The 2020 update to the Razer Blade Pro 17 (starts at $2,599; $3,199 as tested) keeps last year’s design, but brings fresh components and features. The highlights in our test model are an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super (Max-Q) GPU and a 300Hz display, both of which are aimed squarely at enthusiasts. This machine is one of the top performers and one of the most portable 17-inch gaming laptops, all wrapped up in a premium metal build. It doesn’t do quite enough new or different to earn our Editors’ Choice nod, but as a more potent big-screen version of the Razer Blade 15, it’s one of the leading 17-inch options.
Design Check: A Premium, Portable 17-Inch Gamer
From the outside, this year’s version of the Blade Pro 17 looks just like the model we reviewed last year. Major updates to Razer’s laptops tend to come only every few years, and since this design iteration of the Blade Pro 17 was new in 2019, the 2020 edition is focused on updated components and features.
Of course, leaving the design untouched isn’t necessarily a negative. Some laptops are in need of a visual or physical overhaul, but the Blade Pro 17 maintains the trim, all-aluminum design we’ve come to love about Razer laptops. It remains sleek, feels high quality, and presents no weaknesses. It’s much thinner than the pre-2019 design, and it utilizes the squarer, more modern look of the other Blade laptops.
However, the older Blade Pro 17 did have more unique aspects to its design that made it feel more worthy of the “Pro” moniker, whereas the 2019/2020 model feels simply like a larger-screen version of the Razer Blade 15. That’s fine in its own right, but special features of the previous design, such as its volume scroll wheel and mechanical keys, helped it stand out and feel more like a professional’s or creator’s machine. Those are still absent here, but we’ll just have to accept this new paradigm, especially since the new Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition makes up for it as a creator-focused machine.
If you’re concerned about portability even for a 17-inch laptop, the Blade Pro 17 measures 0.78 by 15.6 by 10.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 6.1 pounds. That’s portable enough if needed, but a six-pound laptop is not one you’re likely to make your daily commute partner. A 17-inch notebook, especially one equipped with high-end gaming hardware, will never be an ultraportable. Competitors like the Acer Predator Helios 700 (1.6 by 16.9 by 11.8 inches and 10.8 pounds) and Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (1.1 by 15.7 by 11.5 inches and 6.3 pounds) make the Razer look trim, while others like the Gigabyte Aero 17 HDR XA (0.84 by 15.6 by 10.6 inches and 5.5 pounds) have it beat on weight.
One aspect that helps make this model sleeker is the thin bezels, which on this 2020 model frame a new advanced display. The screen resolution remains full HD, but one of the marquee additions is a 300Hz refresh rate. This is a boon for competitive multiplayer enthusiasts (and I do mean enthusiasts—even fairly consistent multiplayer gamers won’t need 144Hz, never mind 300Hz), as frame rates translate to a competitive edge. We’ll get into just how many frames this hardware can push in the performance section later. If you want to make this laptop a bit more “Pro,” a more expensive SKU offers a 4K touch panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. Speaking of the bezels, a 720p webcam is located along the top of the panel.
Rounding out the build are an excellent touchpad and a good keyboard. Razer’s laptop touchpads remain for me the best Windows touchpads out there, coming closest to Apple’s beloved MacBook solution. They feel high-quality to the touch, and track incredibly smoothly. The keyboard isn’t as much of a standout, but it’s still above average. There’s no special feedback, but the travel distance is comfortable, and the keys have a nice bounce to them.
The keyboard does feel a touch small given the size of the open deck around it, and that’s even including the fact that there’s no number pad. The speakers (one of the least-attractive, dated-looking elements of the design) take up much of the horizontal space instead. At least the sound quality is decent enough, getting plenty loud but lacking much bass.
Finally, we come to the port selection. There are plenty of connectors aboard this chassis, starting with two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, a USB-C port, and an Ethernet jack on the left flank. The right side holds a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support, another USB-A 3.1 port, an HDMI connection, and an SD card slot.
Components and Performance Testing
Razer offers three different models of this laptop, with our test unit the mid-priced option at $3,199. For that, you get an Intel Core i7-10875H processor, 16GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super (Max-Q) GPU, and a 512GB solid-state drive. As with other recent Blade models, the storage is user-upgradable via an open M.2 slot up to 2TB.
The base model costs $2,599, and the only change is to the GPU, swapping in the less pricey and less powerful RTX 2070 Super (Max-Q). The most expensive offering ($3,799) includes the same major components as our unit, but ups the SSD to 1TB and swaps in the 4K display mentioned earlier.
Now that you have those specs in hand, let’s see what the Razer is capable of in our benchmark tests. I compared the Blade Pro 17 to the competing laptops in the table below—check it out to see the machines and components it’s up against.
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.
