Razer Blade Pro 17 laptop
Razer’s big boy gaming laptop comes with a hefty price tag, but does it have the minerals to justify it?
The last Razer Blade Pro launched back in 2017 so this year’s update is a big step forward. The new Blade Pro 17 jumps from a 7th generation Intel Core i7 CPU to a 9th generation i7-9750H, which boosts the computer’s raw CPU performance by between 18 and 24%. This translates to a slightly more conservative improvement of between five and 18 percent in general home and work tasks, bit it’s still enough to justify the upgrade.
The GPU saw a similar generational jump with the predecessor’s Nvidia GTX 1060 and 1080 GPUs being replaced by RTX 2060, 2070 or 2080 (Max-Q) cards. Since we tested the 2017 Blade Pro
17 with a GTX 1060 and the current model we tested with an RTX 2070, a direct comparison doesn’t make much sense. The new GPU performed in line with what you’d expect from an RTX 2070 with game framerates of between 56 and 97fps on Ghost Recon: Wildlands and Middle Earth: Shadow of War respectively, using Ultra 1080p settings.
With most games averaging above 60fps on Ultra settings there’s enough grunt on this model to justify the 144Hz 17.3-inch display, but only just.
Considering this, we wouldn’t recommend getting the entry level GPU configuration, unless you only play less graphically intensive shooters or you’re willing to dial down the graphics presets for higher framerates.
Razer’s last Blade Pro 17 ditched the number pad for a trackpad that lined up with the keyboard and while the new model is still repping a tenkeyless layout, it has returned the trackpad to the less controversial centre front position. While we prefer this layout, Razer don’t seem to have expanded the keyboard size, so it is skirted by an abundance of plain metal chassis. The chunky speaker grills line up with the keyboard and provide a nice overall balance, but we can’t help but feel like Razer could’ve utilised this space in a more functional and less minimalistic way. Battery life was also disappointing at just one hour and 52 minutes for PCMark 8’s home battery benchmark and you’ll probably only get a couple more hours from sparse usage.
Since it’s not powerful enough to fully utilise the fast screen we wouldn’t recommend the entry level $4,299 Blade Pro 17, but the RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 models only come with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD and cost $500 or $1,150 more respectively – so really all three are too expensive to recommend. You can get a Gigabyte Aero 17 XA with identical specs for $1,050 less and we’ve seen MSI GS75 units with double the RAM, double the PCIe storage and an RTX 2080 going for a similar price.
“Since it’s not powerful enough to fully utilise the fast screen we wouldn’t recommend the entry level $4,299 Blade Pro 17”.