Razer Blade 15 (2018)
SMALL, SOLID AND STRONG.
JUST OVER FIVE years ago, Razer introduced the original Blade laptop. Compared to its contemporaries, it was minuscule, but gaming laptops have slimmed down since, culminating in the Max-Q design seen in the best laptops of the last year or so.
With the Blade 15, Razer has caught up with the competition in terms of what makes a great gaming laptop. Solid build, slim body, elegant design, long battery life, thin bezels, 144Hz screen, and internals powerful enough to play the latest games. That means an Intel Core i7-8750H paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q .
What sets the Blade 15 apart is the details. Its aluminium body is the most solid and flexresistant of all the laptops we’ve tested lately, and it’s the thinnest, too, by about half a millimetre. More impressive is the overall solid feel of the body, which Razer says is CNC-milled from a single block of aluminium.
Opening it up, the touchpad is larger than its peers, and the keyboard is flanked by large speakers. The keyboard, however, gave us a few problems. The keys feel good to press, for both typing and gaming; our problem came with the layout which, in addition to missing a number pad (forgivable, considering the space constraints), repositions the up-arrow key between right-shift and forward-slash. If you’re used to this setup for question marks, prepare to mess that up. Our other issue is with the touchpad — its large size caused us to accidentally tap it while typing.
Despite a slightly thinner design than its peers, the Blade 15 performs better in our gaming benchmarks. It averaged 92fps across Riseof theTombRaider’s three-part benchmark, managing 144fps in the Mountain Pass, 83fps in Syria, and 78fps in the Geothermal Valley. That’s much closer to the terrific Asus GL502VS laptop’s 99fps (powered by a standard GTX 1070) in RotTR, compared to the mid-80s scores of the GS65 and Gigabyte’s Aero 15X. TotalWar: WarhammerII and GhostRecon:Wildlands produced scores either in line with or a slight step up from the GS65 and Aero 15X — 59 and 44fps respectively — though the difference was more in the realm of 3-4 frames, instead of 10-plus.
The Blade pulls those scores off thanks to a vapour chamber cooling solution connected to the CPU and GPU. It keeps the internals from throttling under extended load, and stops the outside of the Blade getting too hot to handle during extended gaming sessions. After a lengthy stress test, we measured temperatures of around 54ºC at the hottest points — above the keyboard — but the area around the WASD keys remained in the realm of 38ºC.
The Razer Blade 15 delivers absolutely everything we want in a gaming laptop, in one of the best-designed bodies we’ve ever seen. The build quality is top-notch, and gaming performance matches. The downside, of course, is its price. The Blade 15 starts at $2,899, but that’s for a GTX 1060 Max-Q GPU and a 60Hz screen. The GTX 1070 Max-Q models, like the one we tested here, start at $3,699, with more expensive options if you want a larger SSD or a 4K panel. The Blade is probably the best-looking gaming laptop we’ve ever tested, but near-identical performance can be had from MSI’s GS65 Stealth for a few hundred dollars cheaper. It’s a nice conundrum to have, so choose your weapon wisely.