Three Displays, One Laptop? Razer’s Project Valerie Shows Promise, Problems

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: 1) Razer has a humdinger of a CES announcement, 2) it’s named after a lady, and 3) it seems perilously like vaporware. This time, it’s a triple-display laptop concept called Project Valerie.

Yep, three displays, one laptop. When you open the laptop, you can fold out two more displays like wings. Each display is a 17.3-inch (4K) IGZO panel with G-Sync, so altogether you get a whopping 12K resolution that wraps around you to about 180 degrees.

The secondary and tertiary displays extend automatically due to an “automated deployment system.” A Razer press release reads, “Each display mechanically slides out of the side of the main screen and adjusts into place, making it easy for users to deploy.“ Note that by default, when you open the lid you see just the one display; if you want all three, you simply pull the other two out from their hiding place behind the main display.

Razer said that it relies on software to automatically scale the PC’s display across all three monitors. A representative told Tom’s Hardware that it works similarly to when you connect an external display to your laptop and it autoscales. The three displays are connected internally.

The system powering this three-headed beast is essentially a 17-inch Razer Blade Pro. It’s not reallya Razer Blade Pro with two extra panels slapped on top of it, but it sounds like it may as well be. Project Valerie looks just like one, with the same type of unibody CNC aluminum chassis and a cooling system that involves “a custom-designed fan and dynamic heat exchangers” that “pair with a vapor chamber to maximize heat dissipation.”

It also has an Nvidia GTX 1080 inside–at least for now. The specs are by no means finalized, so the shipping version of Project Valerie will have whatever the hottest Nvidia GPU is at that time. (“That time” has no particular date, yet.)

It’s outfitted with Razer’s Ultra-Low-Profile Mechanical keyboard switches. There’s a strip of LED lighting under all the displays and, unsurprisingly, it all works with Razer’s Chroma lighting software.

The whole kit is about the size of two Razer Blade Pros stacked on top of each other.