The Razer Blade 15, a perennial favorite among gaming laptops for its premium metal chassis and slick, slim design, has reached new heights this year. The 2021 Blade 15 Advanced Edition (starts at $2,499; $2,899 as tested) now carries Nvidia’s GeForce RTX “Ampere” 30 Series GPUs, unlocking a new level of gaming performance—and our test unit’s RTX 3080 can leverage the fast 240Hz refresh rate of its desktop-caliber 1440p display. Add a Core i7 CPU, 1TB of solid-state storage (both present in all models), 32GB of RAM (in our tester), a useful complement of ports, and nearly nine hours of battery life, and there’s a whole lot to love. Yes, it’s expensive, but this Razer represents the best of the best in the premium gaming space, earning an Editors’ Choice award for its reasonable portability, high build quality, and screaming speed.
Razer Thin: A Slim Metal Monster
A few years back, Razer modernized the Blade 15 with a squarer look and thinner screen bezels. Since then, it has seen only a few iterative changes, but that’s no cause for complaint. Its svelte build remains one of the sleekest among gaming laptops in terms of style, quality, and portability, all while ramping up the power under the hood. The all-black paint job, sharp edges, and clean look create a striking silhouette that several competitors have mirrored in their more recent designs.
The Blade 15 was one of the first high-end gaming laptops to be reasonably portable in a world of hefty slabs. This iteration measures 0.67 by 14 by 9.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.4 pounds, plenty thin and relatively light while packing more power than before. (It’s actually slightly thinner than the previous version, which was 0.7 inch thick.)
Slim competitors like the MSI Stealth 15M match this profile, while the Alienware m15 R4 focuses more on power. You can find more-compact laptops that really double down on portability, our favorite being the 14-inch Acer Predator Triton 300 SE. It’s worth noting that Razer’s power adapter is reasonably sized versus the bricks that accompany some gaming laptops, furthering the portability proposition.
While this trendsetter may have been beaten on portability by some rivals since its debut, I’d say it remains the most premium-feeling. The metal chassis is satisfyingly hefty in hand, solidly built all around, and it boasts what I believe to be the best touchpad on a Windows laptop—it’s roomy, scrolls incredibly smoothly, and evokes the same high-end feel as Apple’s superb MacBook touchpads.
The keyboard may not be field-leading, but it’s still on the nicer side. There’s a balanced amount of travel and feedback, neither too mushy nor too resistant, and the keys are individually backlit with customizable RGB lighting. The included Razer Synapse software lets you change each key’s color and visual effects to create appealing patterns or useful highlights. The keyboard hasn’t changed much in the last few iterations but, like the touchpad, that’s fine with me.
The display, on the other hand, has seen some exciting changes. High-refresh-rate screens have become common among gaming laptops over the past two years. This has usually been in the form of full HD (1080p) panels with 144Hz refresh rates, especially on more affordable systems, while pricier options offer 240Hz or even 300Hz full HD displays.
The new Blade 15’s screen, though, is one of the first laptop panels to combine 1440p (2,560-by-1,440-pixel) resolution and 240Hz refresh. Desktop 1440p monitors have become familiar as more powerful GPUs have been able to push high frame rates at this more demanding resolution, but until Nvidia’s “Ampere” launch, that was too big a reach for mobile systems. The GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080 have changed that.
You should expect to see this resolution and refresh-rate combination on more high-end gaming rigs as 2021 progresses, even if 1080p resolution remains more common overall. Our Razer review model, as mentioned, features an RTX 3080, making it a prime candidate to make the most of this sophisticated screen for various types of gaming. (We’ll see how sophisticated in the performance section a bit later.) The screen quality itself is impressive, with vivid colors and sharp images, and the thin screen bezels contribute to the overall sleek appearance.
Despite the thin frame, there are plenty of ports. The left flank holds two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support, a headphone jack, and the power connector. On the right, there’s another USB-A 3.1 port, another USB-C port (without Thunderbolt), an HDMI video output, and an SD card reader. That’s plenty of ports for both peripherals and secondary displays, so there’s not much to complain about on the connectivity front. The system also includes support for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth wireless connections, and a 720p webcam on the top bezel.
Component Check: RTX 30 Series GPUs Amp(ere) Up the Power
In addition to the lovely new display, the core components are the exciting draw of this Advanced Edition update. (Razer also sells a Blade 15 Base Edition, but it’s a functionally separate laptop with a thicker chassis.) All Advanced Editions utilize Intel’s Core i7-10875H CPU and a 1TB SSD, but graphics, memory, and display options vary. While the starting price is high, it’s still nice that you get 1TB of storage across the board, as gaming laptops (even pricey ones) too often skimp to half that, while game install sizes have ballooned.
The Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition now starts at $2,499, which nets you an RTX 3070 GPU and 16GB of RAM along with the 240Hz QHD screen. Our review model costs $400 more, bringing an RTX 3080 and 32GB of memory. That’s a mouth-watering combination for enthusiast gamers, especially considering the slim chassis design. Of course, whether it’s worth it will come down to the performance.
One note before we get into the results: This system is equipped with Nvidia Optimus, which is meant to switch dynamically between the CPU’s integrated graphics and the discrete Nvidia GPU as needed. Optimus mode saves power and battery life for when you’re just clicking around on your desktop or web browsing and aren’t doing anything graphically intensive. Part of this power-saving is achieved by capping the refresh rate at 60Hz, so make sure the dedicated GeForce GPU is active when gaming to take advantage of the display.
When plugged in, the laptop will switch modes automatically when appropriate (as when you launch a game), defaulting to Optimus mode on battery power. You can manually force one or the other on through the Nvidia Control Panel, but don’t be alarmed to see the 60Hz refresh in Windows’ settings while Optimus is active. Razer also informs me that you can no longer switch modes within the Synapse software as you could with past models.
Performance Testing: True AAA and High-Refresh Gaming
We ran the Blade 15 through our usual suite of benchmark tests and compared the results with a host of competition. Below you’ll find the names and specs of the rival machines I selected, so you can see which components the latest Razer is up against.
There are a lot of different combinations here, which should provide all the context we need on the Blade 15’s performance. The Alienware m15’s GeForce RTX 3070 is one of the best 30 Series performers we’ve seen, even outpacing some RTX 3080 laptops, while the MSI GE76 Raider shows what an RTX 3080 can do in a thicker 17-inch chassis. The Acer Triton 300 SE is the smallest RTX 30 Series system here, and its RTX 3060 represents the gap between the top and bottom of the Ampere stack. Finally, there’s the Blade 15 Advanced Edition from last year, the lone GeForce RTX 20 Series system here, to show how much difference “Ampere” makes.
It’s extra important to test each GPU against one another, because we’ve found lots of variation among RTX 30 Series laptops. This is true even between two RTX 3070s or two RTX 3080s, and once or twice we’ve seen one of Nvidia’s new GPUs outperform another that outranks it on paper. We’ve discussed this more in depth here, but the bottom line is that individually testing each system is vital, as you can no longer assume exact relative results from pure specifications.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
Given that there are only three different processors in these five systems, results here are very similar. The new Blade 15 lands in the middle of the pack, but in terms of real-world use, these are all very snappy laptops for home and office tasks. With a system fast enough for gaming, everyday multitasking is no sweat. Similarly, all of these notebooks’ SSDs ensure fast load and boot times, a now commonplace boon for gaming.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.
As with PCMark 10, there isn’t a lot of separation in these tests (with Cinebench a possible exception). The two thicker laptops, with room for better thermals, are the quickest, while the 2021 Razer edges the two others on average. None is a specialized media editing workstation, but their gaming-class processors make them better choices than general-use laptops for occasional content creation or rendering.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to midrange PCs with integrated graphics while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end and gaming PCs strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic test or gaming simulation, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload for a second opinion on each laptop’s graphical prowess.
All of these gaming-ready GPUs flexed their muscles here, but there are definitely some differences. The Blade 15 performed well, but the Alienware’s RTX 3070 has more raw power, as does the RTX 3080 in the beefy MSI Raider. The new Blade 15 handily outperformed last year’s GeForce RTX 2080 Super version, as it should. It also looks more potent than the RTX 3060 by a healthy margin, but let’s try some real games before drawing conclusions.
Real-World Gaming Tests
Synthetic tests are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world gameplay at various settings. We run them at 1080p resolution at the games’ medium and best image-quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12). We also tried them at the new Razer’s native 1440p resolution; those results are in the following text rather than the charts.
The outcome here is meaningfully different than that in our synthetic tests. The 2021 Razer looks much better in comparison to the Alienware here, pulling close in Far Cry 5 and pushing more frames in Rise of the Tomb Raider. It also stayed close to the MSI, on paper the more powerful rig in the group, as well as beating the RTX 2080 of last year’s Blade 15.
That’s a relief for the should-be-superior GeForce RTX 3080 of the new Razer, as most potential buyers will be more concerned with actual gaming frame rates than theoretical 3D power. Of course, this also shows that results can swing from game to game, so don’t take our numbers as gospel. Still, the Advanced Edition’s AAA gaming performance is sitting pretty.
