Razer Blade 2019 review

For a laptop with such an exorbitant price tag, you would expect excellent all-around performance, gaming and otherwise. And, the Razer Blade without a doubt holds its own in this respect, delivering impressive frame rates in some of the latest games.

The numbers you see here show a significant improvement from the prior model. Frame rates in Total War: Warhammer II at ‘Ultra’ settings increased by a sizeable 22%, whereas 3DMark Time Spy results saw an astounding 45% boost.

Of course, the processor performance isn’t going to improve much year to year, especially since this laptop is fitted with the exact same Intel processor as before. That’s not a big deal since that hexa-core processor is plenty powerful to handle demanding workflows like video encoding and other intensive tasks. Anyway, if it isn’t enough for you, you can always upgrade to the 9th-gen CPU.

At this level of power, the Razer Blade could easily do function as both a creative professional’s workstation and a hard-core gamer’s gaming powerhouse. However, it’s the laptop’s Thunderbolt 3 and DisplayPort connectivity that really drives this point home. Even if this configuration of the laptop doesn’t come with a 4K display, it can absolutely drive one via either option – or two with both.

As we’ve said before, the just okay 1080p display supports the laptop quite a bit in delivering some incredibly smooth gameplay in the latest games that utilize Nvidia’s ray tracing dynamic lighting technology. Both Battlefield 5 and Metro Exodus play with nary a hiccup at ‘Ultra’ settings with ray tracing triggered.

Battery life

One of the biggest surprises from this year’s Razer Blade is its startlingly impressive longevity – by gaming laptop standards, that is. Inheriting the same 80Whr lithium ion battery from last year’s model, Razer was somehow able to attain an enormous 87% bump in this Blade’s PCMark 8 Battery Life results.

Likewise, the laptop ran 98% longer during our local 1080p video playback test. These numbers put the Razer Blade much more in line with competing thin and light gaming laptops, which has been long overdue.

You shouldn’t expect to see similar numbers or anywhere close to these while gaming on battery. However, you are ultimately getting a gaming laptop from Razer that can last long enough to get some real work (or even light entertaining) done while you’re traveling or commuting.

Software and features

One of the best things about Razer gaming laptops is that they’re set up with no extra bloatware or third-party software. There are no McAfee or eBay apps loading upon boot here. Of course, there’s always Synapse, Razer’s intuitive system for personalizing its Chroma RGB lighting across the laptop, which in this case, only covers the keyboard.

With this software, you can choose from an assortment of lighting choices down to each individual key, and design lighting profiles specific to particular games that, once loaded, will activate as soon as you enter said game. This app also allows you to do performance toggles for ‘Gaming’ (a GPU boost) and ‘Creator’ (a CPU boost) as well as direct cooling fan control. That’s a pre-installed app we can get behind.

Final verdict

The Razer Blade 2019 is Razer’s most improved gaming laptop to date. Both sheer graphical performance and long-lasting battery life are immensely better.

Razer also took this opportunity at a refresh to fix the glaring exclusion of Windows Hello. While the application needs a lot of refining, we still welcome the almost essential feature – especially at this price point.

This may be one of the most egregiously priced gaming laptops out there, but Razer has obviously taken great pains to pack in as much value into the Blade as possible, enough to make it worth your hard-earned cash. If you do end up dropping the thousands required, rest assured you are taking home the complete package.