Razer Blade 15 RTX2060 Review

Design and Appearance

Sporting an exterior finish that comes in color choices of mercury white or inky blackness, on a chassis that is cast from a singular slab of CNC aluminum, this laptop looks every bit as premium as it is priced. And with a weight of 2.07kg along with a profile that is 0.7″ at its thickest parts, it will stand out from a crowd of 15.6″ gaming laptops for its svelte and portable frame. 

The lid of our review model sports the iconic triple-headed snake logo in its green-backlit halo, set against a pitch-black surround. And it opens up to reveal a keyboard that is dressed likewise. Beyond the dapper looks that it gives off in and of itself, this surface finish also serves to conceal fingerprints and scratches.

The laptop is rigged in all the right places, hardware and even software, to deal with all the hammering that will be meted on it from crunching fingers and exacting workloads. The base is sturdy, as is the lid and the hinges that steady them.

Ports and Connection

Imagine your gaming exploits being beamed across not one but three 4K screens, this laptop can do just that, and even more.

From the Mini DisplayPort and the HDMI to the pick of the bunch, the Thunderbolt 3 port, the Razer Blade 15 is well stocked with ports that allow you to output to three external monitors for an extensive view. The Thunderbolt 3 port can do that and also be used for charging or to connect to your peripherals or external devices, such as an external storage device.

Other than that, three other USB 3.0 Type-A ports and a USB Type-C port feature at the laptops’ edges, along with a 3.5mm Combo audio port and a Kensington Lock. While wired connectivity is made possible by the inclusion of the Gigabit Ethernet, as with the base model, the Wi-Fi 6 feature takes care of all your wireless internet connections.

Keyboard and Input devices

As soon as you clear the decks for gaming, the keyboard rises to the occasion with a flourish of lights to lead you on. The view is spectacular, whether it is the single zone backlight of the base model or the Razer Chroma-supported Per-Key RGB backlight of the advanced model.

The keys on this laptop are less shallow than those of the advanced model, although the clatter is still very much present, as is their seeming sponginess.

The trackpad also wears the same looks as its counterpart. It is a smooth and glassy surface with windows gesture support to provide precision and accuracy of recognition over all the two-finger and three-finger tricks in the sleeve.

As with the advanced model, the feedback is audible. It is a trackpad and an overall input ensemble by extension with more hits than misses.

Audio

The grille area that lines out on either side of the keyboard are the outlets through which the Dolby atmos stereo speakers churn out sound output. While it is probably too much to expect groundbreaking audio from these front-firing speakers, the bass could be much better than it turns out to be.

And although the speakers’ volume is not loud enough to wake the dead, the intensity of the output will resonate with the gaming audience, and much more with the YouTube and Video playback audience.

Display

Most gamers will be content with the Full HD, 1920 x 1080 display of this laptop’s 15.6″ screen, and even more so as the screen refreshes at a rate of 144Hz, a couple of notches above the standard 60Hz benchmark. But if you need more, then the advanced model of this laptop has a 4K OLED screen that is a joy to behold.

The screen gives out output in vibrant and lucid visuals that will catch the eye at every turn. You’ll catch sight of the ebb and flow of rivers in Forza Horizon, and find it hard to lose sight of the scenic and snowy mountains while raiding tombs with Lara Croft. And if you want to flex some of your creative muscle, there’s pretty extensive coverage of the color space to work with, from the sRGB to the Adobe color gamut.

Viewing angles are wide, and the matte panel will hold out quite well for sustainable visibility in outdoor surroundings. Other highlights of this laptop’s display include the 4.9mm bezels at the screen and an HD webcam that is Windows-Hello supported for easy system access via facial recognition.

Graphics

Our review laptop is equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card, one in a long line of GPUs’ that this laptop can count on for graphics output. It is in the middle of the spectrum for sub-$1500 gaming laptops, as with the Razer Blade 15, whose options go from the GTX 1660 up to the RTX 3070 chip.

With this graphics card, the laptop can keep up with the demands of high-end gaming and other creative endeavors on the menu of its owners. For creatives, this laptop can take on advanced photo and video editing tasks with the full complement of shaders and texture fillers, along with a 3D-ready provision.

