Razer has upgraded its premium Blade 15 with an Advanced Model (early 2020) that has all the newest toys.
Announced Thursday, the Blade 15 Advanced Model will move up from the previous model’s 6-core chip to Intel’s new 10th-gen Comet Lake H Core i7-108750H, which features 8 cores in a laptop Core i7 for the first time.
At the same time, the Blade 15 Advanced Model will feature Nvidia’s newest GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q and GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q. Most gamers may focus on the ‘Super’ portion of the name, but the Max-Q part may be more important: Nvidia says its latest iteration of Max-Q gets a lot closer in performance to its standard “Max-P” GPUs.
Razer
Razer’s Blade 15 (early 2020) will feature Intel’s 10th-gen Comet Lake H CPUs, 300Hz panels, and Nvidia’s Super GPUs.
Long called the “MacBook Pro” of PCs, the Razer Blade 15 brings many other changes with the Advanced Model. Gone is the optical switch keyboard of the previous model, though Razer retains the beautiful per-key RGB and has redesigned the key layout to be friendlier. Battery capacity remains the same at a fairly beefy 80 watt-hours.
The other eyebrow-raising feature is the option for a 300Hz, 1080p wide-viewing-angle screen. Gamers who care about winning will want the 300Hz panel. Users who want a Blade 15 to edit photos and videos, or make everything look fabulous, may want to opt for the touch UHD 4K OLED panel. In addition to its insanely great black levels (thanks OLED!), the panel is rated to hit 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut.
Even the ports hide a premium feature. The SD card reader supports UHS-III speeds, essentially doubling the throughput from an SD card to 624MBps on UHS-III SD cards that support it.
Razer
Razer’s Blade 15 (early 2020) will feature Intel’s 10th gen Comet Lake H CPUs, 300Hz panels and Nvidia’s Super GPUs.
One of the few downsides to the Advanced Model is its SSD design. Razer offers 512GB or 1TB NVMe SSD options, in a single M.2. If you want more storage in a Razer Blade 15, you can get that with the Base Model, which features two M.2 slots (with one filled, obviously).
The Base Model is otherwise somewhat limited. Its top CPU is Intel’s 10th-gen Core i7-10750H with 6 cores and Hyper-Threading. Graphics will vary from a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti to an RTX 2070. The signature per-key RGB lighting of the Advanced Model is swapped for a single-zone Chrome RGB keyboard. The base model also lacks Windows Hello biometric facial login features, and the battery steps down to 65 watt-hours. The Base Model starts at $1,600 with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, 6-core Core i7-10750H, 16GB of DDR4/2933 RAM, 256GB SSD, and 144Hz 1080p panel.
The price for the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model starts at $2,600 with a 300Hz panel, RTX 2070 Super Max and 16GB of DDR4/2933 RAM. The top-end Advanced Model goes for $3,300 with 16GB of RAM, RTX 2080 Max-Q, and 1TB SSD. Razer notes the laptop memory can be upgraded to 64GB, so the modules aren’t soldered in place. All Advanced Models feature Intel’s 8-core Core i7-10875H CPU.