In a rare occurrence for gaming-laptop comparisons, none of these systems is using the same processor as any other here. That’s a reason for the variation you see, though really, they’re all well above the threshold for efficient everyday performance. The Blade Pro 17’s CPU should be a touch ahead of the chips in the Acer and the Alienware, but PCMark 10 doesn’t push processors to their limits. The more strenuous media tasks, which lean more fully on all available cores and threads, will let us draw better conclusions. On the storage front, all of these snappy SSDs are about equally fast, ensuring quick boot and load times.
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 is 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. We time each operation and add up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.
The Core i9 processors in the Asus and Gigabyte are supposed to be faster than the Blade Pro 17’s Core i7 chip, so it’s no surprise to see them (mostly) perform better on these tests. Less understandably, the Blade Pro 17 did not surpass the other Core i7 chips (except on Photoshop), but the margins were very slim. Differences in chassis and thermal solutions account for why a theoretically more powerful processor may slightly underperform, but ultimately the head-to-head here doesn’t matter too much.
The Core i9 systems certainly performed better than the Blade Pro 17, though the gulf wasn’t huge. If you know in advance you do a lot of media editing or creation in addition to gaming, you may enjoy the added advantage of a Core i9 processor. If not, the Blade Pro 17’s multimedia performance is quick enough for use in a pinch or as a side hobby.
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, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, 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 scenario for a second opinion on each laptop’s graphical prowess.
These results are of course of special interest for the Blade Pro 17, and they make for positive viewing. The raw 3D power of this GPU, sitting at the top of the Nvidia hierarchy, is hardly surprising, but it’s still good to see it stack up well to others in practice. Only the Asus’ GPU pushes better scores, as expected given that it is the full-strength version of the RTX 2080 rather than the tuned-down Max-Q version. As for how this translates to actual gaming, let’s move on to the next section…
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above 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).
The trend from the synthetic tests continues here, with the Blade Pro 17 coming in with the second-highest average frame rates on these titles. Any frame rates over 100fps for a laptop are impressive, and the sign of a high-end system. This is what you pay these prices for, in addition to the premium build. This much headroom in AAA games ensures you’ll see at least 60fps in big-budget games, though the most strenuous (looking at you, Control) may require some settings tweaks with RTX on. The fact that this performance comes in such a thin chassis, compared to some of the much thicker machines in these charts, is even more impressive.
As far as making use of the 300Hz display, that requires a different genre of game. Smooth AAA game performance is important, but frame rates into the hundreds is relevant to competitive multiplayer games. A screen that shows you information faster and refreshes more often can give you an edge in a tight fight, in addition to feeling smoother.
To that end, I ran Rainbow Six: Siege’s in-game benchmark to see how close the system could get to the 300Hz ceiling. On the Ultra preset (with the render scaling set to 100 percent at 1080p), the Blade Pro 17 averaged 213fps. On the Low preset, which hardcore gamers often use to maximize frame rates, it averaged 233fps. Other titles may push even closer to 300fps, but either way, the machine can clearly make use of a screen that can show more than 144fps.
One more topic relevant to general performance is the Razer’s fan volume and performance modes. When running moderately demanding programs, I would say the fans were more audible than average. When gaming, they get quite loud, and the fans seem to emit a higher-pitched whirring than most, which is a touch more distracting.
Adding to this are performance modes located in the included Razer Synapse software. The default is the Balanced mode, which automatically adjusts fan speeds. You can choose instead to manually tune the fans to a specific RPM with a slider so they stay at that set speed. There’s also a Custom mode, where you can set both the CPU and GPU to low, medium, or high settings to boost performance. The system fans get much louder with these set to high, to the point where it sounds like the laptop is preparing for takeoff. As for how the high presets impacted performance, I saw gains of 5fps on Far Cry 5 at maximum settings, and 10fps on Rainbow Six: Siege set to low settings. I’m not sure it’s worth the extra noise.
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 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.
As you can see, the Blade Pro 17 led this 17-inch pack with an unplugged life of seven hours. That’s a long time off the charger for a powerful laptop with a big, fast display. When you need it to, it will last through a trip, useful when necessary, even if you’re not traveling with it daily.
An Alluring Big-Screen Option
The Razer Blade Pro 17 is simultaneously one of the most powerful and most portable 17-inch gaming laptops available, which is worthy of praise. Of course, you should expect good things in this price range, but pure value is likely a secondary concern if you’re shopping in this price tier. There are plenty of less expensive options (even the base model of this system is $600 less), but this machine has arguably the best build, can scale to the top components and features, and has the longest battery life.
If you’ve got a big budget and are looking for a gaming-first machine with a big screen that’s still portable, the Pro 17 is your clear pick. If price is no object and you’re not dead-set on a bigger screen, maybe you want to splurge even more for the super-impressive, one-of-a-kind Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 (GX550), which packs two discrete panels into one laptop for some unique gameplay and productivity options. For those shopping in the high-end segment but still seeking a more reasonable price, the Editors’ Choice Acer Predator Helios 700 delivers a desktop-like experience.
