If there was just one laptop manufacturer toward which I would carry
some bias, it would probably be Razer.
Not because of my investment in Framework, but because of the history
there. See, in spite of being personally misled by an executive at the very
highest level about the marketing around their initial mechanical keyboards, I
was one of the biggest fans of the original Razer Blade. So much so that I
bought one for every member of my team only to have basically all of them die.
But this is some pretty eco-friendly packaging. So I'm ready to let bygones
be bygones and take a look at the new Razer Blade 18, which they claim is the
very first in the world to feature a dual mode display running at either full
HD plus 440 Hz or a whopping 4K plus.
And that's because it has a 16 by10 aspect ratio, which personally I love at
240 hertz. Even more impressive though is the fact that this machine might even
have the horses to power that display. It features an RTX 5090 mobile with a
vapor chamber cooling design that is so
cool that they had to put a window on the bottom so you could look at it. It
allows that GPU to run at a whopping 175
watts of total power while still reserving 105 watts for the Core Ultra 9
CPU. Dang, what does it come with though? Hey, look at that. They still
include stickers, though. Take that, Apple. What? I like stickers. I mean, if
I'm going to pay $5,000 for a laptop, I should get some cut tang
stickers. Did I mention that? Yeah, that's right. You're watching this
unboxing for the sheer porn of it, not because you're considering buying one.
What I mean, why else would they take its clothes off? Look at that.
Now, that's a big power brick. 400 watt.
I mean, I shouldn't be that surprised. They did tell me that it will do
wait, yeah, 260 watts. But I guess you got to be able to charge and game at the
same time. I don't love proprietary power connectors, but in this case, I
can at least see why they did it. It's not like you can do 400 watts through a
USBC. These are the worst cable management straps ever though. Like I
literally cut them off of every blade that I have ever owned. It's one of
those things that they started doing at one point and then just I guess no one
ever stopped to consider how like utterly inconvenient they are when
you're packing the thing up. Oh, let's not plug it in yet. First, I want to
take a look at IO. And before I do that, Razer skins. Huh.
exclusive razor designs. Are they are are they starting a war
with Dbrand? Oh my god, they're going right after Dbrand. This is just X-ray
but green. At least they're not Caseify allegedly
and using Dbrand's actual imagery.
I assume that Razer knows what the inside of their own laptops look like.
They don't include an applicator. That's an oversight.
All right, I've done this before. I'm
aware of how long an inch is, right? But like, oh my god, this laptop is huge.
It's kind of a lot, right? Let's have a look at the IO. Okay, over on the left
side, we've got our power inlet as well as 2 and 1/2 gig networking, a couple
USB 3 type A's, as well as a USB.
Can you just label things, Razer? God, I
know it's not stealthy and cool, but like which one is the Thunderbolt 5, you
know? Uh 3 and a half millimeter audio jack. And over on the other side, we got
uh Kensington lock, HDMI, another USBA,
and Thunderbolt something along with a UHS2 SD card reader. At the back, we got
a whole lot of nothing except look at that ventilation. This is cool. My notes
on this are kind of snarky. The lab's like, "Well, you know, I like it." Okay.
It would be cooler if I could actually see the vapor chamber.
Okay, I agree with the lab. I'm just looking at the back of the
motherboard. Should we open it before we even turn it on? Let's open it before we
even turn it on. >> And don't open the laptop cuz if you break it, we're hooked.
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I'm really looking forward to seeing this vapor chamber design. They say this
is the biggest vapor that they have ever
chambered and that it is overclock
ready. I mean, when every laptop is
thermally constrained, I don't really understand what that means, but that's
for them to know and me to never understand. I do like how easy it is to
get the bottom off. Look at that. Definitely sliding it forward.
Okay, so we've got the highest spec of this machine with 4 terb of built-in
storage, but there are two TB and 1 TB versions that come with a free M.2,
which is honestly probably the way that I would go if I were you, because then
you could just put up to like an 8 TB in that second slot and get more overall
storage. Now, it is a little thicker. Razer acknowledges that to accommodate
the big fat cooling solution, but they used that extra thickness to include
more modularity than I might have expected from them. Not only do we have
the replaceable SSDs, but we have replaceable SODM memory that comes at
5600 mega transfer per second, but can run up to 5600 with 96 gigs or 6400
megat transfer per second with 64 gigs of RAM and a replaceable Wi-Fi module.
It's Wi-Fi 7, so you won't be replacing it with anything today, but hey, in the
future you could. Even the Steam Deck can't boast that. And that's a very
repairable machine. Look at the freaking size of these fans. Is it still a
competition to see who can have the most fins on their laptop fans?
Sorry. The keyboard I am very excited about. Razer says that they have
redesigned it with much longer key travel and this is pretty cool. They
have dual LED backlights behind some of the keys so that if you hold function or
shift or control, it actually lights up what the function of the key will be.
Remember guys, this is an 18inch laptop.
That's a big trackpad. Apparently has
excellent palm rejection according to lab. So, can't wait to try that out as
well. Wow, that's a big screen. It's kind of wild cuz I remember when my
desktop monitor was not this big. And
16x10, man, is so flipping nice. I only
wonder which mode of display we're in because uh you have to do a full reboot
in order to change it. So, I guess we'll see.
Notepad feels not bad. Just cannot find
the path specified. Relax, notepad. You're not that cool.
