The Razer Blade 17 line of laptops is known for its powerful, expensive 17-inch machines, and this year’s batch is both more powerful and more expensive than the last, with a range of configurations that cost between $2,699 and a double-take-inducing $4,299.
The one I tested was near the top of the pile, and came with a stacked specs sheet and performance to match. The 12th generation Intel i7 processor handled as many tasks as I could throw at it, and the RTX 3080 Ti graphics card crushed most games on the highest settings – with an improved cooling setup stopping the laptop getting too hot or noisy. It’s not perfect, but it’s roughly what I’d hope for from a $4,000 gaming machine.
Here’s the specs of the review unit I was sent:
- Model: Razer Blade 17 - QHD 240Hz - GeForce RTX 3080 Ti - Black
- Display: 17.3" 240Hz 1440p display with G-Sync
- Processor: Intel Core i7-12800H (1.8GHz, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz, with 24MB of Cache)
- Graphics: GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (16GB GDDR6 VRAM)
- Memory: 32 GB DDR5 4800MHz dual-channel memory
- OS: Windows 11
- Storage: 1TB SSD and one open M.2 Slot, upgradeable to 4TB SSD
- Ports: 2 x Thunderbolt 4 ports, 3 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, 1 x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port that supports 15W power delivery, 3.5mm combo headphone/mic jack, 1 x 2.5 Gb Ethernet port, 1 x Kensington Security Lock port, 1 x UHS-II SD card reader.
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6E AX1690 (IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/az), Bluetooth 5.2
- Battery: 82WHr
- Dimensions: 15.55" x 10.24" x 0.78" / 395 mm x 260 mm x 19.9mm
- Weight: 2.75 kg / 6.06 lbs
- Price (as tested): $3,999.99 / £4,299.99
Razer Blade 17 – Design and Features
The Blade 17’s aluminum chassis is matte black, with no unnecessary humps or chevrons. At 0.78 inches, it’s thinner than some of the less-powerful machines on our best gaming laptop list, and it’s impressive that Razer has packed so much power into a relatively tight space.
The skinny bezels around the display, including one housing a 1080p Windows Hello webcam, keep the footprint as tight as it can be for a 17-inch machine. It’s exactly the sort of compact, restrained design that I want from a gaming laptop, and I worked in a cafe for a few hours without anyone giving my machine a second glance. The body, like previous Blade laptops, still attracts fingerprints, but a new coating dulls them to vague smudges rather than clear outlines, making it slightly more presentable.
Taking it out of the house did mean I had to lug it around in my bag. The laptop weighs more than six pounds, and the power pack weighs a few pounds more: I started to feel it after half an hour of walking.
With that weight comes sturdiness. Everything about the Blade 17 feels solid and high-end, including the reassuringly stiff hinges, which kept the screen set at whatever angle I wanted.
It also has every port I want from a gaming laptop, including 3 USB-A slots – ideal for a mouse, headset, and external keyboard at the same time – and 2 Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, which is one more than most top-end laptops, including the 15-inch versions of the Blade. You also get a USB-C slot that supports 15W charging, which is a good idea in theory, because you could top off the battery with a regular wall charger rather than the Blade’s power brick, but in practice it charged the Blade 17 so slowly that it was practically useless.
When you open the lid of the Razer Blade 17, a smart recessed keyboard greets you, flanked by speakers that are laser-cut into the body. The keys are slightly bigger than last year’s model but there’s still plenty of spare space around the keyboard, which fits with the machine’s more minimalist design. I enjoyed both typing on the Blade 17 and desperately smashing the WASD keys in-game – each key feels responsive, robust, and clicky, and I almost never pressed one accidentally.
The 1440p display is gorgeous. Razer says it covers the full DCI-P3 color space, and it shows: yellow and pinks pop and contrast with truly dark blacks and blues. The deep reds of the recent martial-arts game Sifu were rich and luxurious, while the landscapes of the battle-royale shooter Apex Legends fizzed with bright purples and oranges.
The combination of its 240Hz refresh rate and Nvidia’s G-Sync technology, which reduces screen tearing, made everything feel ultra-smooth, even during frantic, jerky gunfights, and I didn’t notice any stuttering in anything I played.
