Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition review

As you’d expect of a laptop at this price range with this sort of specifications and Razer’s impressive heritage, the performance of the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition is very good. While we didn’t test the highest-end model with professional with the Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 GPU, the model we’re reviewing features the RTX 2080 Max-Q graphics card.

This is still a mightily formidable graphics card, and while it’s mainly aimed at gamers, it still does an excellent job at running professional applications as well, while the Max-Q design of the GPU means Razer has been able to fashion an impressively thin laptop around this powerful graphics card.

Even though this is not a gaming laptop, despite its looks, we're able to play some games on it, and the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition does an excellent job, as you’d expect. The RTX 2080 isn’t powerful enough to run modern games with full graphical settings at 4K resolution – but you won’t find a mobile GPU that can do that.

However, even at ultra settings, a graphically-intensive game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider managed 74 frames per second at 1080p. With the 4K screen’s refresh rate of 60Hz, anything above 60FPS is rather academic, but it means you’ll get impressive gaming performance when you want to wind down from work. As the GPU is an RTX series card, it also means you can take advantage of ray tracing graphical effects in games that support it.

Of course, this laptop is designed for creatives, and you’d be doing it – and yourself – a disservice if you only used the  Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition for gaming. The RT Cores in Nvidia’s lineup of RTX GPUs that handle ray tracing can also help creators, such as animators, create digital art with realistically rendered lighting.

Software such as Maya and 3ds Max can take advantage of the RTX 2080 Max-Q’s faster ray tracing performance, allowing animators, game designers and other creatives to use the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition rather than a desktop PC. This could genuinely be a transformative product for those kind of professionals.

The GPU also features Tensor Cores for AI applications, and again this can help creatives by performing tasks such as resolution scaling and video re-timing much faster than older hardware, and creative applications like Adobe Lightroom can take advantage of this feature.

Now, we haven’t fully explored the impact that the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition can make to heavy image editing workloads, but with our time with the laptop we’ve been impressed with how fast it can handle, and even with our rather modest video editing and transcoding needs, the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition performed excellently. It also kept impressively quiet, even when under heavy load. If you’ve ever been distracted by loud fans whirring away in gaming laptops and mobile workstations, then you’ll be impressed with the performance of the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition’s thermal handling, as it allows the powerful components to keep cool without having fans blasting out hot air (along with noise).

Battery life

You’d be forgiven for expecting the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition to have a rather paltry battery life considering the powerful components and high resolution screen that it comes with, and while you’d be pretty much correct, it’s not as ridiculously short as some of its mobile workstation competitors.

In our battery life benchmark test, which runs a looped 1080p video at 50% brightness, the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition lasted a respectable 5 hours and 28 minutes. Now, that’s not a huge time, but it’s better than we expected.

However, it’s very likely that you’ll be using the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition for much more strenuous tasks than simply watching 1080p videos, and that’s when you’ll see the battery very quickly drain away.

For example, with the PCMark 8 Battery Life test, the battery life dropped to just over four hours. That’s replicating tasks like browsing the web, writing documents and video conferencing. Again, the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition is built for more intensive tasks. For rendering 3D animations, editing 4K videos and even playing games, expect the battery life to drop significantly.

Still, it’s not a shockingly short amount of time, and it means on days when you just need a laptop for catching up on emails, for example, then the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition won’t have you hovering by a power socket.

But, if you want a workstation that combines power and long(ish) battery life, Apple’s MacBook Pro 15-inch is still the king, with an excellent 7 hours and 36 minutes in our tests.

Verdict

The Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition is one of the best mobile workstations we’ve tested. This is thanks to Razer putting its gaming expertise to great use. It’s built a laptop that’s aimed at professionals – especially ones who work in media, games or any industry that requires complex 3D modelling – and packed it with some of the best mobile tech that’s currently available.

A lot of the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition’s success is thanks to the likes of Intel and Nvidia working hard to bring powerful components to mobile devices. The RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU, for example, allows the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition to offer excellent graphical performance while maintaining an impressively portable design.

The real star of the laptop, however, is the gorgeous OLED 4K screen, which makes everything you run on it look incredible. It also offers a decent amount of desktop space, considering the 15-inch screen size. The fact that it offers 100% DCI-P3 color gamut support and is factory calibrated means it’s an even more tempting purchase for digital creatives.

It’s not all good news, however, as the price is incredibly high, and the design won’t be quite to everyone’s tastes. If you’ve relied on MacBook Pros your entire career, there’s not quite enough to tempt you to switch – except for that screen. Place the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition side-by-side with the 15-inch MacBook Pro, and the OLED 4K panel of the Razer will make even the biggest Apple fan feel a bit let down by the MacBook’s Retina display.