Razer Blade 15 Advanced review
Our Verdict
The Razer Bract 15 Advanced combines a thin, lightweight design with great game performance. Simply exist prepared to dish out a whole lot of money.
For
- Sleek, lightweight pattern
- Not bad gaming performance
- Lots of ports
- Like shooting fish in a barrel to command with Synapse
Confronting
- Lackluster touchpad and keyboard
- Convoluted screen options
Tom's Guide Verdict
The Razer Blade 15 Advanced combines a thin, lightweight design with great game functioning. But be prepared to dish out a whole lot of coin.
Pros
- +
Sleek, lightweight design
- +
Great gaming performance
- +
Lots of ports
- +
Like shooting fish in a barrel to control with Synapse
Cons
- -
Lackluster touchpad and keyboard
- -
Convoluted screen options
Razer Blade 15 Avant-garde review: Specs
CPU: 10th-Gen Intel Cadre i7-10875H 2.3 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080
Display: fifteen.6" QHD, 240 Hz
RAM: 32 GB
Storage: 1 TB SSD
Dimensions: xiv.0 x 9.3 10 0.7 inches
Weight: iv.4 lbs
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Razer Blade 15 Advanced won a "highly recommended" honor for best gaming laptop at the Tom's Guide Awards 2021 for gaming.
The Razer Blade 15 Advanced is a remarkable device, particularly when you consider the relatively brusque history of Razer laptops. Razer's innovative Blade line has been on the market for less than 10 years, and however information technology's arguably trounce former workhorses like Dell, HP and Acer at their own games. Like the residue of the Bract line, the Razer Bract 15 Advanced is both functional and fashionable, providing a comparable gaming experience to virtually fancy desktops.
And, like the rest of the Blade line, the Razer Bract fifteen Advanced is besides hot, loud and expensive. The commencement 2 faults aren't really dealbreakers, as it's hard to brand a gaming laptop that runs cool and quiet. But no matter how you piece it, $ii,900 is quite a bit of money for one of the best gaming laptops, particularly 1 that has a hard time doubling as a productivity device.
In our Razer Blade xv Advanced review, we'll talk over the PC's powerful components, its first-class gaming performance and its innovative screen. It's not the simply gaming laptop in this price range that'due south worth because, but in spite of a few faults, the Bract 15 Advanced works pretty hard to earn its steep asking price.
Razer Blade xv Advanced review: Price and availability
There are five dissimilar configurations of the Razer Blade 15 Advanced, ranging between $2,600 and $3,300. All models come equipped with an Intel Core i7-10875H processor, 1 TB SSD storage and a copy of Windows 10 Dwelling house. At that place's considerable variation across that, both in terms of internal components and displays.
The $ii,600 model, for example, comes with a full Hd screen, a GeForce RTX 3070 GPU and 16 GB RAM. The $3,300 model, on the other manus, comes with a 4K OLED screen, a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU and 32 GB RAM.
Our test model was the center-of-the-road $2,900 variation, which comes with a QHD, 240 Hz brandish, a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU and 32 GB RAM. Fifty-fifty a mid-tier Razer Blade 15 Avant-garde surpasses high-end models from competing manufacturers, both in terms of components and price.
Razer Blade 15 Advanced review: Design
Razer has a penchant for designing absolutely gorgeous laptops, and the Razer Blade 15 Avant-garde is no exception.
This sturdy machine measures 14.0 x 9.three x 0.7 inches, and that's remarkably small when you consider how many powerful components it packs. At 4.4 pounds, information technology's non as light as it looks, only it's not difficult to carry for extended periods of time, either.
As far as its appearance goes, the all-time word to depict the Blade fifteen is "sleek." It has a blackness brushed metal chassis, with a low-cal-up Razer logo in the middle of the lid. Open up information technology upwards, and you'll find a screen with minimal bezels on elevation, and a tenkeyless keyboard, two speakers and a large touchpad on the bottom. The metal chassis is, unfortunately, quite prone to fingerprints, and probably adds some weight to the overall design. Notwithstanding, it'due south a lot more than elegant (and durable) than a plastic model.