Gaming

Gamers can rest easy knowing that this laptop can comfortably run a vast majority of the biggest games on the offering. No matter how taxing the games are, this laptop offers a good platform to take them on, even if it might take the odd concession to do so.

With high settings at 1080p, this laptop can reach framerates hovering just above the 50fps mark for heavy games in the mold of Red Dead Redemption 2, Metro Exodus, and Control. The latter will make the most of the ray tracing feature in the GPU, resulting in even more immersive and realistic gaming.

And although there is a tendency of most games to experience a slight drop in frame rates with ray tracing, as with Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, the high refresh rate of this laptops’ screen will make it almost impossible to notice. FPS gaming as well as other Fast-paced games that throw up gaming action in blink-and-you-miss-it frames will benefit from the speed of the display, making for an even more enjoyable gaming experience.

Battery

You’ll be lucky to keep the lights on for a maximum of two hours during gaming, especially if you go full throttle on all the system settings or the display.

The 80Wh battery can be recharged via the proprietary A.C adaptor, and with the Thunderbolt 3 Port if you are on the go and can do with a lot less heft on your hands. You can always tune down on the nits and the graphic settings, or resort to a host of power management modes to buy more time, but there’s only so much that you can get in return.

Cooling and Noise Emission

This laptop comes armed to the teeth with all the gears of a sophisticated but efficient cooling system, in preparation for the inevitable heating challenge that is posed by the powerful processors inside this laptop. While the advanced model employs a vapor chamber cooler for the bulk of its cooling operation, the base model sticks with the more traditional heat pipe assembly, and it is no less effective.

The constant feature across the board is the surfeit of very thin fins on the duo of fans, revolving at breakneck speed and cutting through the heat strain with plenty of zip and buzz. In exchange for the great fanfare, the laptop will almost always be cool and comfortable to use, even on your laps.

It may throw up a scare or two at the thick of gaming action or with a pile of heavy workloads bearing down on it. But it should be nothing more than a scare, short-lived, and sorted out swiftly by fans that are always on the loose.

Performance

There’s quite a pool of processors to choose from with this laptop. Our review laptop settles for the 9th Gen Intel Core i7-9750H processor, and it is a near-perfect choice. Near perfect in the sense that the octa-core processors in other configurations should perform better, on paper at least.

With this six-core processor capable of reaching a boost clock of 4.5GHz, the Razer Blade 15 is well placed to take on an array of taxing workloads without incidence. And with its hyper-threading function in the works, this laptop makes a good case for multitasking. With routine computing, as with web browsing, streaming over Youtube and Spotify, this laptop will pretty much chew up everything like a piece of cake.

But this laptop was not built for the mundane, and so it can step up to more serious computing, as with media transcoding, 3D design works, and programming. While it takes the cake with all of the aforementioned tasks, gaming is the icing, no scratch that, gaming is the whole cake.

And the Razer Blade serves up all the relish of high-profile gaming in a platter, all the turbo boosting, adrenaline-pumping, and rapid-fire action that is a staple of the gaming community.

Final Verdict

Our review model of the Razer Blade 15 is one in a long line of iterations of the 15.6″ gaming laptop, with the distinctions cutting across the cooling system, display panels, and graphics card. And as it is a gaming laptop, the graphic card configuration is the main distinction.

From the RTX 2060 graphics card of the base model, which is the thrust of this review,  to the RTX 30 series graphics card of the advanced model. 

While its slim profile sets it yards apart from the competition, its impressive hardware ensemble puts further gloss on its claim for top stakes in the 15.6″ gaming laptop leaderboard. 

All of the laptops in the lineup are top-shelf picks, for avid gamers and creatives alike. It is still plagued by the perennial problems of gaming laptops. Chief among which is the frenzy of the fans under load, and a battery that is at the receiving end of powerful processor exertions.

Device Specifications

Display size   ‎

15.6 Inches

Screen Resolution

‎1920 x 1080 Pixels

Processor  ‎

Core i7-9750H

RAM

‎16 GB DDR4

Hard Drive 

‎512 GB Flash Memory Solid State

Graphics Processor ‎

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

Operating System

‎Windows 10

Item Weight

‎4.63 pounds

Product Dimensions ‎

13.98 x 0.78 x 9.25 inches