Razer Blade 15

Razer’s laptop is cutting edge

There are ‘gaming’ laptops that look like a Transformer, weigh more than a wheelie bin and have the battery capacity of a musical birthday card, and then there are Razer’s Blades. This one isn’t as compact as the 12.5in Stealth (see our review, Issue 493), but it’s strikingly slender considering its 15.6in screen, full-size Rgb-backlit keyboard and glass touchpad. d.

The bezels are so narrow that the whole thing is no bigger than the previous 14in model. And apart from a discreet illuminated logo on the lid, there’s nothing to make you feel self-conscious if you’re not, in fact, a gaming obsessive but just want a no-compromise PC to carry around.

It’s not surprising that a laptop with a top-end processor and graphics card would cost over two grand, but in fact the Razer Blade 15 starts at £1,700, which gets you a six- core i7-8750h processor from Intel’s latest range, a 6GB GTX 1060 graphics card in Nvidia’s heat-limiting Max-q version, a 256GB SSD and a generous 16GB of memory. Naturally, the configuration Razer sent us was the fanciest, with an 8GB GTX 1070 and 512GB SSD, at £2,330. By the time you read this, an even pricier 4K touchscreen model should be available.

The standard display is 1080p Full HD, chosen to avoid wasting processing power on a sharper picture when it could be making things go faster. That makes sense for gamers, less so if you’re using the graphics card to accelerate something like video effects, where screen resolution isn’t related to how many pixels you’re rendering. But the 144Hz refresh rate makes all software feel extra responsive, and although our colour meter readings of 90 per cent SRGB with a Delta E of 2.16 won’t excite graphics professionals, they’re good enough for most jobs.

Our speed tests confirmed that this is about the fastest laptop we’ve ever tested, and easily the fastest at this size, no doubt helped along by Razer’s clever air flow design. Both the i7 and the GTX are slower than desktop PC components, and you could buy more performance in a tower, with a decent monitor, for less money. But you couldn’t take it to the coffee shop and use it for seven hours and seven minutes without a power socket, which is how long our video-playback test took to drain the Razer Blade 15. Although it won’t last as long for heavy work, this is a superbly practical system.

The fastest laptop we’ve ever tested, making software feel extra responsive