Razer Blade 15 (2019)
The new Blade 15 is compact and packed with powerful components, but rivals have caught up with Razer
SCORE
PRICE £2,400 (£2,880 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/300razer
In 2018, the portable and powerful Razer Blade 15 was the best all-round gaming laptop on the market. That was then, though. In the year since its release, competing laptops have emerged from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and others. Despite the previous Blade 15’s brilliance, it can’t match those recent rivals for gaming capability.
Good thing there’s a new one, then. Admittedly, it doesn’t look much different, but that means it’s incredibly compact for the specification inside: at 355 x 235 x 17.8mm (WDH) and 2.21kg, it’s the only 15in gaming laptop I’ve reviewed that I can fit into the laptop sleeve I bought for my 15in MacBook Pro. Then there’s the sleek matte black chassis, which is made entirely of aluminium. My only criticism is that the black anodised finish picks up fingerprints like crazy.
Despite incredibly thin bezels, Razer finds space to embed a Full HD camera at the top. A pair of upward facing stereo speakers sit either side of the keyboard, but sound is no match for the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502 ( see p54); for gaming, you’ll want a decent headset.
There’s an adequate selection of ports on the Blade 15, though (understandably) fewer than on larger, thicker rivals. Two USB-A ports sit on the left edge, nestled between a 3.5mm combo jack and, towards the back, a proprietary power input. On the right edge, you’ll find a third USB-A port, Thunderbolt 3 USB-C, an HDMI 2.0b output and a mini-DisplayPort.
If you want a Gigabit Ethernet jack then you’ll need to buy the Base Model of the Razer Blade 15. These start at £1,480 but only include a 60Hz Full HD display, along with lesser specs. In contrast, the Advanced Model reviewed here includes a 240Hz Full HD display, Intel’s ninth-generation Intel Core i7-9750H and 16GB of RAM. Note it includes two SODIMM slots that can hold 32GB each, so you could bring that up to a whopping 64GB.
It’s also a graphics powerhouse, thanks to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q: a slimmed down version of the standard mobile RTX 2080 I tested inside the £4,000 Alienware Area51m ( pcpro.link/300alien). The Blade 15 uses Nvidia’s Optimus technology, which switches between the iGPU and dGPU to prioritise either performance or power efficiency.
“Even when playing games for hours, the CPU’s individual cores never exceeded 72°C – well clear of throttling territory”
Stay cool
I expected the Blade 15 to run hot given its slimline chassis and powerful specs, but even when playing games for hours, the CPU’s individual cores never exceeded 72°C – well clear of throttling territory. The most heat-prone area of the chassis is the underside of the base, around the middle. Using an IR thermometer, I clocked a maximum temperature of 42°C, which isn’t bad.
It stays chilled by using a complex cooling system comprised of two “custom” 44-blade fans, a vapour chamber, graphite-based thermal plates and 68 heat fins. When performing basic daily tasks it really is as “whisper-quiet” as Razer claims. But with increased demand comes increased noise as the fans fight to keep the internals cool.
Razer’s Synapse software lets you fiddle with system controls and you can boost the CPU and GPU into performance modes. As for the fan setting, I’d recommend going for Auto (Default), which only ramps up the fans when required. That said, I set the fan speed to high while running our benchmarks to squeeze out every last drop of performance. And it’s much faster than last year’s model. This boost is mostly down to its high-powered processor, the new octa-core Intel Core i79750H. Working alongside that 16GB of RAM, the i7-9750H produces exceptional results that cruised past the speeds achieved by the 2018 Blade 15, which used an i7-8750H and equivalent RAM.
You can see how the 2019 Blade 15 fares compared to its rivals in the charts opposite. It’s a big boost over the old Razer Blade, but notably it couldn’t match the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502, Alienware m15 or the Acer Predator Helios 500 – admittedly the former has double the RAM and the latter uses a highpowered Intel Core i9 CPU.
Where the new Blade 15 excels is gaming. This is the first laptop I’ve tested that uses an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU, and it puts its 240Hz display to good use. In the GFXBench Car Chase test, the Blade 15 maintained an average onscreen frame rate of 204fps, a stunning
result that’s second only to
the 224fps of the Asus ROG Strix Scar III (the other 240Hz laptop I’ve tested). The Scar III includes an i9-9880H CPU and 32GB RAM, though its RTX 2070 GPU isn’t quite equal to the 2080 Max-Q in the Blade 15.
