Razer Blade (2018) review: Looking sharper than ever before

A machined aluminum beauty

Razer is back with a new Blade laptop, and it’s the company’s best looking machine yet. The 2018 Razer Blade is milled from a single block of aluminum, and the result is a sleek, dusky beauty that you can use for both work and play.

It’s subtle and understated in a way that few gaming laptops are, and save for the illuminated triple-headed snake logo on the lid and the RGB backlit (both of which can be turned off), this could easily be mistaken for a business notebook. The new Razer Blade also represents a new design direction for Razer, with small refinements that make the laptop feel like a truly new machine compared to its predecessors.

The hottest trend in the gaming notebook space right now is probably the push toward ultra-slim bezels (such as MSI's and Gigabyte's attempt among others), which the 2018 Blade embraces that with gusto. One of my main complaints with Razer’s Blade laptops, including the Blade Stealth ultrabook, has been their thick bezels, so this year’s design refresh could not have been more welcome.

The other major change in the Blade’s design language comes in the form of a more angular and blocky look that is reminiscent of the Razer Phone. When set beside the older 14-inch Razer Blade and its rounded corners, there’s no doubt that the sharper edges on the new Blade give it a more modern feel.

However, Razer says that this sharper (literally) look is also a result of the exigencies of a more compact design. This is because the more squared-off corners allow Razer to push components further to the edge of the chassis, making additional room for things like a larger battery and a more spacious component layout.

The efficient use of space is important because Razer has put a heavy emphasis reducing the space footprint of the new Blade, so this is one of those 15.6-inch laptops that are closer in size to their 14-inch counterparts.

Here’s an overview of the Blade’s specifications:

• 15.6-inch 1,920 x 1,080-pixel 144Hz IPS display
• Intel Core i7-8750H (2.2GHz, 9MB L3 cache)
• 16GB dual-channel DDR4-2667 RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q
• 512GB PCIe M.2 SSD
• 355 x 235 x 17.3mm
• 2.1kg

This is the top configuration you can get locally, and it’ll cost you a hefty S$3,899.

Is it worth its price? Read on as we take a closer look at what Razer is offering in the following pages.

Suitable for both work and play

Razer has checked many of the right boxes with its newest Blade laptop. It comes with many of the features that you’d expect from a machine released in 2018, and it’s perfectly in sync with the latest trends in laptop design.

I’m of course talking about slim, light machines with thin bezels, and sometimes, butter-smooth 144Hz panels. The latter is really one of the best features of the laptop, and it’s impossible to overstate how much of a difference it makes in your gaming experience.

These high refresh rate panels are only now becoming more common among gaming laptops, and they play a singular role in closing the gap between a laptop and desktop experience. Compared to a regular 60Hz screen, even the smallest things like mouse movements or dragging a window across the screen feel markedly smoother.

In game, the difference is even more palpable, and it’s noticeably easier to aim, flick, and react in every firefight. If you’re going to make a gaming laptop your main gaming machine in 2018, a 144Hz display should be one of the key features you look out for.

But the refresh rate aside, image quality on the Blade’s 1,920 x 1,080-pixel IPS display is also top-notch. Colors really popped for me, and the slim bezels created a more expansive and immersive experience that has been sorely lacking on Razer laptops before this one. Viewing angles were also excellent, as expected of an IPS panel, while the matte finish helps to dull reflections.

However, I found myself running it at 100 per cent brightness most of the time, so it feels like it could do with a brightness boost.

The screen's top bezel is also markedly thicker than those at the left and right, but it does mean that there’s still room for a webcam there. In the quest for ever slimmer bezels, many manufacturers have had to compromise and relocate the webcam to the bottom bezel, which gives rise to some seriously unflattering camera angles.

If you ask me, a marginally thicker top bezel is a small price to play for a more functional design.

The RGB backlit keyboard is powered by Razer’s Chroma software, and the lighting is bright and even and very pretty to look at. The Chroma configurator provides extensive per-key customization options, and you’ll have a field day tweaking it to suit your preferences.

Another thing I really like is the larger than average Windows Precision Touchpad. At 130 x 80mm, the bigger touchpad complements the notebook’s design quite well (it might’ve looked a little bare otherwise), and the larger area obviously provides more usable space and improves the overall experience. The glass-topped touchpad is super smooth, precise, and responsive, with good feedback for the integrated left- and right-click buttons.

However, while the keyboard itself serves up a decent typing experience, but I’d still characterize the key travel distance as still feeling a little shallow. Furthermore, the layout has one oddity where the right Shift is located next to the top arrow key instead of the question mark, which takes some getting used to. 

Two speaker grilles flank the keyboard, and they pump out loud audio that’s plenty serviceable. The speaker placement is also the reason why the Blade doesn’t include a number pad, unlike something like the Gigabyte Aero 15X that squeezes a full-sized keyboard onto its relatively svelte body.

Personally, I prefer Razer’s approach as it means that I’m able to type with both hands centered above the keyboard. If Razer had tried to squeeze a full-sized keyboard with a number pad here, the default typing position would then shift to the left, and I find this off-center positioning uncomfortable.

