Razer Blade 15
A superb al all-rounder thanks to balanced performance – and an ab absolute beauty of a screen
SCORE
PRICE £1,875 (£2 (£2,250 inc VAT) ) from ebuyer.com
Razer’s Blade laptops were instrumental in transforming the gaming laptop from a hulking desktop replacement into today’s more desirable slim and light machines. So desirable and practical, in fact, that they’ve started crossing over into the professional and creative markets too. These days, the range covers everything from 13in ultraportables to the workstation-class Studio Edition models with Core i7 processors and Nvidia Quadro graphics. And sitting somewhere in the middle we have this Razer Blade 15 model, which is based around the eight-core Core i7-10875H, a GeForce RTX 2070 Super GPU and a fantastic 4K OLED screen.
It’s an impressive piece of hardware, and while there are traces of its gaming heritage in the RGB-backlit keyboard, the design still looks elegant, streamlined and restrained. The aluminium chassis gives it weight – it’s just over the 2kg mark – but also a durable, solid feel. There’s space for a good array of ports, including three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports and two USB-C – one of which supports Thunderbolt 3 – along with an SD card reader and a 4K-capable HDMI 2.0b output. Whether you’re a hardcore gamer or a creative professional, you’ve got everything you need.
The screen, meanwhile, is simply awesome. It covers 100% of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, as well as 96% of Adobe RGB, and while colour accuracy isn’t perfect – we measured an average Delta E of 3.25 – it’s good enough for all bar the most criticalcolour work. Maybe more importantly for most people, it’s very, very bright indeed, with a maximum luminance of 432cd/m2. This and the perfect blacks you get from OLED make sure that it delivers one of the most convincing renditions of HDR we’ve seen from a laptop, with a richness and vibrancy to the colours that standard LCD screens just can’t match. If you’re working on HDR content, it’s very hard to come back from this screen. In fact, much the same goes when you’re watching it. We do have one small niggle here, though. When you turn Windows HDR support for streaming video on, there’s a weird quirk where the pointer turns near-transparent and becomes nigh-impossible to see.
Razer picks up further points for not messing up the fundamentals. The touchpad is massive and unerringly responsive, to the extent that this is one of the few creative laptops you could get some work done without wishing instantly that you’d brought a mouse with you (although you still know you’d be working more efficiently if you had). The keyboard, nestled between two wide speaker grills, has a smart, spacious layout and a crisp action, albeit on the shallow side. Even the audio is up to par, with more depth, presence and dynamic range than nearly every other laptop in this test this month can muster. We’ll say it again: this is a great laptop for watching or creating movies.
But does it have the power? Well, while the Razer Blade 15 isn’t in the same league as either the Chillblast or Gigabyte laptops, it’s not too far behind, with strong results in CPUintensive tests such as Cinebench and very respectable scores in the more GPU-heavy 3D rendering and video-editing benchmarks, where it creeps ahead of the similarly specified PC Specialist by virtue of its superior RTX chip. It also runs a little quieter than the competition, thanks to an effective thermal design that makes the most of a custom vapour chamber, clever use of materials and some hefty cooling fans.
Given the specification and the OLED screen, you might not expect much in the way of battery life, but the Razer managed a credible 6hrs 38mins in our video-rundown tests. More heavy-duty processing would bring that down massively, so don’t expect to work all day away from a wall socket, but for light work or entertainment you’ll be fine.
There are other laptops in this Labs with more CPU and GPU horsepower, but we like the Razer’s balance of performance, ergonomics and design – not to mention its excellent screen. It loses out on the top award by a whisker, but we would put it high on any shortlist.