They're a little on the stiffer side, so you'll have to really type with purpose.
Basically that. Oh, it's a little bright. Ooh, we can try out the keyboard
function. So, function
So cool, huh? That must cost a fortune. You know
how I know? Because when you delve into the tech. No, just kidding. Because the
price is really high. Hey, there you go. My oneline review of the keyboard. Now,
let's try typing, moving my cursor, and
then typing and brushing it with my Oh,
okay. Well, you can't activate the click. It's hard for me to actually type
with my palm resting on a trackpad because I guess I've trained myself over
the years to not touch the trackpad of my laptop. Okay, I'm going to have to
make a conscious decision to accidentally palm the trackpad while I'm typing.
I am moving
a little. Yeah, pretty good actually. And the second you have a finger on it,
it's not bad. There's no haptics in it. So, you just have kind of the uh the
built-in like click. Trackpads on Windows haven't necessarily
been as good as Mac, but have been not hugely problematic for many years now,
and the Blade 18 looks like it is no exception. Now, let's take a closer look
at this display. Razer, for some reason,
does not advertise a peak brightness for it, which I don't really understand
because it performed pretty well in our testing. It's not an HDR display. It's
IPS with no local dimming, so you know, it is what it is. But for an SDR display
at around 550 nits peak brightness, depending on the mode that it's
operating in, that's very respectable and is good enough to use outdoors. Of
course, that's not the main attraction. The main attraction is its dual mode
operation. So, its native resolution is
3840x 2400 kind of a 4K plus to account
for the extra pixels at the bottom of a 16x10 display. And you can do up to 240
Hz in that mode. And I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to do this on
my own. Through Razer Synapse, you can
change it to 1920 x 1200 440 Hz. So, you
click that and then you're going to need to restart the computer. This is nice
though. Different color profiles. You can view the calibration report. This is
a verified display. We didn't find that it was the most color accurate display.
It does vary a little bit across its modes. In its best one, its delta E
averages were under two, which is what we would consider to be accurate, but it
has a bit of a blue cast and its grayscale tracking was not amazing.
meaning that sometimes shadows are lost and sometimes highlights are
overboosted. So make of that what you
will. We also found that Razer is over marketing the gamut coverage. They claim
100% DCIP3, but we got 97% and we
contacted them about it and they're like, "Yep, that's within our expectations."
So yeah, with that said, for an 18inch
machine with this kind of performance, it's not it's not bad. It's not as thin
as it kind of looks though because you got these feet that stick up off the
bottom and this kind of like hump for the vapor chamber cooler. Still not bad.
Not bad. Pretty impressed. Oh, we should plug it in. All right. And now the
window on the bottom is RGB lit.
We're in performance mode now, boys. With that said, we didn't get quite the
frequency out of the CPU that Razer advertised. They set up to 5.4 GHz, but
that seems to be the spec for this silicon. not what you can actually
expect in this chassis. We only got up to 5.2, which to be clear is still a
very fast chip. Well, I have to wait to game on it until I get out of this
stupid hover car. But you guys don't have to wait to know how it performs.
When we compared it to another pretty comparable machine from HP, it performed
about like you would expect. In CPUbound games, we found that they were both
around the same at the same resolution. But in GPUbound games, we did find that
Razer's cooler was worth the extra work. We did find that it outperformed that
other comparable laptop with similar specs by up to 10% at 1200p in certain
titles. So, it's probably not what I would choose this machine for. That
would come down to the IO and the size of the display and the creature
comforts, like the really cool thing with the keyboard keys illuminating or
whatever else. But, it's better than a kick in the teeth or braces on your
teeth. Okay, I gave up on the tutorial, but while we wait for this, why don't we
check out the speakers? Rave of crabs.
The bottom part seems to be a grill and
then there's a grill here and the grill on
the bottom. So, I guess that's how they're getting
that pretty impressive sound stage.
falls a little short once the bass drop hits, but loud and decent clarity. And I
think the most impressive part is just how big the sound is, how immersive it
feels. Oh, we could try out the webcam, too.
Yes. Ooh, yeah. There's a hardware switch, by the way. Uh there's also the
uh IR tracker for Windows Hello if you're into that sort of thing. Now
seems like as good a time as any to have a look at the image quality and I guess
we'll be recording sound on it as well. It is fine, I guess. 5 megapixels they
say. I mean I can count the megapixels in
there. Okay. Yeah, now that I'm out in the world this is definitely not enough
performances. Yep.
Nope. Yep. That's fine. And this is why we actually play the game. So, let's
turn it down to balanced. Yeah, this mobile GPU is uh she's struggling. She's
struggling to game at 4K. Okay, now we know that. At least in Cyberpunk with
ray tracing on and all of that. Let's go
maybe 2560 by600.
At that resolution, I really don't think that I should need balanced
DLSS. No, this is more like it. Now, we're gaming here, folks. Yeah, we're
getting around 60 plus FPS. We do see 1%
lows dip below, you know, like 55 from time to time, but 1600p in a very
demanding game with ray tracing like Cyberpunk, these kinds of frame rates
very acceptable on a mobile sort of technically mobile gaming device. My one
objection to all of this is of course the price. It starts at like three grand
plus and that's for the option with less RAM and less storage. And the
configuration we're running here today is over $5,000
US. That's right. You couldn't afford to have an H in the word thousand anymore
because you spent it on your laptop. May your future choices be more fiscally
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