RAZER Blade 15 (2018)
Still one of the most refined gaming laptops on the market.
Razer has a legacy of gaming laptops that look as sleek as any professional ultrabook that Apple can put out and this year’s Blade 15 is no different. Wrapped in a powdery space black metal chassis, the Blade 15 squeezes a vibrant 15.6-inch IPS display into a 14-inch form factor. There’s also a clear concern for craftsmanship and style with a nicely weighted keyboard that ditches the number pad for symmetrical speakers and a generous, powdery touchpad. The entry Blade 15 has a 60Hz display, Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU and a 256GB NVMe SSD, but this can be upgraded to variants with a 144Hz display and either a GTX 1070 GPU or a 512GB NVMe SSD, or both. These components are unified with 16GB of RAM and a CPU that’s pretty common among high-end gaming laptops, the Intel Core i7-8750H CPU. This configuration managed to produce a score of 1,082 on Cinebench’s Multi Threaded CPU benchmark — some 6% better than the Mid 2018 MacBook Pro (APC#460 p22) and has 4.8% on Dell’s G5 15. In gaming tests this rig was near the top with fps averages of 45.8 on Ghost Recon: Wildlands on 1080p Ultra settings. The 80.2 Wh LiPo battery lines up with MSI’s GS65 Stealth but falls short of the 94.2Wh batteries on Gigabyte’s Aero 15 (2018). At just 1.7cm thick this laptop is the slimmest gaming laptop we have on record, but at 2.15kg it’s 270g heavier than the GS65 Stealth. You’re also looking at a $600 premium on the model we tested with the identically specced GS65 Stealth and Aero 15 (2018) costing just $3,399 to the Razer Blade 15’s $3,999.