Razer Blade 18
An attractive, svelte laptop that packs a gorgeous 18in screen and the components to fully exploit it
“You soon start to take for granted having so much screen space, thinking nothing of keeping multiple windows open side-by-side”
SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £3,167 (£3,800 inc VAT) from razer.com
The Razer Blade 18 is the biggest laptop Razer has ever made, and it makes a fine argument for why you should buy a big gaming laptop. Don’t be fooled by its 21.9mm thickness, however. While the Blade 18’s streamlined aluminium chassis might remind you of a modern ultraportable, you won’t want to tote this 3.1kg beast around all day.
Thankfully, if you pull it out in a coffee shop or a classroom you won’t feel too out of place. Gaming laptops are often decked out in eye-catching designs, but the Blade 18 is low-key with a simple matte black exterior interrupted solely by a green Razer logo on the lid. Razer claims the finish has been treated with a fingerprint-resistant coating, but it’s common to find a few smudges on the Blade 18 after you’ve been using it for a while.
18in diagonal
Let’s jump straight to this laptop’s selling point: the 18in screen. It uses IPS rather than OLED technology, but with excellent colour coverage and 2,800 x 1,600 pixels, it makes an immediate impact.
What’s surprising is that once you sit down in front of the Blade 18, you quickly stop noticing the size of the screen. You soon start to take for granted having so much screen space, thinking nothing of keeping multiple windows open side-by-side, which makes the Blade 18 a nice canvas for multitasking as well as gaming.
If you’re playing fast-paced games at high frame rates, the display’s 3ms response time and 240Hz refresh rate are key features — though you can automatically limit the display’s refresh rate to 60Hz when unplugged to conserve battery.
Razer claims the display can cover up to 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, but when we got the Blade 18 into our testing lab we found the results to be 89% of the DCI-P3 gamut, albeit with an excellent average Delta-E score of 0.26. We measured an average brightness of 495cd/m2 , peaking at 513cd/m2 in the centre.
While this display isn’t as vivid or bright as the ROG Zephyrus M16 ( see p50), I think you’ll still be impressed. I enjoyed using all that screen real estate to watch The Green Knight and The Last Duel, both of which looked sharp and colour-accurate on the Blade 18’s display.
And games such as Cyberpunk 2077, A Plague Tale: Requiem and Phantom Brigade all looked spectacular.
Gaming speeds
What of frame rates? Some expectation setting is necessary. Even our high-end (though not top-of-theline) Blade 18 review unit, with its GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, Core i9-13950HX and 32GB of RAM, struggled to play the latest games at maxed-out settings. When I cranked all the graphical settings up to max in Cyberpunk 2077 (with Nvidia’s DLSS 3 disabled), it struggled to maintain 15 to 20 frames per second in outdoor areas. Dialling down the settings to Medium pushed frame rates into the low thirties, and when I then switched on DLSS it maintained a steady 30 to 40fps.
But Cyberpunk is both demanding and not yet optimised for DLSS 3.
The Blade 18 delivered better performance in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, achieving frame rates of over 60fps at native resolution with the settings cranked up. I mention Cyberpunk so you can understand that you shouldn’t expect every game you play to run at 60fps or higher with settings maxed on this laptop. It’s a beast, but it can’t deliver the same calibre of performance we expect from top-tier gaming PCs.
You can fine-tune performance by cranking the CPU and GPU to the max in the Performance Modes section of Razer Synapse. This pushed the laptop from an average of around 90fps in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to 99fps at the panel’s native resolution.
Those are impressive scores, but if you want the best possible frame rates then there’s no hiding from laptops with GeForce RTX 4090 graphics inside.
Beyond games
If you’re considering cutting video with the Blade 18, I have good news. It’s a solid workhorse that completed our video-encoding speed test (which tasks the laptop with transcoding a 4K video down to 1080p via Handbrake) in 4mins 56secs. That’s an excellent result, with only the latest Apple MacBooks able to beat it.
In my own experience using the Blade 18 for work and play, I can tell you that it never faltered in my day-to-day tasks. I was able to regularly run multiple browsers with 30+ tabs open, while streaming music via Spotify and playing games in a window, and the Blade handled it all with zero slowdown and as much aplomb as a matte black laptop can manage.
The keyboard is more divisive. While it’s not mechanical, it offers anti-ghosting tech and customisable per-key RGB lighting. However, the key travel is too shallow for comfort and the keys are so low profile that I found it hard to orient my hands on the keyboard purely by touch, which is a hassle when playing games.
