Review: Razer Blade 15 (2018)

by Parm Mann on 15 June 2018, 10:00

Tags: Razer, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Conclusion

...one of the most stylish gaming laptops around, and there's plenty of high-end hardware crammed inside the tough 16.8mm aluminium chassis.

Razer has given its mid-sized Blade gaming laptop a major facelift for 2018. Out goes the curvy chassis and thick display bezels, and in comes a sleek, angular chassis with a 15.6in edge-to-edge panel touting a 144Hz refresh rate.

The end result is one of the most stylish gaming laptops around, and there's plenty of high-end hardware crammed inside the tough 16.8mm aluminium chassis. The highlights include a hexa-core Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16GB of memory, fast SSD storage and up to GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics.

Yet while Blade 15 is an improvement in many areas, some of the old issues linger. Despite the implementation of vapour chamber cooling technology, the laptop struggles to deal with heat build-up, resulting in an uncomfortably hot chassis, noticeable CPU throttling, and bothersome fan noise.

Bottom line: performance purists who wish to extract every last ounce should look elsewhere, but if you're looking for a potent PC that's as pretty as it is powerful, Blade 15 is the smallest and sleekest gaming laptop in its class.

The Good
 
The Bad
Looks great
144Hz full-HD IPS display
Six-core, 12-thread Core i7 CPU
Silky smooth gaming at native resolution
Good sound, excellent trackpad
 
CPU quick to throttle
Chassis gets uncomfortably hot
Fan noise still an issue
Noticeable backlight bleed
No Ethernet port


HEXUS.where2buy

The Blade 15 laptop is available to order from Razer.

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At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.



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