are also provided at the top of the screen, as well as privacy pickups, which are more friendly to productive office groups.

C-side keyboard design is very regular, each key has RGB backlight, you can set your favorite lighting effects in Thunder Cloud software, but also can be synchronized with other devices of Thunder Snake, it is really a "lamp factory" style. The power keys and direction keys are squeezed into the keyboard, which is a compromise to maintain the neat style of the design.

There are also a pair of stereo loudspeakers on both sides of the C side, coupled with the built-in THX space sound effects, the sound is very shocking.

Below is a very large touchpad made of glass that feels comfortable and supports a range of manipulative gestures for expansion.

The D side is also made of metal, which has a strong sense of integration, and the light of the key panel can be seen through the fan.

The interface on the side is also rich. On the left are power interface (230W), 1 USB 3.2 Gen2 TypeA port (10Gbps), full-featured USB4 Type C port (support for 100W PD charging), 3.5mm headphone hole.

There is also a full-featured USB4 Type C port (100W PD charging support), a USB 3.2Gen2 TypeA (10Gbps) port and a HDMI2.1 port on the right, which is quite rich in view of the light and thin body.

Hardware design Thunder Snake's exterior design has always been excellent, and the internal workmanship is even more amazing. The Ling Blade 14 2023 we got is equipped with AMD's latest Ruilong 9 7940HS processor and RTX 4070 laptop GPU. Can these two powerful cores get effective heat dissipation? Can such a thin fuselage bear it? Let's hurry up and open it.

After taking it apart, we can find that the Ling Blade 14 2023 does not use a heat pipe to conduct heat, but adopts a unique vacuum cavity soaking plate design. The interior of the whole machine is fully stacked, quite regular and scientific, and the hot spots are evenly arranged. There will be no "stacked music".

The memory part is the biggest highlight. One of the biggest regrets of Lingblade 14 2022 is that the memory is on-board and does not support capacity expansion. The 2023 model plugs two pluggable DDR5 memories directly into the memory, and the frequency is currently the highest 5600MHz, with two 8G memory. If there is a large memory requirement, the maximum can be upgraded to a single 32G memory, that is, two super-large memory with a total of 64GB, which undoubtedly provides convenience for creative production work.

On the other side is Qualcomm's WCN685x wireless network card, which supports Wi-Fi 6e protocol and is a high-end network card that only high-end AMD Ruilong notebooks will use.

Below is M.2 slot, the whole machine has only one M.2 hard drive slot, supports PCIe 4.0mm 4 channels, comes with 1T Samsung PM9A1, supports PCIe 4.0, and has excellent performance. Now the hard drive is also very cheap, if you want, you can upgrade to the highest 4TB double-sided particle solid state.

At the bottom is a 68.1Wh battery, which is quite large for a 14-inch laptop. And because this computer can hot switch between direct connection and mixed output, it can meet the needs of office games after a power outage for a period of time. With the 100W PD charger, you can share it with your mobile phone when you go out, greatly reducing the weight of travel.

Theoretical performance Thunder Snake Blade 14 2023 is equipped with AMD's latest Ruilong 9 7940HS processor. It has achieved a comprehensive upgrade in the process, CPU and GPU core architecture, using the new Zen 4 architecture, leading 4nm process, full core design, with 8 large cores and 16 threads, the benchmark clock frequency is 4.0GHz, the maximum acceleration clock frequency is 5.2 GHz L3 cache capacity up to 16MB. At the same time, its built-in Radeon 780m kernel display has also been upgraded to RDNA 3 architecture, with 12 computing units, the core frequency is 2800MHz, and its performance is comparable to that of GTX 1650 Max-Q alone, so it can achieve smooth office and happy online games even after a power outage.

On the GPU side, the one we have is a RTX 4070 laptop called GPU. The underlying architecture of RTX 4070 has been drastically upgraded to Ada Lovelace architecture, and DLSS, the killer of software, has also been upgraded to DLSS 3. And due to the great improvement of the process, the energy-efficiency ratio is quite amazing. Although the fuselage can provide 140W full power performance release, but the actual game around 100W has a pretty good performance, for an inch of gold 14-inch notebook is quite suitable. RTX 4070 notebook computer GPU has 4608 CUDA cores, core frequency 1605MHz, to the highest Boost frequency 2175MHz; video memory is 8GB GDDR6, bit width 128bit, video memory frequency 2000MHz.

It seems that the hardware configuration of Ling Blade 14 2023 is quite flagship, so can it continue to output high performance? After we use AIDA64 to roast the FPU,15 minute baking machine, the CPU temperature is stable at 95 ℃ and the power consumption is stable at 80W. And the 80W does release most of the performance of the Ruilong 9 7940HS.

Then we use FurMark doughnuts for single-baked GPU, with the blessing of Dynamic Boost 2.0 technology, the RTX 4070 laptop GPU of Ling Blade 14 2023 fluctuates between 135W and 140W, the temperature is stable at 86.1 ℃, and the performance release is quite sufficient.

Next, we run the above two software at the same time to simulate the maximum pressure and run the double baking for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, CPU was stable at 20W and 73.4 ℃, and GPU was stable at 125W and 86.4 ℃. The performance release of the whole machine has reached an amazing 145W, which is the absolute head of the current 14-inch lightweight book.

