It’s hard to settle for less if you are a fanatic gamer. It’s really hard to convince die-hard gamers to opt for a gaming laptop that’s not worth their money. When it comes to gaming laptops, one can’t ignore the Razer Blade 15 with Super Max Q GPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, and a 300Hz display.
The pioneer, the trailblazer Razer Blade 15 is a trendsetter gaming laptop that comes with a thin attractive metallic body. It comes with some extraordinary features that can’t be ignored.
Of all the gaming laptops available on the marketplace, Razer Blade 15 is the closest you can opt for if you are looking for a powerful gaming laptop and an everyday machine. The new advanced Razer Blade 15 comes with some necessary upgrades that are enough to grab your attention.
As far as the configuration of Razer Blade 15 is concerned, it comes with a high-power eight-core Intel Core i7-10875H processor, a 1TB NVMe SSD, and 16 GB RAM. To top it off, it comes with a 1080p HD display screen with a 300 Hz refresh rate.
As far as the pricing is concerned, the advanced Razer Blade 15 starts from $2,599. At this price, you will get the same processor with a 300 MHz refresh rate with the RTX Nvidia super Max-Q 2070, 512 GB NVMe SSD, and 16 GB RAM.
With these high-power configurations and tweaks, Razer Blade 15 still doesn’t come close to its competitors.
Given that the Nvidia RTX graphics card comes with a heavy price tag, 2060 provides the best balance between value and performance as compared to other laptops with the same graphics card. If you want to upgrade it, you can opt for the RTX 2080 MaxQ card and 9th Gen. Corei7 processor.
Just like other gaming laptops, the Razer Blade gaming laptop comes with poor battery life. And that is a big concern for gamers.
Razor Blade 15 Advanced – Pros and Cons
Pros
- Advanced keyboard layout
- Customizable SSD and RAM
- Batter battery life
- Easy-to-use software
Cons
- Gets hot easily
- Inferior webcam quality
- Loud fan noise
- Comes with a high price tag
Most gamers tend to compromise on usability to get the best possible gaming experience. If you want to evaluate it for productivity or creative work, then you should consider a different set of benchmarks. And this is where the Razer Blade 15 falters badly.
As far as the gaming performance is concerned, with this configuration, most titles are known to have stellar performance. If Rocket League and Remedy’s Control are your usual gamut that pushes the normal PCs to their limit, they usually run smoothly on Razer Blade 15 with 110 frames per second, and 250 frames per second respectively. With the 300Hz refresh rate display, when the games go beyond 60 frames per second you should notice a drop in performance if the games are played at their highest settings.
If you’re seeking a laptop with RTX 2080 Max-Q card, you may opt for a machine that supports real-time ray tracing features. Fortunately, Razer Blade 15 does support this feature, but that’s where you can easily spot the shortcomings of the GPU.
This is a good configuration to play the most demanding games today with high frame rates as the display comes with a 1080p resolution. Yet ray tracing without Nvidia’s AI-assisted Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology presents a big challenge.
Fortunately, Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) features assist processors to keep the rate of ray tracing gameplay mode high without any significant hitches on audio or the visual quality. The Nvidia graphics card in the Razer Blade allows the features to run the Control on 100 frames and Fortnite 50 frames per second, which can be considered a good frame rate, but not perfect.
On switching the ray tracing features at their highest for Remedy’s Control, it brings the frame rate to 40, while for Fortnite, it went down to 25 frames per second when ray tracing features were kept on. This is where you get to know about the real performance of a laptop.
To have a great gaming experience with Razer Blade 15, you just have to toggle into settings to get the most of visual fidelity and sound quality. You may need to turn on the DLSS to cop-out the system technically. Otherwise, the system can’t handle ray tracing in games like Control. Additionally, it’s hard to neglect how the system gets hot when it tries to maintain the refresh rate.
For instance, a 5-minute video took four minutes and nine seconds to export in Adobe Premiere Pro, as compared to when the same video took 3 minutes 42 seconds to export in Alienware M15R3, meanwhile, Gigabyte Aero 15’s speed took 2 minutes 42 seconds to export the same file with the same settings.
On the front, the CPU and RAM in Razer’s laptop machines are configured exactly the same as what’s inside Gigabyte Aero 15. Besides, it has got a more powerful GPU than both of the GPUs mentioned above (Gigabyte and Alienware). It seems like the cooling system is the main culprit here which may hamper the performance.
Most gaming laptops do go around 75 degrees Celsius / 167 degrees Fahrenheit and it’s usual. But if you’re used to playing graphically demanding games, laptops may easily get heated up to 85 degrees Celsius/185 degrees Fahrenheit. So, what if it gets hot? It still rules.
Hardware
Moving towards the hardware takes us to the exterior of the laptop. In the new improved design of the Razer Blade 15, the arrow keys are shrunk down to the left and that seems to be the most neglected part of the keyboard.
Some additional changes have also been introduced in the laptop hardware such as extra ports. The 2021 version of Razer Blade comes with a UHS-II SD card reader. It has also got a USB type C port. Overall, the Razer Blade 15 has three Type-A ports with 3.1 USB, two type C ports (both with 20-volt PD 3.0 charging), a card reader port, and an HDMI connection port.
Battery rundown test
The Razer Blade 15 battery banks are the toughest ones. For the latest machine, a battery rundown test was conducted. On a fully charged battery, the laptop machine was put on power-saving and airplane mode with all the functions disabled including Wi-Fi and balanced performance mode in order to test its battery life. To test the battery life, a video was played in a loop until the system shut down itself, keeping the brightness level at 50% and the volume at its full capacity.
The Razer Blade 15 is the best in its own lot where other machines don’t last longer than a couple of hours. It continued working for seven consecutive hours without giving any quality on audio or video hitch.
For general use, the machine is beyond perfect but it surely is your travel companion.
The Razer Blade 15 is a serious competitor and the necessary replacement for your desktop this season if you really want to have a seamless and smooth gaming experience.
The Razer Blade 15 is still one of the favorite gaming laptops among most gamers, but impressive offers from other brands may lure you to go for other gaming laptops. Considering the performance and the configuration, this gaming laptop is really unmatchable.