Is the Razer Blade 15 worth it?
Razer blade 15 base model review Yes, the Razorblade is a gaming laptop. But razor goes through painstaking effort to make sure that its flagship laptop is not just another gaming laptop. Coming back to this design in 2020, it might not be as striking as it was when it launched a couple of years ago. But spending some time with it again, I was reminded of just how much this stands out from a lot of the competition in a lot of different ways.
Razer blade 15 base model review
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Design
The design of the razor blade is more about what it avoids than what it does. And you’ll know what I mean if you set this thing next to a laptop from the predator line or the Alienware line. It’s really obvious right away this is a normal laptop for lack of a better term. And it knows the focus here is all on straight lines and simple design language it’s more in line with a MacBook than a traditional gaming laptop. There are two exceptions to that rule of course and they both involve glowing lights. You’ve got the green snake logo on the lid which still glows in the dark.
The Keyboard (razer blade 15 base model review)
And of course the RGB backlighting on the keyboard with twelve levels of brightness control and endless customization options. Razor still does RGB backlighting better than anyone else and speaking of the keyboard. Razer has finally made a design change here that I have been bothered by for years and we’re talking about the keyboard layout. They’ve finally given in and gotten rid of those full-size arrow keys and instead used kind of the typical half-size up and down arrow keys. But the result is that the shift key
The questions mark is now next to each other like a normal keyboard layout. And now I don’t have to struggle with that every single time I sit down and type at this computer. And for me, I do that all day so this was a huge huge relief and Razer does intend for you to use the blade for more than just gaming.
That’s clear it’s more than just the excellent keyboard and touchpad. What they use here it’s also just the size of the Razer Blade it only weighs four and a half pounds. And you can set this thing next to a Dell XPS 15 or a 16-inch MacBook Pro. And it fits into that same size category it has all the bells and whistles of a premium laptop. – including the IR camera above which lets, you do Windows Hello facial recognition. Even the port selection here lends itself to somebody who wants to use this laptop for more than just gaming.
Port Selection
In addition to your normal mix of USB a USB C and HDMI you also get a Thunderbolt 3 port here. And a full-size SD card slot Razer knows its target audience and obviously, that includes people who will use those types of ports daily. When it comes to performance, what you get on a spec sheet can be misleading. There’s a lot more going on here than just listing off the process or the graphics card the RAM and that kind of thing. The way that a system integrates those components can produce wildly different performance results and the razorblade is kind of an interesting example of that well let’s get this out of the way first.
Gaming With A 300Hz Display
As a gaming laptop which that’s what this is, it’s fantastic to use the new NVIDIA r-tx 2080 Super Max Q graphics card. Which is the top of the line for these thin and light gaming laptops in 2020. The super in the name of the graphics card only amounts to about 5% of an increase in performance over the previous models give or take. Depending on the game. but the gameplay experience that you get on the razorblade is as much about the screen.
As it is about the graphics card this particular unit I have here came with a 300 Hertz refresh rate screen at 1080p resolution. And even though you might like the sound of a 4k OLED panel. which razor also offers if gaming is your main prerogative. This is the one you want 300 Hertz might sound like overkill.
But it ensures that your screen will never bottleneck your GPU. And all that extra Headroom means you won’t experience all that nasty screen tearing. That you get in some gaming laptops. It’s nice to know that even lighter games like CSGO or Rocket League which cap at 250 frames per second still won’t also come close to that upper limit.
The Razer Blade kept up with B few laptops like the Acer predator Triton 500 in pretty much every game. I tested at max settings and keep in mind those are two laptops with pretty much identical components and for tonight. We’re talking about 110 frames per second. In Battlefield 598 and even 60 frames per second in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It is still sort of mind-boggling to me that a laptop this size can produce those types of frame rates.
Content Creation
So that’s gaming and the way the razor blade handles its power share between the GPU and the CPU is oriented. More towards that graphics card. It’s not to say that the razor blade isn’t a good laptop for content creation. But it does have some limitations. There this time around the razor blade gets upgraded to the 10th gen Intel Core processors. And this one, in particular, is the core 10 875 H. Which adds two extra cores and four new threads.
So now you’re up to eight cores and 16 threads ideally. That would give you some extra performance for things like video editing photography any kind of content creation. Applications that can use those extra cores and in case you’re curious about games. Nowadays can’t use those extra cores all that much.
However, we have some new consoles coming up. And that could end up changing the way games use extra cores in the processor. so one like this actually might be pretty dominant in the future. But right now you’re not gonna see much of a difference between this and the six-core processor from last year. But back to video editing, the razorblade is not a bad little machine at that type of task. It’s just that there are some better options out there these days like the laptop.
I recently reviewed the Dell XPS 17. Even though it only has an RT X 2060, there’s more going on here than just from the spec sheet. Because that’s able to tap into that GPU a lot more in applications like Adobe Premiere. So just because you read r-tx 2080 supermax cube, that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is going to perform a lot better than something like a Dell XPS 15. The same goes for the display.
Honestly, I already talked about how great it is for gaming with that high refresh rate. But the fact that it’s matte 1080p like it’s not ideal for the type of content creation tasks. That you might want to do with it, the contrast is pretty good, and everything looks beautiful on it. But if you wish to that broader color gamut, you’re going to have to jump up to the 4k OLED version of the razor blade.
Airflow
Now that this particular design is beginning to show its age a little bit. I do have a lot of things I’d like to see improved in the future. The first has to do with airflow now razor works hard to make sure there’s some poke hold all over the chassis and put vents in every possible area. I get it. It’s not what this design is going for in terms of looks. Still, the result is that the razor blade is a little bit warmer than I’d like it to be I expect warmer surface temperatures.
when I’m doing something like gaming. But I found that even when I’m just kind of doing a lighter workload in Chrome. The surface temperatures and the polymerase and the keyboard are just kind of uncomfortably warm. Especially if you use it for to eight hours at a time it’s a delicate balance between performance and surface temperatures. And fan noise and I still think there’s a little more work to be done here to make sure it’s balancing.
The Speakers
All those things correctly, and then there are the speakers there okay. They’re located right here on the keyboard. Deck pointed up like this should be but the quality is just not there. The bass is missing, and you compare this to pretty much any MacBook. it’s just a world of difference.
Price
Lastly, it’s not cheap this unit here costs 3000$. That’s three grand but of course, what you get is a full terabyte of SSD storage and 16 gigabytes of RAM. And all those powerful other components. but you’re still gonna be at least three or four hundred dollars more than a lot of the competition.
That has those same components and results in a pretty similar performance. A good example is the predator Trident 500. That I mentioned earlier and that one even comes with double the RAM. Razor also offers several cheaper models. They call these the base Edition and this is a slightly thicker chassis but it only starts at $1,600. And then it does get you a 144 Hertz. Refresh rate no matter what model you get the competition at that price.
I’m really across the board is still really tight. However, honestly, the razorblade is still a trailblazing gaming laptop. I think it’s changed the way we perceive gaming gear or any technology. That is used correctly for PC gaming.
I don’t think I’m alone in that. I don’t want my laptop that spends thousands of dollars. Not also to be able to function as just a standard laptop. And that’s a pretty huge thing to demand. Considering how much horsepower you need to power modern games at reasonable frame rates. The razorblade is still the laptop that does that best. Hopefully, you got an entire Razer blade 15 base model review.
