Razer Blade 15
It’s time to get creative.
The Razer Blade laptops are all pretty darn sweet-looking machines. Sleek black laptops with perfectly designed keyboards and tiny screen bezels, and powerful internal hardware to boot. The Blade 15’s new Studio Edition is no exception: a ninth-gen Intel
Core i7 processor along with a Quadro RTX 5000 GPU, crammed into an impressively slender chassis, carved from a single block of aluminum. This laptop ditches the usual black-andgreen aesthetics of the Blade series, though, instead opting for a more professional silver finish.
This Blade feels like a staging ground for turning a great gaming laptop into a great content-creation laptop. A high-end graphics card and fully addressable RGB-lit keyboard can still scratch the gamer itch, while plenty of RAM and a large 4K touch display mean that this laptop is well situated to handle video editing and graphic design tasks.
Our review model of the Blade 15 Studio Edition comes with a 15.6-inch 4K display at a 60Hz refresh rate. That refresh rate might be rather unexciting, but this OLED panel brings high brightness and dazzlingly good color that looks great even in well-lit environments. Touch control is a nice bonus for creatives who enjoy quick fingertip navigation, although the potential for fingerprintrelated troubles is high, and the Blade 15 SE doesn’t come with a stylus of any sort to avoid such woes.
Physical connectivity is a winning aspect here – three standard USB ports are joined by a Thunderbolt 3-enabled USB-C port, Thunderbolt 2 port, and an HDMI port, perfect for connecting extra monitors for workstation tasks. Using the Blade 15 SE as a desktop replacement is definitely viable, as high-powered laptops like this typically chew through battery. However, the battery life is impressive for a workstation laptop; around four to five hours of use, depending on software and brightness. The lack of Gigabit Ethernet is a shame, but not a deal-breaker.
The main downside of the Blade 15 SE isn’t the battery or ports, then, but the lack of a Core i9 CPU. The i7-9750H at the heart of this is perfectly competent, but it’s not exactly groundbreaking, and it weakens the potential of this system for CPU-intensive tasks. This laptop already has an upsetting price point; Razer could have sprung for a superior CPU.
In fairness, this system is focused on creativity, not number-crunching. The rest of the internal components do the job; a high-speed 1TB SSD and 32GB of memory are good to see, with that Nvidia Quadro GPU pulling its weight in a big way. All that hardware generates a lot of heat, though, and the Blade 15 SE’s twin fans clearly struggle to deal with it. The laptop gets uncomfortably hot after extended use, even with adequate clearance underneath it for airflow.
The external design is, of course, stunning. The trackpad is large, central, and easy to use, and that keyboard isn’t just illuminated by customisable
RGB effects – it’s very satisfying under your fingertips, with nice large keys and reasonable travel for such a slim laptop. It actually looks a little small at first glance, but that’s just because of this 15-inch machine’s large form factor and flanking speakers, which can pump out music at an impressive volume.
Lastly, we must bring ourselves to address that most divisive of subjects: pricing. The Blade 15 SE costs a tidy $6,999. Yes, it’s expensive, but the high-end studio GPU and cutting-edge design mean that it’s certainly not bad value for money. Cheaper versions are available, too, if you’re willing to dial it back with the GPU – a GTX 1660 Ti model with a 1080p screen is far less troubling to your bank balance. Ultimately, the Blade 15 Studio Edition is pretty awesome; pricey, sure, but still awesome. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got to make some phone calls to Razer PR to explain why we deserve to keep it.
Awesome screen; great chassis design; very solid performance. Runs hot; expensive; CPU is a little limited.
Christian Guyton
A high-end graphics card and fully addressable RGB-lit keyboard can still scratch the gamer itch, while plenty of RAM and a large 4K touch display mean that this laptop is well situated to handle video editing and graphic design tasks.