On the bright side, the Blade xv has ports to spare. On the right, at that place'south an SD card reader, a USB-C port, a USB-A port and an HDMI port. On the left, there's a three.5 mm headphone jack, a USB-C port, 2 USB-A ports and a proprietary power port. For what information technology's worth, the proprietary power port is not nearly every bit convenient as it could be. The cord itself has an asymmetrical pattern, which makes information technology difficult to utilize if you accept something plugged into the closer USB-A port. You accept to either run the string around the whole laptop or play musical ports with the rest of your peripherals, and neither solution is very user-friendly.
On the other hand, I do have to requite the Bract fifteen a lot of credit for including more i USB-C port. More than and more gaming peripherals are using USB-C inputs, and information technology'south high time that gaming laptops and desktops fabricated allowances for that.
Razer Blade 15 Advanced review: Keyboard and touchpad
While it's a truism that yous should always bring your own mouse to a gaming laptop, it'due south an absolute necessity for the Razer Blade fifteen Advanced. That'due south because the touchpad is unresponsive, imprecise and just tetchy in full general. Because the touchpad is enormous (five.3 ten 3.0 inches), my palms and wrists rested on information technology constantly, inputting unwanted commands and moving my cursor when I wanted it to stay still. On the other hand, when I really wanted to apply the touchpad, I institute it resistant and tiresome to procedure commands.
The keyboard didn't fare much better. With extremely shallow cardinal travel, typing is both an unsatisfying and uncomfortable feel. On a one-minute Typing.com test, I scored 106 words per infinitesimal with 98% accuracy, compared to 116 words per infinitesimal with 98% accuracy on my regular Logitech G915. Even then, the departure in speed is negligible compared to the divergence in tactile sensations. I would expect a lackluster keyboard like the Blade 15's on a much cheaper, not-gaming model of laptop.
Razer Blade 15 Advanced review: Display and audio
The Razer Bract 15 Advanced has a beautiful screen, which is nonetheless non the most advanced model on the market. While yous can get the Bract xv Advanced with a 1080p, lx Hz screen, our review model came with a 1440p, 240 Hz screen, and information technology fabricated a big departure. This colorful screen provides 244 nits of brightness, an sRGB colour gamut of 124% and a Delta-Due east of 0.23. (Delta-E measures colour accuracy, and closer to nil is amend.) That's a respectable amount of color, but not as much brightness every bit its competitors.
Compare and dissimilarity to the similar Alienware m15 R4, which offers a blinding 460 nits of effulgence, as well as a whopping 211% of the sRGB color spectrum, albeit with a Delta-E of only 0.32. Our favorite gaming laptop, the Asus Zephyrus G14, offers 323 nits of effulgence, but merely 117% of the sRGB spectrum. (We didn't measure Delta-E on this device.)
Sound is likewise a mixed handbag. The speakers can get extremely loud, and since there are two of them, they create a pleasing stereo effect. At the same fourth dimension, the audio is a fleck fuzzy, even on lower volumes, and Razer has THX environment sound enabled past default — even when you're not using headphones. This creates obnoxious reverb, and sounds specially grating on video calls. Simply get a gaming headset.
Razer Blade 15 Avant-garde review: Performance
When it comes to game operation, the Razer Blade xv Advanced lives up to its proper noun. When we cranked some pop PC games up to Ultra settings, the Blade 15 all the same delivered more than than 60 fps at 1080p, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 fps in QHD. My own tests backed this up, and getting more 100 fps in QHD was non at all uncommon.
Here's how the Razer Blade fifteen Advanced did in benchmark tests, compared to two close competitors:
| Razer Blade xv Advanced | Alienware m15 R4 | Asus Zephyrus G14 | |
| Assassin'south Creed Odyssey (1080p) | 74 | 67 | Due north/A |
| Grand Theft Auto V (1080p) | 107 | 108 | 115 |
| Red Dead Redemption two (1080p) | 70 | 68 | 35 |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p) | 88 | 77 | 49 |
(Notation that this chart compares simply 1080p frame rates, as we don't benchmark QHD frame rates on laptops that offer 4K screens.)
Generally speaking, the Blade 15 outperformed the contest in Assassin'due south Creed Odyssey, Crimson Dead Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, sometimes past more than 10 frames per second. Grand Theft Car 5 tended to run better on comparable systems, although non past a night-and-day club of magnitude.
