You’ll soon be able to buy Razer’s heavy-duty Blade Pro 17 gaming laptop with a 300Hz display.
The 2020 version of the Blade Pro 17 has been upgraded to support the insanely high 300-frame-per-second refresh rate. “If you’re playing those high frame rate, competitive titles, this laptop is going to be amazing,” said Eugene Kuo, Razer’s senior marketing manager.
(Credit: Razer)
The 300Hz LED panel itself has a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution. But if you’re a content creator, you can also get the Blade Pro 17 with a 4K touch-screen panel. On the downside, you’ll have to settle for a slower 120Hz refresh rate.
The other notable change is to the silicon inside. Razer has bumped up the 6-core chip to an 8-core beast by using Intel’s 10th-generation “Comet Lake-H” Core i7-10875H processor, which features a 5.1GHz boost speed.
(Credit: Razer)
(Credit: Razer)
According to Razer, the casing on the 2020 model hasn’t been changed much, but the company did update the keyboard layout with the addition of a larger shift key and half-directional keys for a better typing experience. The laptop also maintains the same 0.78-inch thick casing. But the product remains pretty hefty at 6.06 pounds.
(Credit: Razer)
Razer designed the Blade Pro to act as both a gaming laptop and a desktop replacement. So you’re getting a wide collection of ports, including an SD card reader, a single Thunderbolt 3 USB-C slot, an Ethernet port, and an HDMI 2.0B connection, in addition to three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports. There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack as well.
(Credit: Razer)
Razer plans to start selling the product later this month on the company’s website. But the product is going to be pricey. The first model will go for $2,599 and features an Nvidia RTX 2070 Max-Q gaming graphics card and 512GB of NVMe SSD. For $3,199, you can upgrade the card to a RTX 2080 Super GPU. The most expensive model, at $3,799, offers the RTX 2080 GPU, the 4K display, and 1TB of SSD memory.
Other specs include a 720p web camera and Wi-Fi 6. You can also upgrade the laptop yourself with up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD.
Whether or not the new laptop can really leverage the 300Hz display is the big question. Last year, PCMag reviewed the 2019 model of the Blade Pro 17, which came with a 144Hz screen. And we noted the RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics card inside lacked the power to fully leverage the display with our tested PC games coming in at 93 to 112 frames per second when played at high graphics settings. To achieve a higher frame rate, you’ll have to scale down the game’s graphic settings and resolution. (The same situation applies to the RTX 2080 Super Max-Q card, according to benchmarks.)
So the 300Hz display may be superfluous, especially for non-competitive gamers. But we’ll learn more once we get our hands on the device. Stay tuned for our review.
