Razer Blade 16 review: the RTX 4090 is a powerful, very expensive chip

The Razer Blade 16 is exciting. I’m thrilled because he has one of the best displays in a gaming laptop I’ve seen so far. But it’s also exciting to see the mobile version of the RTX 4090 for the first time. This is the chip that powers some of the most powerful and most expensive gaming laptops coming this year.

The results we got from our test unit are nothing short of amazing.This is a beast of a device with some serious power and a panel that makes games pop. It is also a luxury item that cannot be put in. But it’s great – and the framerate it’s displaying gives us hope that we might see a similar performance boost from his more affordable RTX 40 series laptops this year increase.

The Blade 16 unit I have contains a Core i9-13950HX, 32 GB of RAM, a 2 TB SSD, and a top-of-the-line RTX 4090. Both storage and RAM are upgradeable. At 5.4 lbs, it’s not that too Much heavier than a 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Max — which is impressive for a full-tilt gaming laptop given the massive frame rates the Blade delivers. Certainly thinner than other giant laptops with RTX 4090 chips. You can fit two.)

This particular model is priced at $4,299.99. Buy this or buy 4 dishwashers. For many, it’s multiple paychecks. It’s a lot.

But damn, can this be a game. Check out the chart. All in all, we see a 20-30% increase from the RTX 3080 Ti machines we reviewed in some titles, and even bigger jumps in others. I got Shadow of the Tomb Raider and 415 on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Compared to Blade’s 169 and 548 respectively. QHD Acer Predator Triton 500 SE was 79fps tomb raider With ray tracing enabled and 67 fps on red dead redemption 2 With ray tracing enabled. Blade pushed out 118 fps and 103 fps in the title with the same settings. These are significant (and noticeable) jumps in performance.

The only titles that can get this model below 60fps are Cyberpunk 2077I pushed Ray Tracing to the highest setting and the Blade started having issues. After burning out everything else I threw that day, watching my laptop trip and blow up around Night City was almost satisfying. (cyber punk Of course, with ray tracing turned off, it was much more playable, but it still didn’t hit 60fps at native resolution. )

All games were run at the highest possible settings. Because come on. This is 4090.

If you really want to maximize the title like cyber punk Without compromise, Nvidia offers a solution with DLSS 3 capabilities using new frame generation technology that boosts frame rates by over 50%.used this tomb raider With ray tracing turned on, it increased by nearly 50%. Basically, it improved Blade’s frame rate to levels you’d expect if ray tracing wasn’t turned on at all. This is a solid option for making heavy titles more accessible, as long as you don’t mind a little extra delay.

And we can’t overstate how good games look on this mini LED display. The extensive port selection, including HDMI 2.1, Thunderbolt 4 and a UHS-II SD slot, should make connecting an external monitor a breeze, but the Blade’s Mini LED panel delivers incredibly rich and vibrant colors, making it even more crisp. It has great detail. pleasure to see. It was honestly a pain to drop the resolution from his UHD Plus to FHD Plus. Everything looked visibly rough in comparison.The new display also has a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is a welcome change after the previous year’s 16:9 on Razer’s machine. It is pushed up 16 inches diagonally from the screen.) The bottom bezel is now dramatically The smaller size makes the whole laptop more sleek and less blocky overall.

Oh, and it’s also a dual-mode display. That means you can switch between native his UHD Plus/120Hz and FHD Plus/240Hz ‘modes’ with one click. Well, hey. All you really have to do is dive into Razer’s Synapse software, dig out the display panel, after that Flick the switch. After doing that, you need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect. So if you’ve heard about this feature and imagined it coming and going all the time, it’s not an experience at all. only happens), and you’ll probably stay in high-res mode most of the time (because if you don’t want high-res, why buy this?) If you want to play a competitive shooter , switch to FHD.

The Blade is first and foremost a gaming laptop, but if you’re interested in using it for editing or other GPU-intensive workloads, you can too. This device took just over 2 minutes in our 4K video export test. This puts him over a minute faster than last year’s Razer Blade 15 model with the RTX 3060 in the same test, making him one of the fastest scores we’ve seen so far. It even beats Apple’s M2 Pro Mac Mini desktop, but still lags far behind the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Max.

Blade scored 1,296 on Premiere Pro’s PugetBench, which tests live playback and export performance at 4K and 8K. That’s a well over 50% increase from last year’s Blade 15 Advanced Unit, and actually outperforms the M2 Max MacBook Pro, while the 3080 Ti GE76 Raider scores slightly higher.

One caveat to all this: Blade gets. hotIt got very hot while playing games or doing GPU intensive work in Premiere Pro. I would have avoided touching the area near the hinge and never used it on my lap. Under the hood, the CPU was spending a good amount of time in his mid-90s (Celsius), sometimes even hitting 100. Oh that’s noisy.I could hear the fans all over the place during the benchmark The Bargeoffice.

Well this had all the different settings maxed out and the discrete GPU powering everything. If you don’t want to hear your fans, Synapse has a silent mode you can turn on. But again, why buy this if you’re not looking to get the absolute maximum power out of the game?

But a $4,299 device isn’t something people want to buy often. An investment of that magnitude should pay off over quite a few years. The Razer Blade is already notorious for not lasting as long as buyers would like, with constant overheating expected only to hasten the deterioration of components like CPUs, GPUs and motherboards.

Again, I know no one buys a Blade with an RTX 4090 and expects it to be quiet. Blade laptops are thin, light, and hot. It’s been their reputation for years. It’s a reminder that thinness comes at a price in PC space. If you expected this year’s generation to buck that trend, you’ll be disappointed.

The rest of this device is standard Razer Blade fare. If you’ve used a Blade 15, you know what to expect. The speakers sound very decent and do an admirable job of making the game audio audible over noisy fans and even if the volume he’s under 20% and the fans are burning it’s what I need I could hear things. The trackpad is one of the largest you’ll find on a laptop (seriously, it’s huge) and has a satisfying click. Note that you’ll need to reach farther than you’re used to to left-click the .

Battery life isn’t great either (if you have a simple hope that it’s on an H-series Intel machine). With battery saver on, external GPU disabled, keyboard backlight off, resolution set to 1920 x 1200, average 3 hours 43 minutes of continuous use (overtop Slack and Spotify, not games) (meaning multitasking in 20 Chrome tabs running on ).

My only real gripe about the design is that it’s still a fingerprint magnet.I know Razer claims they’re making improvements in this area, but not enough. As soon as I took the Blade out of the box, it was covered in fingerprints. As our photographers were getting the device ready to shoot, they complained that they couldn’t wipe and wipe it completely clean.I know tons of you don’t mind this. But the price of this laptop is 4 thousand dollarsFor that much money, I want the lid to not look completely gross.

That little detail aside, the Blade 16 is an incredibly impressive package. It’s hot, noisy, and picks up fingerprints. For now, that’s what you can expect when buying a Razer Blade. It certainly offers one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had on a laptop (and considering the price, it really should).

Still, this device is far from most people’s budget stratosphere, so it’s hard for me that too excited about it. What I’m hoping for is that the lower priced versions of these chips and newer features like DLSS 3 will bring good performance at a slightly higher price point in this world. We think Nvidia has done its job, and is making sure that gaming will be more fun for everyone once the RTX 4000 series starts rolling out.