Razer Blade 15 Advanced 300Hz Review
Razer’s Blade line of laptops are undoubtedly popular, and to an extent I can see why. They feel a lot like the “Apple of Gaming PCs”, the chassis looks a lot like a black unibody macbook and they are definitely premium. But, for me anyway, they feel like they have a bit of an identity problem. They can’t work out if they want to be a slim and sleek ultrabook, or the world’s most powerful gaming laptop, at least for this spec anyway. Let’s take a look, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
The model I have is the Blade 15 Advanced, with the 10875H 8 core, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, and the absolutely stunning 1080p 300Hz panel. Yes, 300Hz. It’s amazing, but we will get to that. Spec wise, this is as clapped-out as you can get and for the privilege you’ll be parting with a whopping £3100. That sits this squarely in the “premium” category for sure – although you do get a lot for your money.
Part of the identity problem I mentioned is the performance offered, especially from the GPU. It’s supposedly an RTX 2080 Super, max-q version, but you get RTX 2070 “full fat” performance. Let’s take a look at the results.
| Game | AVG FPS | 1% Low | 1% Low MS |
| BFV (Ultra) | 105.4 | 94.25071 | 10.61 |
| COD MW (Ultra) | 107.54 | 81.69935 | 12.24 |
| PUBG (Ultra) | 106.33 | 84.31703 | 11.86 |
| Fortnite (EPIC) | 133.55 | 86.13264 | 11.61 |
To give you a rough idea, the MSI GE65 I reviewed a little while ago now which had a full RTX 2070 had the same, or better, performance than this RTX 2080 Super. The cause? The ultra-thin design. This thing isn’t much thicker than the USB Type A ports on the side, meaning their admittedly very impressive vapour chamber cooling solution has to work overtime keeping both the inferno of a CPU, and GPU, cool.
It does manage to do that, actually with less fan noise than I expected, with the CPU maxing at 95°c or so, and the GPU around 75°c, but if you are dead set on a Blade 15 with the 300Hz display I would probably get the 2070 Super variant for £500 less instead. While it does keep the chips cool enough, the CPU did still thermal throttle during testing, and the surface temps under the laptop got to burn-you-within-minutes temps pretty quick, approaching 50°c making for a very uncomfortable gaming experience on your lap, and the top of the keyboard got to be 45°c or so too, so steer clear of that area too.
I should note, during my testing I got a bios & synapse update which allowed me to select a “Boost” mode for the CPU in Synapse which I highly recommend you set as it gave a roughly 30% performance increase from the default “Medium” setting in CPU bound workloads.
Speaking of CPU bound workloads, lets take a look at some benchmarks for that too, and see how they compare to the new Ryzen 4000 CPUs.
| Seconds | |
| Blender BMW | 263 |
| Cinebench | Points |
| 1T | 426 |
| nT | 2914 |
As you saw, at high or ultra settings, you really can’t make use of the stunning 300Hz display, so you’ll have to turn the settings down a lot if that’s of interest, but honestly it should be. Playing CSGO on this was amazing. It was just so smooth. I really enjoyed the experience, and while I can’t say it’s worlds different from a more normal 144Hz panel, it definitely was nice.
Just look at this high speed footage. Look at the pistol slide, how smooth it is to slide back forward again. For context, here is a 144hz panel doing the same test. See how jumpy it is by comparison? That’s insane.
Anyway, back to the test results, that gun firing in CSGO is the total system input lag, ie from the light on the mouse going out to the gun firing on screen, and that is possibly a new record for a laptop at just 25ms. Very impressive.
What’s more impressive is the panel’s response time. 2ms. Seriously. Legit 2ms black to white, which likely equates to a legit 1ms GtG time. Now, it is slow to release, around 10ms, but that is still worlds better than any other laptop panel I’ve checked out. Ghosting, as you would expect, is non-existent here. It’s crisp and smooth.
And the news gets better for the panel, as testing with my Datacolor SpyderX, it reported a full 99% of the sRGB spectrum, and 76 and 77% of the AdobeRGB and DCI P3 spectrums respectively, which would be great for a 60 or 144hz panel, but to see that on top of a wicked fast 300Hz panel.. Man. Thumbs up for the display, seriously.
As for the other bits you come into contact with regularly, the keyboard and trackpad, they are pretty good too. The keyboard is a pretty low key travel design, but it’s well laid out, the keys feel great for gaming on and after an adjustment period, nice to type on too. The track pad is huge, really nice feel to it and pretty much as good as you can get on a Windows machine.
I/O is alright, you get 3 USB A ports, their bidirectional charging port, 2 type Cs one of which which doubles as thunderbolt 3, HDMI and a full size SD card reader. A decent setup.
Battery life from the 80Whr battery varies depending on usage. If you are a little heavier on it, and with the screen at 300Hz full brightness, you get a couple hours of web browsing type usage, although you can extend that more to 4 or 5 with tweaks.
One thing I should mention is storage – the only option you can get right now is a 1TB SSD – it’s an M.2 Samsung PM981 which is an NVME drive, although not the fastest. It is upgradable, as is the RAM, which you might want to do as for a machine of this caliber I would have preferred to see 2 or even 4TB options available.
So, what’s the verdict? Like I said, the identity problem means you get a fairly hamstrung GPU, with a stunning display you might have trouble pushing enough frames to, a thin and light but blisteringly hot chassis that still has the sharp edges cutting your wrists as you type or game, but offers a truly premium feel and experience, at a truly premium price. This isn’t a bad machine, far from it, but it’s definitely for a niche and I don’t think I am in it.
-
TechteamGB Score