When I watched TV shows, all the colors looked true to life, including faces, and viewing angles were good enough to use the Blade 17 as a stand-in TV, placing it on a coffee table with two people watching it from a sofa. With a max brightness of 300 nits, it’s not the brightest screen you’ll find on a gaming laptop, but it was more than enough for me, even in direct sunlight. I once gamed for a full hour without realizing I had the brightness down at 40%.
Razer Blade 17 – Software
The Blade 17 is free of annoying bloatware, and the only preinstalled software of note is THX Spatial Audio for adjusting in-game sounds (we’ll come to the speakers later) and Razer’s Synapse software, which is supposed to be a hub for all the Razer devices you own.
The THX sound software is intuitive if barebones, letting you toggle between different sound frequency presets, most of which seem to make very minor differences to audio – but you can easily set your own custom presets that are as extreme as you want. You can also toggle both THX Spatial Audio – which is good at simulating surround sound when you’re using headphones – and Dialogue Enhancement, which I can’t say made much of a difference when I tested it on videos that had voices speaking over background noise.
Synapse, which I’ve used in the past for keyboards, mice, and webcams, is powerful when you know how to use it, especially for tweaking your RGB lighting. I opted for solid, bright green WASD keys and a pulsing red background for the rest of the keyboard. You can set the colors to sync between Razer devices, so I had my Razer mouse copy my laptop keyboard’s pulsing lights.
Synapse will also link directly with certain games so that your RGB lighting mirrors what’s happening on-screen. It’s a gimmick, but a cool one, and I never want to turn it off. It supports a long list of games, including Apex Legends: as each three-player squad appeared on my screen before a round of battle royale, the keyboard lit up three different colors in columns. When I picked up loot, the RGB lighting pulsed the same color as the item I was picking up, and the sound of gunshots was matched with flashes from the keyboard.
As powerful as the lighting options can be, they’re fiddly to set up. Nothing in Synapse is quite where you expect it to be – to customize your keyboard lighting, for example, you can’t just go into “lighting” in the Blade 17 section. Instead, you have to separately boot up the “Chroma Studio”, which brings up an intimidating number of options, and then wrestle with lighting layers in a rigid menu before you get the result you want.
The Synapse options for your laptop’s performance are limited. With your laptop plugged in, you can flip between “balanced,” “silent,” and a “custom” setting that lets you turn everything up to the max, which is how I played all my games. When you’re off your charger, “balanced” is the only available setting. A battery-conserving option would have been useful for when you don’t have access to the power brick.
You can also toggle GPU modes in the performance tab, which basically means choosing to run off the 3080 Ti all the time or turning on Nvidia’s “Optimus” tech, which aims to save battery by using your processor’s integrated graphics to power the machine and then automatically switching to the 3080 Ti when you need it. Optimus will also dial down your display’s refresh rate when you don’t need the full 240Hz.
On the Blade 17, Optimus is virtually essential. When I ran everyday tasks on the graphics card at 240Hz I got less than two hours of internet browsing before I had to refuel. With Optimus, I could push that up to three and half or more, which isn’t amazing, but it’s a huge difference (more on the battery later).
Razer Blade 17 – Performance and Gaming
The Blade 17 is one of the most powerful gaming laptops you can buy. It pairs its RTX 3080 Ti – Nvidia’s beefiest laptop GPU – with Intel’s 12th generation i7-2800H processor and 32GB of DDR5 4800MHZ memory. Outside of gaming, it’s a near-unbeatable combo, and I could multitask as much as I wanted to. I got zero slowdown, even when watching HD video with tons of other browser tabs open and a game downloading over WiFi in the background.
In-game, the Blade 17 shredded practically everything I threw at it, playing demanding games at max settings on its 1440p display with strong, steady frame rates. With everything dialed all the way up in Forza Horizon 5, I ran between 60 and 80 frames per second, for example, and a few minor settings tweaks got that up to 90. I scampered across rooftops in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla at max settings at a solid 60 to 80 frames per second. Both games looked delicious on the 1440p display, and it felt like a genuine step up from my regular 1080p monitor. On less demanding games on maximum settings – Sifu or Apex Legends, for example – you can expect to top 120 frames per second and beyond.