I had some pretty impressive results in my own qualitative testing as well. I put the Blade 15 through its paces with Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition, Doom Eternal, Baldur's Gate Three and Final Fantasy XIV. Once I got the screen to properly parse frame rates — and this was something of a struggle, as I'll draw shortly — the games ran smoothly and fluidly, with lots of color and graphical detail to spare. Historic period of Empires III and Baldur's Gate exceeded 90 fps, while Final Fantasy XIV reached 120 fps, and Doom Eternal, 160 fps. Y'all may not need the full 240 Hz refresh charge per unit, but yous could probably reach information technology, at to the lowest degree if you lot're willing to plow the resolution down a bit.
My only complaint here is that the Blade 15's screen doesn't default to 240 Hz, and getting information technology out of 60 Hz manner tin can be a real struggle. While in that location's a dropdown bill of fare in the Razer Synapse software (which too controls keyboard lighting, fan speed and power options), it's grayed out, and suggests that you lot utilise Windows Display Options instead. However, Windows also locked me into a 60 fps frame charge per unit — and thought that the Blade xv's principal screen was a secondary monitor. (What the primary monitor was, I can simply imagine.)
Somewhen, past watching a complicated tutorial video from Razer, I figured out that I had to employ the Nvidia software to manually route my video feed through the GPU, so further employ that software to manipulate the frame rate. It's not clear why some of these methods work and others don't. Thankfully, you accept to become through this process only once, but "try three methods, which may not piece of work" is a pretty frustrating viewpoint for a premium product to take.
In terms of productivity, the Blade 15 is powerful enough to handle whatever y'all throw at it — give-and-take processing, email, multimedia, or even graphic blueprint and video work, thanks to its powerful GPU. Information technology earned a 6,662 on the Geekbench 5.four benchmarking software (higher numbers are better), and copied 25 GB of information to a flash bulldoze at a transfer rate of 890 MBps. We oasis't nevertheless tested a comparable system with Geekbench 5.iv, simply the file transfer speed was a fiddling slower than the m15 R4, which moved data at one,147 MBps.
Razer Blade fifteen Advanced review: Heat
Like a lot of gaming laptops, the Razer Bract xv Advanced runs hot and loud. If you're gaming, it'south impossible to keep the Bract fifteen in your lap, as it runs at a searing 113 degrees Fahrenheit. We benchmarked a more comfortable ninety degrees while not gaming, but withal, I found information technology besides hot to proceed in my lap for more than a few minutes at a time. This is very much a automobile that should live on a desk.
The Blade 15's fans keep it cool enough to run, although they go pretty loud while doing then. Even when merely doing productivity work, the fan ran loudly enough to drown out music on the speakers past default. I tinkered around in the Synapse software and plant a more comfy balance. While the Razer Blade 15 Avant-garde is not going to whip your stray papers into a whirlwind, it'south not the quietest machine out there, either.
Razer Blade 15 Avant-garde review: Battery life
Using the Tom'southward Guide laptop battery life test (constantly surfing the web on Microsoft Border), the Razer Bract 15 earned a respectable five hours and fourteen minutes of battery life. Compare and contrast to the m15 R4, which runs for about 4 hours —but as well to the Zephyrus G14, which runs for about 11 hours.
Gaming was a bleaker state of affairs, at one hr and two minutes, simply very few gaming laptops can final for longer than that.
Razer Blade 15 Avant-garde review: Verdict
The Razer Bract fifteen Avant-garde does exactly what you'd look a Razer laptop to do. It looks great, offers enough of ports and runs games beautifully. It'south too as expensive as you'd await a Razer laptop to be; you could easily spend $3,000 on a college-stop model.
While I wasn't thrilled with the Blade xv's uncomfortable keyboard, unresponsive touchpad or unintuitive screen refresh rate, these don't do much to detract from an otherwise excellent product, particularly if you lot're willing to bring some of your ain peripherals to the party. Information technology's why we too list information technology as one of the best laptops for engineering students.
In terms of competitors, the Alienware m15 R4 costs roughly the aforementioned amount of coin, and offers like functionality. I don't take a potent preference betwixt the 2, although the Razer Bract 15 Avant-garde is a piddling fleck lighter, a picayune bit smaller and a lot more aesthetically pleasing.
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Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/razer-blade-15-advanced
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