The power button is nestled on the right speaker grille, so the area above the keyboard remains undisturbed. This is a small detail, but I find that it only adds to the laptop’s minimalist appeal. However, while the power button looks like it's also in the perfect position to act as a fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello, that feature is unfortunately still not present. 

The laptop comes with three USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type-A, one Thunderbolt 3, one HDMI 2.0b, and one Mini DisplayPort 1.4 output. This should have most folks covered, but it'd have been nice to see an SD card slot for creative types. However, Razer isn't using the Thunderbolt 3 port for power, and it has its own proprietary charging connector that supplies the requisite 230W to a notebook built-in with the GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics engine (USB-C PD only supports up to 100W).

As with all slim designs, cooling is a concern, and Razer says the Blade utilizes vapor chamber technology to keep the laptop cool instead of more conventional heat pipes. It uses this for both the CPU and GPU, and the vacuum-sealed vaporized liquid helps dissipate heat from the other components as well.

Dual 44-blade fans then push air through their respective heat sinks to expel heat. To further help with heat transfer, Razer has packed in a 68-fin heat exchanger with fins that measure just 0.1mm thick, the better to maximize the surface area available.

The vapor chamber design also covers more area and components than the previous heat pipe-based design, and Razer credits this with helping it achieve even thinner dimensions than before.

The company worked hard to optimize the design as well, citing the use of new materials to block heat in strategic places and transfer heat more efficiently with better graphite-based thermal interfaces. For instance, the Blade uses a special nanoparticle layer between the keyboard and the internal components to block heat transfer to areas that the user touches most often, such as the palm rests.

That sounds nice in theory, but this is sweltering Singapore, and if you end up gaming without any air conditioning both palm rests can get piping hot, to the point that it's uncomfortable to rest your palms on the laptop. 

This can be mitigated somewhat using the Synapse app, which lets you increase fan speeds up to 6,000RPM, but this obviously results in a lot more noise. In addition, there's a dedicated Gaming mode you can select for a slight boost in performance.

That aside, one of the best things about the Blade is probably how good it feels in hand. This is one solid and impeccably put together laptop, and it really feels like you’re picking up a block of metal (well, because you are). There’s barely any perceptible flex to it, and the build quality here is really top-notch.

At 17.3mm thick, this is one of the thinnest 15.6-inch gaming laptops out there, and it’s even slimmer than the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin. However, I’d stop short of calling it an ultra-portable, as it’s not that light at 2.1kg (for which, the MSI counterpart is much lighter). It’s good for short trips out, but you won’t want to be lugging this around in your backpack the entire day.

Don't get us wrong. The notebook is certainly a great a workhorse and gaming companion - something which might have been a lot larger and heavier just a couple of years back. Technology has progressed plenty and the new Razer Blade is approaching what used to be termed as ultra-portable class (typically laptops that are 2kg or less). Today however, most real ultraportables are laptops that weigh 1.3kg or less. As such, our comment above is merely in the context of what defines an ultraportable these days.

Test setup and performance

Here’s a full list of the notebooks we’re looking at:

• Razer Blade (2018)
• Gigabyte Aero 15X (Core i7-8750H)
• Gigabyte Aero 15X (Core i7-7700HQ)
• Aftershock PRIME-15

The Gigabyte Aero 15X (Core i7-7700HQ) and Aftershock PRIME-15 were chosen because they share very similar specifications with the Razer Blade. With the exception of the processor, the notebooks are equipped with the same GPU and memory configuration, so this comparison should clearly highlight the performance boost you're getting from the new 8th-generation hexa-core chip. 

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We ran the notebooks through the following benchmarks:

• PCMark 10
• 3DMark
• VRMark
• Ashes of the Singularity
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Tom Clancy’s The Division

PCMark 10 Extended

PCMark 10 Extended assesses the performance of systems in a variety of workloads, including basic computing tasks, productivity applications, digital content creation, and gaming. Compared to PCMark 8, it also adds in new test metrics, such as app startup times, which quantifies how long it takes to launch a variety of real-world apps, and a rendering and visualization workload to simulate professional graphics and engineering applications. In addition, existing workloads have been updated to reflect modern usage.

Unsurprisingly, the 6-core/12-thread Intel Core i7-8750H processor helped the Razer Blade push ahead here. However, the 8th-generation Intel processors don't actually represent that large of a performance upgrade in terms of basic productivity applications.

It was a mere 2 per cent faster than the Aftershock PRIME-15 and its 7th-generation Core i7-7700HQ chip, and a look at the score breakdown even shows it lagging behind in the Productivity tests. The greatest performance advantage manifested in the Gaming benchmarks, where the Razer Blade gained just under a 9 per cent lead over the Aftershock PRIME-15.

3DMark

3DMark is a more relevant assessment of gaming performance, and it puts the system through a range of graphics and computational performance tests at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K.

The Razer Blade was roughly 8 per cent quicker than the notebooks equipped with the 7th-generation Intel processors across the board. That's a modest improvement, although not one that would necessarily justify an upgrade from a 7th-generation processor.