A good point of comparison is the 17-inch MSI Raider GE76, which IGN reviewed earlier this year. Like this version of the Blade 17, it costs $4,000 and has both a 3080 Ti and 32GB of DDR5 4800MHZ RAM. Unlike the Blade 17, it has an i9 processor that’s more powerful than the Blade’s i7, and it can also divert slightly more power to the graphics card than the Blade can. You’d expect, therefore, for the Raider to outperform the Blade in most tests. Here’s a comparison of the Blade versus the Raider as well as the Gigabyte Aero 16, also outfitted with a 3080 Ti.
As you can see, the Blade can more than hold its own against the Raider, which is both heavier and chunkier than the Blade. It lagged roughly 10% behind the Raider in our testing on Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus, and Hitman 3, but scored higher than the Raider in all other tests. The numbers above are all on max settings at 1080p, so expect lower numbers playing the same games at 1440p. When I ran the Total War: Three Kingdoms benchmark at 1440p, for example, I got 68 frames per second, which is still very strong.
The most demanding game I tried on the Blade 17 was the recent open-world zombie fest Dying Light 2, at max settings and with ray-tracing turned on. Here, the Blade 17 struggled, barely hitting a stuttering 30 frames per second. There’s no real shame in that, given that even high-end desktop cards can have trouble with this game at those settings. Plus, Nvidia’s DLSS tech, which renders an image at a lower resolution and upscales it, was a simple solution. Switching it on from the game settings, I got upwards of 50 frames per second without any noticeable loss of quality.
One of my favorite things about the Blade is how it manages to give you these numbers without overheating or running super loud. Heat and fan noise is often a problem with gaming laptops, and while the Blade 17’s three fans do run loud, they’re quieter than other gaming laptops I’ve tested. Even playing game sounds through the speakers at 50% volume was enough to drown them out. Combining the fans with the Blade 17’s numerous vents, including one that’s tucked away, barely noticeable, along the hinge between the keyboard and the display, is enough to stop the laptop getting too hot. The underside was always warm after a long gaming session, but not so hot that I couldn’t pick it up, and I never noticed any excessive heat seeping through the keyboard to my fingers while I was playing, which has been an issue on previous gaming laptops I’ve used.
I knew the Blade 17 would perform well in-game – and at this price, it simply has to – but I still can’t help but be impressed. Laptop gaming is never going to compare to playing on high-end desktop, but this is pretty much as good as it gets on a portable machine, and it sets you up to run games on max settings for the rest of 2022 and beyond.
A quick thought on the speakers: they’re just fine. Razer has certainly improved on last year, and the new Blade 17 has eight speakers including four subwoofers. But music sounded better on a relatively cheap Bluetooth speaker, and game sounds that should be big and boomy end up a little washed out. The speakers are definitely passable, and I like that they work with the THX Spatial Audio to give you a mini surround sound system that plays directional audio, but it’s not enough to stop me reaching for my headset.
Razer Blade 17 – Battery Life
The Blade 17’s battery life was passable when I turned the right settings on, and horrible when I didn’t. The key was to flick on Nvidia’s Optimus mode, which tries to save you battery by switching to integrated graphics and a 60Hz refresh rate when you don’t need the Blade 17 going full steam. At 50% brightness on balanced power mode and with location and Bluetooth turned off, the Blade 17 lasted 3 hours and 21 minutes on PC Mark 10’s Modern Office battery test, which simulates what you might do on a regular work day.
That’s just about acceptable – it’s short of the MSI Raider GE76, which has a bigger battery and a worse screen, but long enough that you can work away from a charger for a few hours without worrying.
With any other combination of settings, the battery life was atrocious. Confusingly, Nvidia has an “auto-select” graphics option that’s separate to Optimus but is also supposed to toggle between your GPU and integrated graphics. With that turned on, the Blade 17 couldn’t even manage 90 minutes on the battery test, and I’m assuming that’s because it was running the screen at a constant 240Hz. When I tried forcing the refresh rate to stay at 60Hz, which is only possible when you’re running on the GPU, the Blade managed 2 hours and 20 minutes on the test. It’s annoying that the Blade only has decent battery life if you set it up in one particular way.
The 3 to 4 hours of internet browsing that I got on most charges is less than what previous Blade models could manage, but it’s by no means a dealbreaker. I think of the Blade 17 as a gaming machine first, a laptop second. To make use of its high-end specs, you're going to need to plug it in. For me, being able to move between rooms in my house or take it into the office is a secondary benefit, and the power pack, while admittedly heavy, is surprisingly slim, so it will fit in whatever bag you’re using.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/gP8cLxs
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