Gadgetory

whatever view laptops here TechnoBuffalo I typically use them for about a week in the office at home out and about really trying to use them extensively in various environments and learn their quirks and test their performance but things were a bit different with this review I recently traveled to Shanghai China to cover the vivo NEX phone and for the purpose of this review specifically I left my MacBook Pro home and just use the 2018 Blade exclusively as my only laptop throughout my week-long trip doing everything on it from watching movies replying to emails and editing the video that you saw on this channel on this laptop and after a week of extremely heavy use I have some thoughts let's take a closer look at a razors latest mobile powerhouse razor is marketing this machine as a powerful mobile gaming rig so we first need to start with the specs our review model is the 15 inch version with the 144 Hertz 1080p display it's got 16 gigs of RAM and 8th gen 6 Core i7 processor a 512 gig nvme SSD and a gtx 1060 max-q with 6 gigs of VRAM handling all of the graphics and there is no denying the fact that this thing is packed to the brim with a crazy amount of horsepower and impressive specs especially for a laptop but all those things come at a hefty costs both in terms of price retail price on this one here is 2200 bucks and the weight of the machine itself and the blade is by no means too big to carry but that all aluminum body does have a substantial footprint and weighing in at just over 4 and a half pounds there's no mistaking this thing for ultrabook it was a little cumbersome using this thing to catch up on YouTube videos on a small airplane tray table but once I got to the hotel I had no issue using it at a desk which honestly will probably be where you'll be using it as well mainly because you will not be able to stray away from power for too long I was extremely disappointed by the battery life on the new blade having a few lightweight programs like slack a VPN client and a word processor open all at the same time drain the onboard battery much faster than expected even in the better battery mode on one ten I only got about three and a half hours of use on average and that was what the display said to about 50% brightness this made it difficult to do just about anything during a massive press event with little power available and it was just plain frustrating to watch my battery quickly drain in front of me while I did simple things like copy files from an SD card over to an external SSD when this machine was set in performance mode and Premiere Pro was open and rendering video the battery life fell even faster and I was lucky to get about 90 minutes before the battery was completely drained and before you start tearing me apart in the comments I know I know Razer is not marketing the blade as some machine with incredible long lasting battery but I couldn't achieve what most people would even just consider the average and I expected much better from the relatively large 80 watt hour battery inside the machine okay so let's move on to something a little bit more positive and that's the display our review unit has the 1080p display and it looks really good and it's got a feature you won't notice until you really sit down and start using it and that's the fact that it's got a refresh rate of 144 Hertz and if you haven't seen or used a screen with this refresh rate it's hard to really show or describe how smooth it is but I'll say after using it you'll probably find it a little bit difficult to go back to that traditional 60 Hertz display the higher refresh rate is of course perfect for gaming but it's noticeable all across the system just scrolling through menus or websites was extremely smooth and just makes navigating around the system seem a whole lot snappier personally though I'd rather go with the 4k model of this laptop over this one and it doesn't have that insanely high refresh rate but when editing in Premiere Pro or just trying to get work done I found myself really wanting extra resolution 1080p just wasn't cutting it razor's also done a bit of work to trim down the bezels around the display and though there still appear fairly prominently they are better and hey at least the webcam is up on top above the display besides the screen the keyboard and trackpad are very important on any laptop but I'm happy to say that they follow the Razer standard here on this new blade you're getting an incredibly solid comfortable and tactile keyboard with the ass individual RGB lighting perky paired with a fluid and now much larger trackpad though pay special attention to that keyboard as much as I appreciate the inclusion of full-size arrow keys I hate the fact that they are not at the very end of the keyboard like almost every other additional keyboard out there that seemingly small and harmless change led to many incorrect key presses and was just generally annoying to get used to all of my critiques aside though when this machine does what it was built to do any kind of high end performance tasks like gaming or video editing it is truly a phenomenal job and I was really impressed with just the raw power you're getting out of this laptop while editing in Premiere Pro the blade was able to edit and render my 4k clips like they were nothing not only could I play them back at full quality in the timeline but the entire four and a half minute video itself could be exported in 4k in just about four minutes and being built for games of course the blade handled games here without any issue at all we played two pretty demanding titles GTA 5 and pub G and both ran incredibly well although again it is only running at 1080p I was still impressed both games were set to their maximum graphics settings and we saw an average of a hundred frames per second in GT 5 and while playing pub G the game ran at a solid 60 frames per second on Ultra settings it is worth mentioning though that we got these results when the blade was plugged into power running off the internal battery will cut the framerate down a bit depending on the game but it's still gonna be totally playable for example we still were able to get 75 to 80 frames per second on average when playing GTA 5 on the internal battery putting benchmarks aside any game or processor intensive tasks ran extremely well on this laptop and I brought this thing to Shanghai to do one main thing and that was to edit the video that you saw on this channel and I honestly could not have asked for a better performance especially from a laptop and razor says the new and improved cooling system in GPU helped keep this machine relatively quiet during high intensive tasks and they deliver on those claims for the most part with this new blade it's certainly not silent but it's not as bad as we've seen on other razer laptops one of the benefits of this thicker laptop chassis is having more ports and luckily on this blade you have a lot to work with you've got three USB 3 type-a ports a Thunderbolt 3 port HDMI mini display and a headphone jack and these ports are very much appreciated by the pros and the gamers using this machine put to use and fairly quickly there are a few missed opportunities here on this 2018 blade I'd have loved to have seen or I guess rather heard of better sounding built-in speakers and I were to really love to have seen some kind of Windows hello compatible unlocking method that spacious power button up top seems like an obvious choice for a fingerprint reader to be built into but when it comes down to it everything the 2018 Blade was built to do by Razer it does really well and there's no denying the fact that all those components working together provide a powerful mobile experience that's just great for gaming or video editing and this machine is really built for all you guys out there who want a portable gaming laptop that can truly hold its own you want the most ports you can get the most power available on a laptop and the blade delivers on that promise and the target audience that this was built for by Razer is going to be very happy you will not be disappointed but all the features you're getting on this 2018 blade do not come without a few compromises and I just want to say this and kind of in closing if you are not someone who needs all that raw power or you really want a game on the road there are laptops out there many laptops that are much lighter have a much longer lasting battery are much cheaper and just more well rounded in versatile options that you're probably gonna be happy with so what are your thoughts on the 2018 razor blade are you someone who really prefers a thicker laptop that has more ports more power or a bigger display that better refresh rate or do you want something smaller a little bit more versatile and a little bit thinner leave a comment down below and let us know also be sure to subscribe to the channel click that notification bell so you are notified about upcoming videos coming to the channel I am Robert Rosenfeld from TechnoBuffalo thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next one