VRMark

Futuremark’s VRMark benchmark is designed to assess a PC’s ability to handle high-performance headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. If a PC passes the Orange Room test, it is ready for the latter two systems. The benchmark also has a target frame rate of 109FPS, and I've included the average FPS each notebook managed to provide a clearer measure of their respective performance. 

The way things look, VRMark still places a greater emphasis on higher single-core clock speeds and isn't quite able to fully utilize hexa-core Core i7-8750H. The latter has a 2.2GHz base clock and maximum turbo frequency of 4.1GHz, compared to the 2.8GHz base clock and 3.8GHz boost clock of the Core i7-7700HQ.

While the 8th-generation Coffee Lake processor has a higher turbo boost frequency, it seems like that couldn't make up for the considerably lower base clock.

While the Razer Blade still passed the test handily, it was still around 17 per cent slower than last year's Gigabyte Aero 15X.

Ashes of the Singularity

Ashes of the Singularity is a demanding real-time strategy game that puts thousands of units on screen, and it’s capable of pushing even the most powerful GPUs.

The hexa-core processor on the Razer Blade didn't help it here, and performance was virtually indistinguishable from the notebooks with the 7th-generation quad-core chips. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Mankind Divided is one of the most demanding titles to run today, but the Razer Blade is more than capable of delivering a playable experience. 

That said, the 8th-generation chip nets you only slightly better performance than its 7th-generation counterpart. In fact, the Razer Blade was a mere 3 per cent faster than the Aftershock PRIME-15 at High settings. 

Tom Clancy's The Division

The Division isn’t as demanding to run as Ashes of the Singularity or Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but its Snowdrop engine can still stress cards with the use of dynamic lighting and the like.

The performance jump was similarly minuscule here, and the Razer Blade was just 2.5 per cent faster than the Core i7-7700HQ-equipped Gigabyte Aero 15X. 

Temperature, battery life, & portability

Temperature

I measured the external temperatures of the four quadrants of the notebook after 40 loops of 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme stress test. This amount of time is more than enough to get an idea of your average maximum running temperature for this workload.

CPU and GPU temperatures were in line with expectations, and were actually slightly better than the competition. Similarly, surface temperatures appear quite comfortable, but these measurements were taken in an air-conditioned environment, and as I noted earlier, the palm rests can still get quite hot when the AC isn't running. 

Battery life and power consumption

I used the built-in battery life benchmark in PCMark 8 Home to assess the battery life on the laptops. Ultimately, the large 80Wh battery on the Razer Blade means it can spend a decent amount of time away from a power outlet, but it was still outdone by the even larger 94.24Wh battery on the Gigabyte Aero 15X. 

However, it's still miles ahead of most of the competition, so I'd consider this a fairly good showing overall. 

Portability

The portability index is an objective measure of how portable a notebook is, taking into account factors like size, weight, and battery life.

With such svelte dimensions and decent battery life, the Razer Blade is without doubt one of the more portable gaming notebooks you can buy. The Gigabyte Aero 15X may still come out ahead thanks to its particularly outstanding battery performance and slightly lighter weight, but the Blade is definitely no slouch in this department. 

It's not often you see a gaming laptop that can be feasibly used away from a power socket, so it's nice to see Razer paying attention to this area. 

Razer’s best Blade yet

The 2018 Razer Blade is Razer's most refined laptop yet. It's not revolutionary, and lacks any particularly novel features such as a second screen, but that may just be what makes it so good. This seems especially significant, given that the very first Razer Blade that the company announced in 2012 featured a trackpad that doubled as a secondary display and 10 additional buttons with customizable icons. 

Six years on, and Razer is going back to the basics with its 15.6-inch Blade laptop. Yes, the 17.3-inch Razer Blade Pro (which is also more accurately the spiritual successor to the first Razer Blade) still has its trackpad located to the right of the keyboard, but it no longer has a second screen either. 

I like this shift toward simpler and more elegant designs, which is also why I think Lenovo has the right idea with its more mature-looking Legion laptops. 

Razer says the 15.6-inch Blade is intended to replace the 14-inch model, and it's not difficult to see why. It crams a larger and better display into a body that isn't that much larger (it's only a centimeter longer and is a hair thinner), while beefing up the system's specifications considerably. 

The six-core Core i7-8750H (2.2GHz, 9MB L3 cache) and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q can handle pretty much any game at 1080p, while the display's 144Hz refresh rate ensures an ultra smooth experience throughout. It's also worth pointing out that its Max-Q GPU appears to give up less in terms of performance than the similarly configured Gigabyte Aero 15X, so that's another point in its favor.

The new Razer Blade is fast, compact, and gorgeous-looking, which helps it stand out from the crowd. This is simply a very well-built machine, and its all-metal ebony body feels impeccable and is truly one of the best things about the laptop. It's sleek and understated, but you still get an excellent RGB backlighting system on the keyboard if that sort of thing matters to you.

This is one of the few gaming laptops that can also double as a work machine, thanks to its tasteful design, good battery life, and excellent trackpad. It's pricey at S$3,899, but I'd argue that the price is quite justified given what it offers. If you're looking for your next gaming laptop, this laptop deserves to be near the top of your list.

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