the razor blade has been a roller coaster of emotions for me over the
years with the highest peak being when i dropped a crap ton of cash
on them for my staff and the biggest valley being
shortly afterward the defect rate of the aforementioned blades that i bought for
my staff now the most recent last gen blade was
fine in fact we've got two units that are both still working like the day we got
them but it was such a boring pure spec
update that honestly i was having a hard time figuring out what the heck razer has
been working on for the last few years fortunately
all of that changes today this
is the blade 2018
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once i got over the shock of razer moving to kind of a a boxier design
compared to their older curvy one my initial impressions of the razer blade
2018 are actually very positive the aluminum chassis is extremely rigid in
spite of its overall slimness and the significant reduction in bezel size
makes it feel far more 2018 than its not
so 2018 predecessors probably the most
important change to the id here though is that razer has finally made a laptop
that will impress both your gaming friends
and your business associates that is assuming of course that you do
get at least a little bit of help from dbrand and maybe tone down the RGB on
the keyboard so it has HDMI mini displayport and usb type-c along with
three full-size usb type a's and that
type c i showed you that's a Thunderbolt 3 port very nice not to mention it's got
significantly better performance so it's core i7 8750h and gtx 1070 max q
might seem a little pedestrian compared to other manufacturers who have been
bitten by the core i9 bug but as we've seen over the last couple of weeks
unless you're building a machine like this one
you can actually end up better off with
a less powerful CPU but one that you can actually cool
compared to an op one that ends up throttling all day so we're going to
fire up an ida 64 test here and we're going to see
that while the 2018 does actually trade
some clock speed for thermals when hit with a synthetic load so you can see
here it's running at 2.6 gigahertz for a short while then
it's going to drop down to our base of 2.2 gigahertz
in games this thing regularly turbos up
to 4 gigahertz ending up in about the 90 degrees range and never thermal
throttled in our 24 degree celsius office and our GPU stayed nice and cool in the
low 70s and as you can see here i'm
going to lean in close to it
the fans are certainly audible but not
distracting at all and what else is cool is that this
generation blade keeps the keyboard nice and cool even while gaming though it
should be noted that this area right here right above the keyboard that's
where your heatsink is you are not going to want to touch that
now performance is right about where we expected with
the 1070 max q getting beaten
but even then only slightly by the full fat gtx 1070 in the ASUS zephyrus
but Linus you might say what i really loved about the old blade
was how loud it was huh if you're not concerned gamer just
gonna fire up synapse here all you have to do is enter gaming mode
which actually boosts up the clock speed here we go of our gtx 1070 max-q
takes the CPU's TDP from 35 to 45 watts
with a max turbo power of 85 watts and
generally makes the blade 2018 a worse
laptop um
if you were blindfolded in gaming mode with the blade 2018 in front of you
we'd forgive you if you mistook your gaming rig for a drone taking off
we would actually recommend leaving gaming mode off until razer provides
maybe some finer control of the power and fan profiles because the performance
gain is in our estimation not really worth it now on the subject of options
that gamers should actually use the
144 hertz 1080p version of this notebook
is the one to get you can completely ignore the 60 hertz 4k version unless
you desperately need a touch screen 1080p 144hz is a perfect fit for this
CPU GPU combo and the ips panel in this
version is bright and vivid with the higher refreshment making everything
from games to even just mousing around on the desktop navigating
Windows feel smoother and more responsive
i think the only thing that i would like to see added in razer's options is a
touch version of the 1080p one because right now
they're really making you choose between the ultimate compact gaming laptop and
one that is still optimal for productivity
though this might be something that we have to take up with the actual panel
manufacturers and not so much with razer
now above the screen here is the webcam
pretty decent compared to other laptop webcams which is to say that it is
still behind literally every flagship phone on the
market and we really wish that laptop makers other than microsoft i guess
would be the only one that seems to be taking it seriously still bad we wish
they would start doing a better job given how small of a camera element you
can have and how inexpensive a camera element you can have that can end up
with a very nice looking image these days with that said at least razer
borrowed some of its mobile expertise on the speakers for this puppy they do lack
a little bit of punch on the low end but they make up for it with clear sound
that is pretty loud and excellent stereo
separation
now back to the bit that we talked about before about how this machine
could easily be used for gaming and productivity
what about the keyboard now razer keyboards have been a real
sticking point between me and alex who has kind of become our de facto
notebook editor now i have liked
most of razer's notebook keyboards with the notable exception being the blade
pro he on the other hand literally changed my personal blade
stealth's desktop background to this when he had to use it for like an hour
now fortunately razer has actually made some revisions to the keyboard in this
model and we can finally agree
it's very good it's got a nice snappy feel to the keystrokes it's not too loud
and we both feel comfortable typing on this machine for hours then
below that very satisfactory keyboard is one of the biggest touch pads that i
have ever seen on a Windows machine in fact it might be the biggest one like
check this thing out it is awesome to use like it baffles me that it has been
two years since the apple macbook pro 2016 and no
one has ripped off that design yet like it's still not quite as good as the one
on the macbook pro but with its glass top
really nice feel nice clicky buttons although not the whole surface is
clickable it's the closest that we've seen in a Windows machine opening up the
blade 2018 reveals actually pretty impressive upgradability given its size
both the RAM that's a new one and the storage can be
easily swapped and that is a hecking impressive 80 watt hour battery that
gives it four hours of life in our pc mark test now that's not an amazing
result compared to other productivity-centric notebooks but it
absolutely smashes other gaming laptops that are this
powerful bringing us to the price
our model here comes in at 2400 us
dollars which is considerably more than the ASUS zephyrus that i'm going to put
next to it right here and remember guys this is a laptop that
already had a substantial thin tax built into the toll that it was
going to take on your wallet if you're going to be gaming day and night we feel
that the zephyrus is a better choice it offers a bit more performance while
making less noise it has more room for games thanks to its hard drive in
addition to its SSD and it offers silky smooth visuals
thanks to g-sync by contrast the blade is still very competent for gaming and
crushes the zephyrus when you're on the go thanks to its more professional looks
excellent track pad smaller form factor and double the battery life but of
course you get to pay a thinness tax and a razor tax
speaking of taxes d brand ships worldwide does that have anything to do
with that whatever it doesn't matter dbrand makes awesome vinyl skins for
laptops phones tablets consoles controllers and more they use high
quality true textured 3m vinyl on every product and their skins are cut with
unrivaled precision they measure many times and cut once only to ensure they
have a factory fit for your product not only do they look great but dbrand skins
protect against incidental damage and scratches like say for example one of
the main reasons i love a dbrand skin on my laptop is sliding it in out of my bag
that way you don't end up with a completely scuffed up surface on both
sides of your laptop that sucks especially when you're paying this much
for it their products are affordable and they ship worldwide so check them out at
the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you
disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking
out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below also down there is our
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that they're LTT not like this one in the sense that you can buy this design anymore
and a link to our community forum which you should totally join