The noise of the double-baked Ling Blade 14 2023 is also very low, but the surface temperature is a little high, which is not easy for this 18mm thick, 14-inch lightweight book, and this kind of extreme testing environment is rarely encountered in daily use.

The GPU running score in the 3DMark Time Spy reached 12115, which is almost exactly the same as the RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU, and the performance is quite excellent, no different from the large-size game book.

In addition, we also ran the light pursuit test of 3DMark, the measured score was 7263, and the improvement of light pursuit performance was also quite significant.

Next, let's look at the theoretical performance of CPU. In CineBench R20, the score of single thread is 705 and that of multi-thread is 6353. This score is almost the same as that of a large-size pure game book, and the energy-efficiency performance is quite amazing.

In R23, we got 1818 points for single thread and 16484 points for multi-thread. And the powerful RTX 4070 laptop GPU complement each other.

16GB dual-channel DDR5 memory, excellent performance, latency and previous DDR4 notebook memory is not much different, but the speed is really greatly improved.

Solid-state drive is Samsung's high-end hard drive PM9A1, read and write performance is also very good.

After the actual measurement of the game, we will carry out the actual measurement of the game. The resolution is adjusted to 2560 to 1600, and the image quality is adjusted to the highest. If you have light, you will open the most high-end light chase, and if you have DLSS, you will open it to the balance gear. The first is the competitive game "CS:GO", which can show its performance in high frames. After running the built-in BenchMark, the average frame reaches 311 frames, which is enough to run all over the electronic competition screen.

In another shooting game that requires a high frame rate, "APEX Legends", Ling Blade 14 2023 can also reach a high number of frames in the training ground, making the game experience excellent.

In PUBG, the highest picture quality of 2.5K can still reach an average of 132frames, and the game experience is equally smooth.

Next, the author also tested three classic 3A masterpieces. "Control" can reach an average of 73 frames when DLSS is turned on, and it is not a problem to play 2.5K light chase.

In another classic 3A masterpiece, the Wild Dart: redemption, running its own BenchMark at the highest quality of 2.5K has reached an average of 82 frames, which can also bring a smooth gaming experience.

In Tomb Raider: shadow, the average number of frames reached 111 frames, the game experience is extremely smooth.

If you want to play a 3A masterpiece with higher configuration requirements, you need DLSS 3 technology. We're going to test several 3A masterpieces that support DLSS 3. First, let's take a look at the frame number of the most stressful "Cyberpunk 2077" at + 2.5K resolution. By default, Ling Blade 14 2023 still has no way to play, and the average number of frames is about 22 frames.

When you turn on the exclusive cool techs DLSS 3 of the RTX 40 series, the number of frames of Lingblade 14 2023 has soared to an average of 68 frames, and it is easy to play with the highest quality of 2.5k light chase.

The legendary 3A game "Wizard 3: hunting" has also launched a next-generation version, followed by higher configuration requirements and DLSS 3 technology support. Without turning on DLSS, the Ling Blade 14 2023 achieves an average of only 20 frames at 2.5K resolution + top light.

If you turn on the AI-enhanced DLSS 3 technology, its frame count will soar to an average of 67 frames, and most scenes can be played at more than 60 frames at a 2.5K resolution and a maximum light chase.

Creative production productivity is also a specialty of Thunder Snake Ling Blade 14 2023. Because frivolity and performance are exactly what many creative workers need.

First, we tested the performance of Thunder Snake Blade 14 2023 in the common rendering software V-Ray. The measured results are as follows. We can see that thanks to the excellent single-core and multi-core performance of the full-core Ruilong 9 7940HS, the CPU score has been greatly improved.

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When rendering with RTX 4070 laptop GPU, it can provide quite significant GPU acceleration effect, and it is fast to model and render.

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CTOnews.com also tested Pr, a commonly used video editing software, to see if it was up to the job. The final Pr score of Lingblade 14 2023 is 787, which can handle 4K video clips smoothly.

Finally, the author also tested the range of Ling Blade 14 2023. When the power-saving mode and mixed output are turned on at 50% brightness, the PCMark10 modern office can last up to 9 hours and 23 minutes. This score is good for a 14-inch performance book. This is thanks to the excellent energy efficiency of the Ruilong 9 7940HS processor.

To sum up, in fact, Thunder Snake Ling Blade 14 2022 is already a quite perfect machine in my opinion. The only two small regrets are that the onboard memory cannot be expanded and the 16:9 screen has a wide black edge. The Ling Blade 14 2023 fixes all the above problems and further enhances the performance release performance, with the new Ruilong 9 7940HS processor and RTX 4070 laptop GPU, bringing a balance between portability, performance and battery life with a very high energy efficiency ratio, bringing the extreme performance of the omnipotent to new heights.

At present, Thunder Snake Ling Blade 14 2023 has been released. The e-commerce page shows that the new 2023 Ling Blades 14's RTX 4060 and RTX 4070 models sell for 18999 yuan and 21999 yuan respectively, and will go on sale in the early morning of the 21st. If you are interested, you can make an appointment.

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