As for the system’s 1440p native resolution (citing the maximum-quality presets only), the 2021 Razer averaged 95fps in Far Cry 5 and 101fps in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Stepping up from 1080p to 1440p resulted in respective drops of 12% and 24% in the two games. Considering the sharper appearance, that may be worth it for many gamers.
These are older titles, though, and we’ll be updating our gaming test suite soon, so I also booted up Assassin’s Creed Valhalla at 1440p and saw 75fps and 61fps at the medium and ultra-high presets respectively. A mere 61fps with max settings may fall short of your fantasies, but this is an extremely demanding game with all the bells and whistles turned on. Given the results at the medium preset and the option of dialing down resolution to 1080p, you have a lot of options to choose from.
High-Refresh Multiplayer Gaming
Speaking of refresh rates, AAA titles like the above are not the kind to push a high-refresh screen to its limit. That’s more the realm of competitive multiplayer and esports titles, where ultra-high frame rates not only look better but give a competitive advantage. I tried the in-game benchmark of Rainbow Six: Siege using the Low and Ultra presets (both at 100% render resolution) at both 1080p and 1440p. At the lower resolution, the Blade 15 averaged 221fps on Low and 195fps on Ultra. At 1440p, it averaged 171fps and 154fps respectively.
Those are objectively strong results, especially since 144Hz is arguably the best high-refresh bar to reach—240Hz and 300Hz displays are nice, but frankly not everyone can see a difference beyond 144Hz, and you begin to hit diminishing returns in terms of practical significance. Esports professionals may disagree, but reaching 144fps or more is enough to earn our stamp of approval for high-refresh gaming.
That said, the difference between 1080p and 1440p may be felt more keenly with these games, because this is a genre where an extra dozen frames per second are exactly what hardcore players seek. Smoother performance gives you an edge, so squeezing out more frames without suffering big swings or hitching is important. If you’re determined to utilize this laptop’s 240Hz display, maybe you’re best off playing Rainbow Six: Siege, Apex Legends, and League of Legends at 1080p and saving 1440p for AAA titles and your web browser.
Heat Check
Gamers are usually concerned with laptops’ heat output during long sessions. The Blade 15 utilizes a vapor cooling chamber, a necessary solution given its thinness. It definitely gets warm, and downright hot in certain spots. The keyboard and deck on either side of the touchpad are mostly just toasty, but the area above the top row (where fortunately you don’t need to touch) and the underside of the laptop get hot enough to hurt if you leave your fingers there for a few seconds.
This isn’t a major issue as it doesn’t seem to affect performance, and you’ll very likely have the system on a desk instead of your lap, but it’s not ideal. As far as fan noise, the Razer actually does a good job of keeping the fans from revving up too loudly. They were relatively quiet and maintained the same volume throughout most of my testing when running 3D apps, though I found their higher pitch more grating than their volume.
Overall, the new Blade 15 is an extremely capable high-end gaming machine for all types of titles. It may not deliver the chart-busting frame rates you might imagine when you hear the words “RTX 3080,” but it meets the new bar for mobile gaming in an impressively thin chassis.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
It’s a relief to see a long runtime, since a short one would have undermined the portability draw. Only the tiny Triton 300 SE lasted longer, while the new Blade raises the bar for 15-inch gamers. Part of this is due to the power savings of Optimus mode, which is fine for video viewing. (I retried the battery test with the Nvidia GPU active, and the Razer lasted only 3 hours and 23 minutes.)
The Cream of the Crop for Mobile Gaming
The Razer Blade 15 is a perennial champion among elite gaming laptops, and this newest version is a clear reminder why. The design is of uncommon quality in both look and feel, including functional aspects like the best-in-class touchpad, and the system is as slim and portable as any 15-inch competitor. The latest parts back up the style with ample substance in terms of benchmark performance. You can play whichever type of game you like at comfortably high frame rates.
Obviously, this style and speed comes at a high cost. But if you’re shopping in this category, that’s no surprise. It’s difficult to refute that the Blade 15 Advanced Edition is as good as it gets, particularly if portability is important to you.
The Alienware m15 R4 delivers comparable or better performance at a lower price, so there’s a value argument to be made there, but it loses out in terms of bulk. If you’re mostly concerned with performance per dollar, the Alienware remains a great pick, but there’s no denying the Razer’s envy-inducing combination of power and style. Its overall excellence earns it our Editors’ Choice award as the best, most portable super-premium gaming laptop.