The touchpad is big – 50% bigger than that of Blade 17, according to Razer – and I had no trouble using it to execute Windows gesture commands or move the camera around in a slow-paced game such as Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. I initially had trouble getting it to register my left-clicks, but I soon realised that was because it’s so big I was inadvertently clicking the centre of the touchpad, rather than the lower left.
The little things
Razer outfits the Blade 18 with a six-speaker setup, two tweeters and four woofers. It supports THX Spatial Audio and goes suitably loud, but without a proper subwoofer you can’t expect much bass. Still, they make music and audio effects in games sound nice and clear.
I couldn’t pick up the location of enemies based purely on their footfalls in Call of Duty: Warzone, but the gunfire and explosion packed a punch. In terms of music, it can’t match the quality of the speakers on Apple’s MacBook Pros, however.
The Blade’s 5MP webcam is another positive. It made me look as good as I ever could in my weekly calls with colleagues, and I didn’t notice any meaningful noise or distortion. You’ll need to invest in a better webcam if you want to stream yourself playing games on camera, but the built-in webcam works fine in a pinch.
The Razer Blade 18 has a full complement of ports, as you’d expect from a laptop this large, and because they’re spaced out you should avoid cable-routing headaches. A pair of USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports sits on the left, along with a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, 2.5Gb Ethernet, a 3.5mm audio jack and the power port. The laptop can also charge via USB-C.
Over on the right side you get another USB-A port, a Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 port, an HDMI 2.1 out and a UHS-II SD card reader. Nor is this the only way to add storage, with a spare M.2 SSD slot inside the chassis to supplement the supplied 1TB SSD.
Negative battery
Don’t expect much in the way of battery life from the Razer Blade 18. Gaming laptops rarely perform well in this department, and that huge display doesn’t help. In a basic battery test that tasks the laptop with continuously surfing the web via Wi-Fi with its screen set to 150cd/m2 , the Blade 18 lasted 5hrs 20mins. That’s terrible for most laptops but not bad for gaming machines, although the ROG Zephyrus M16 once again wins out this month.
Expect battery life to drop to around 1hr 30mins for gaming, and for the Blade 18 to run hot–over45oC on the underside when we measured it – at full throttle. That will make this laptop feel even more uncomfortable in your lap, cementing its position as a desktop replacement rather than a portable gaming machine.
Almost amazing
The Razer Blade 18 makes a strong case for why you should pay almost £3,900 for an 18in laptop. That’s as reviewed. If you’re willing to make do with an RTX 4060 and 16GB of RAM, the price drops to £2,900 – while the top-of-the-range version with a
2TB SSD, RTX 4090 and 32GB of RAM costs £4,500. Whichever model you choose, that extra large screen makes it even better suited to standing in for a full desktop, since the display feels almost as spacious as a full 24in monitor. And with the latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series laptop GPUs and Intel’s 13th gen CPUs on board, the Blade 18 can deliver the kind of performance we used to only dream of achieving with a laptop.
It should be obvious that this machine can’t rival bulkier laptops for speed. That’s true for the ROG Zephyrus, and will become even more obvious when we test the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 with its RTX 4090 GPU and Core i9-13980HX CPU. And this offers double the storage space (2TB versus 1TB), yet retails for almost exactly the same price.
Your choice boils down to your priorities. If you want a slick-looking 18in gaming laptop with solid performance, plenty of ports and a beautiful display, the Razer Blade 18 is a great choice. If you’re all about the frame rates, look elsewhere. ALEX WAWRO
“If you want a slick-looking 18in gaming laptop with solid performance, plenty of ports and a beautiful display, it’s a great choice”
SPECIFICATIONS
24-core (8 P-cores, 16 E-cores) Intel Core i9-13950HX processor 12GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics 32GB DDR5-5600 RAM 18in non-touch IPS display, 240Hz, 2,560 x 1,600 resolution 1TB M.2 Gen4 SSD Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.3 5MP webcam Thunderbolt 4 USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 3 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 HDMI 2.1 2.5Gb Ethernet UHS-II SD card reader 3.5mm combo jack 92Wh battery Windows 11 Home 400 x 275 x 21.9mm (WDH) 3.1kg 1yr limited warranty part code: RZ09-0484TWH3-R3W1