Razer’s Blade 14 is my go-to advice for anybody looking for a good gaming laptop computer, however as spectacular as it’s, it trades energy for portability. If that’s the type of sacrifice you don’t wish to make, then say whats up to the Razer Blade 18—that is the powerhouse you’re on the lookout for.
Side-by-side with the Razer Blade 14, the Blade 18 seems like a protecting huge brother. You can see the household resemblance, however the bigger Blade is extra imposing. Its 18-inch Mini LED show is so vivid it’s virtually overwhelming in darkish rooms, and it produces vivid colours that rival the already gorgeous display screen on the Blade 14.
The Blade 18 begins at $3,100, however the mannequin I examined is $4,500. You get a lot of energy for the worth. It packs a 14th-generation Intel Core i9 14900HX processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (upgradable to the beastly RTX 4090, which is what I examined), 32 GB of RAM, and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. It’s the type of energy that may tear by even the most demanding video games.
Smooth Screen
Razer outdid itself with the show on the Razer Blade 18. The Mini LED panel has a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel decision, with 2,000 native dimming zones, delivering distinctive distinction between brighter and darker areas of the picture. The Razer Blade 14 was already one among the most vibrant laptop computer screens I’d seen, however the Blade 18 makes it look boring by comparability.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft
But what units it aside is the 300-Hz refresh charge. At their finest, most gaming laptops solely help 240 Hz, which is loads for many video games, however for fast-paced titles like Overwatch 2, you need all the frames you will get, and the Blade 18 is one among the few laptops I’ve examined that may crank out that many reliably.
Maintaining such a excessive body charge goes to be a drain on the battery, however Razer’s Synapse software program has an choice to mechanically change the show to 60 Hz when on battery energy. This dramatically cuts down on what number of frames your video games need to render, conserving energy, however will result in much less easy gameplay. You may also press Fn+R to cycle between 60 Hz, 240 Hz, and 300 Hz whereas linked to a charger.
Synapse additionally has a coloration profile selector that allows you to swap between DCI-P3, Adobe RGB, Rec.709, and different profiles to get exact, correct colours. This is very useful for players who’re additionally designers and picture or video editors—the place coloration accuracy is extremely important to their workflow.
Powerful Performance
An awesome show doesn’t matter a lot when you don’t have the horsepower to again it up, however happily, the Razer Blade 18 rises to the job. The mannequin I examined comes geared up with the GeForce RTX 4090 (you can even select between the RTX 4070 or 4080), and it tore by most video games. Starfield, a notably less-than-optimized sport, was getting 60-plus frames per second in crowded areas like New Atlantis on Ultra graphics settings, and sustaining 80 to 90 fps on Medium.
Overwatch 2 is what blew me away, although. On Medium graphics settings, I maintained a full 300 fps (whereas the laptop computer was linked to energy). This is a sport the place I’m always flying throughout the map in seconds, whipping out my pistol to land headshots on an enemy that wasn’t in my opinion a third of a second in the past, earlier than dashing again to heal my teammates. Three hundred frames per second is precisely what I would like, and the Razer Blade 18 has the show and the energy to provide it to me.