Impressively, the Razer Blade 15 managed to pip the Scar III in the more demanding 1080p Metro: Last
Light test, clocking an average of 146fps. That’s bang-on equal to the Acer Predator Helios 500, a larger laptop with a far more powerful CPU, but again the Asus Zephyrus had the advantage – here its greater cooling ability was almost certainly the key.
New to the PC Pro suite of gaming tests, the 1080p Hitman 2 Mumbai benchmark (High settings with 2x supersampling) is one of the most gruelling graphics tests out there. Still, it came as a surprise that the Blade 15 only managed an average frame rate of 8.5fps. That’s marginally better than the Asus Zephyrus, which managed 7.8fps. By dropping all the graphics settings to medium and lowering from DirectX 12 to the DirectX 11 API, I could get the Hitman
2 Mumbai benchmark to average out at just over 60fps.
The Blade 15’s storage speed is outstanding. In the AS SSD benchmark, its 512GB PCIe SSD hit read (or open) speeds of 2,339MB/sec in our sequential file transfer tests and write (or save) speeds of 1,801MB/sec. My only quibble is the lack of space: 512GB isn’t much room for a gaming library in a world where games can be as large as 100GB. The Base Model of the new Blade 15 offers a dual-storage option that comes with a 2TB hard disk in addition to an SSD, but the Advanced Model is capped to the single storage slot.
Having achieved such great results in every other area of performance, there had to be a catch. The weak link in the chain, it turns out, is battery life. In our standardised battery rundown benchmark, the Blade 15’s 80.2Wh battery petered out after a mere 1hr 51mins of playback. That’s an appalling result. Even the Acer Predator Helios 500, with its Galactus-esque power demands, managed to pass the two-hour mark. And last year’s Blade 15 went for 7hrs 7mins under the same conditions.
240Hz of goodness
Now we come to another crowning glory: that display. This model’s 15.6in IPS panel has a refresh rate of 240Hz and represents a step up in overall quality compared to its predecessor. It covers 93.4% the sRGB gamut and produces an sRGB gamut volume of 106%, meaning that it has a solid crossover with the sRGB colour space used by all web content and almost all PC apps. Colour accuracy is also better than the last Razer Blade at an average Delta E of 1.78.
A 303cd/m2 maximum brightness is usable inside, and note the matte finish reduces glare from overhead lighting. You just won’t want to take it outside. I measured contrast ratio at 1,128:1, a strong result that ensures images onscreen look vivid, with plenty of pop between light and dark.
I’m less enamoured with the keyboard, which has been tweaked since last year. First of all, Razer has enlarged the Enter key, making it easier to press than it was on the 2018 edition. This results in the relocation or shrinking of other keys, such as the left Shift button, which is now halfsized. And there’s still a secondary Fn key placed alongside the arrow keys, which can and does result in repeated accidental presses. It’s a small annoyance that crops up all too often.
Even more annoying is the lack of symbol lighting on keys. None of the keys’ secondary functions are backlit despite Razer’s product page stating that they have LED lighting. Apparently, the US models have the backlighting, as advertised. The UK version does still have per-key RGB lighting, a feature that’s dizzyingly customisable in Chrome Studio within Razer Synapse.
The touchpad is huge and lovely to use – other manufacturers could learn a thing or two from Razer. On certain Asus ROG gaming laptops the touchpad is shunted over to the side, and on the Alienware Area-51m (a 17in behemoth) the trackpad is laughably small. Sensitivity and accuracy on the Blade 15’s touchpad are top-notch, but make sure that sensitivity isn’t set to high as this prevents palm-rejection from working properly.
Still the best gaming laptop?
Although the new Blade 15 is better than last year’s iteration in almost every capacity, it isn’t definitively the best gaming laptop you can buy. It wins in some areas: it looks gorgeous and it’s as sleek and portable as ever. Yet, it doesn’t represent great value for money: the Alienware m15 and Asus Zephyrus offer similar power for less, and the 2018 Blade 15 was only £2,330 at the time of review.
Would I regret buying a Razer Blade 15 (2019), though? Almost certainly not. That’s because it offers a rare combination of style and substance. Despite all the power packed into its thin and light chassis, it keeps its cool to produce consistently fast results. Yes, the Razer Blade 15 is expensive, and the battery life is woeful, but everything else is simply fantastic.
SPECIFICATIONS
Hexa-core 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-9750H processor 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 with Max-Q Design graphics 15.6in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS display 16GB DDR4-2667 RAM 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD 720p IR webcam 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 Thunderbolt 3 USB-C 3 x USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 80Wh li-polymer battery 355 x 235 x 17.8mm (WDH) 2.1kg Windows 10 Home 1yr C&R warranty