Razer Blade 18
The leading gaming ultrabook maker releases a giant 18-inch gaming laptop, but is it a beauty, or just a beast?
$7,999 | razer.com/au-en
If you’re a fan of desktop-replacing gaming laptops, then 2023 is the year of your dreams, with a range of manufacturers producing 18-inch monster workstations like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 that we covered in the last issue (APC 521, p36). The next colossus to enter the ring is the Blade 18 from Razer. For the most part this device offers an almost identical set of specs to the Asus offering, but it’s described by Razer to be just 2.19cm thick – almost a whole centimetre thinner than the ROG Strix Scar 18’s 3.1cm thick chassis. This is an impressive feat of engineering, but it’s perhaps not the whole truth since while the chassis is around 2.2cm thick if you decide to strategically omit the device’s feet, it sits closer to 2.6cm off a table when closed which makes it feel not as different to the Scar 18 as it looks on paper. The other caveat is that this compressed chassis also unfortunately impacts overall performance.
The Blade 18 that we tested came with an Intel Core i9-13950HX CPU, 32GB of RAM and a 175W Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 with a manufacturer RRP of $8,499. Now, we have seen this device going for $7,999 from third-party retailers, but even this discounted offering is more expensive than the $7,499 Strix Scar 18. This price difference might be justified by the additional engineering involved in making the Blade 18 thinner, but only if the Asus device didn’t have a higher clocked i9-13980HX CPU included in that equation. The Blade 18 with an i9-13980HX actually retails for $9,399… so if you have your heart set on the Blade, be prepared to pay a lot more for it.
There’s no doubt that people would prefer a gaming laptop that is extra portable, but for the segment going for the extra large 18-inch form factor, we suspect that portability is going to take a back seat to performance and gaming experience. Sure, there will always be customers for whom price is not a predominant factor, but unfortunately the Razer Blade 18’s performance was well behind the Strix Scar 18 too. For general work tasks it was similar, but for CPU specific multi-threaded tasks the device was up to 45-percent behind when using a balanced power mode.
After swapping to performance mode and running the Razer Cortex boost feature, which does things like disable CPU sleep mode and stop automatic updates, you can get these scores up to within 10 percent of the Strix Scar 18, but the Blade 18’s fans kick up quickly and run loudly in order to achieve these performances. We also usually only test machines in their standard balanced mode, so the Strix Scar 18 could in fact offer much better performance if all parameters are consistent.
The Blade 18 uses the same 18-inch 240Hz, G-Sync compatible, DCI-P3 QHD-plus display, which is a good balance of resolution and speed that’ll look great in a wide variety of gaming styles. Battery life was a little shy of 3 hours in 1080p movie playback, but it only lasted 1.5 hours in our Home Office test which means there’s room for improvement in light work optimisation.
A large-format gaming PC that sacrifices performance and adds fan noise for a thinner chassis.
Joel Burgess
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