Razer Blade 14 It’s my recommendation for anyone looking for a good gaming laptop, but as impressive as it is, it trades power for portability. If that’s the kind of sacrifice you don’t want to make, then say hello to the Razor blade 18—This is the power you are looking for.
Next to the Razer Blade 14, the Blade 18 looks like a protective older brother. You can see the family resemblance, but the larger Blade is more imposing. Its 18-inch Mini LED display is so bright it’s almost overwhelming in dark rooms, and produces vivid colors that rival the Blade 14’s already impressive display.
The Blade 18 starts at $3,100, but the model I tried it’s $4,500. You get a batch of power for the price. It includes a 14th Gen Intel Core i9 14900HX processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 laptop GPU (upgradable to the beastly RTX 4090, which is what I tested), 32GB of RAM, and a 1 terabyte solid-state drive. . It’s the kind of power that can surpass even the most demanding games.
Smooth screen
Razer outdid itself with the Razer Blade 18’s display. The Mini LED panel has a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels, with 2000 local dimming zones, providing exceptional contrast between the brightest and darkest areas of the screen. image. The Razer Blade 14 was already one of the most vibrant laptop displays I’ve seen, but the Blade 18 makes it look dull by comparison.
Photography: Eric Ravenscraft
But what sets it apart is the 300Hz refresh rate. At best, most gaming laptops only support 240Hz, which is enough for most games, but for paced titles fast as supervision 2You want all the frames you can get, and the Blade 18 is one of the few laptops I’ve tested that can reliably produce that many.
Maintaining such a high frame rate will drain the battery, but Razer’s Synapse software has an option to automatically switch the display to 60Hz when running on battery. This dramatically reduces the number of frames your games have to render, which saves power, but will result in less fluid gameplay. You can also press Fn+R to toggle between 60Hz, 240Hz, and 300Hz while connected to a charger.
Synapse also has a color profile selector that allows you to switch between DCI-P3, Adobe RGB, Rec.709, and other profiles for precise and accurate colors. This is especially useful for gamers who are also photo or video designers and editors, where color accuracy is incredibly vital to their workflow.
Powerful performance
A big screen doesn’t matter much if you don’t have the power to back it up, but fortunately, the Razer Blade 18 is up to the task. The model I tested comes equipped with the GeForce RTX 4090 (you can also choose between RTX 4070 either 4080), and swept most of the games. star field, A noticeably less optimized game, it was getting over 60 frames per second in busy areas like New Atlantis on Ultra graphics settings and maintaining 80 to 90 fps on Medium.
supervision 2 However, that’s what blew me away. On Medium graphics settings, I maintained a full 300 fps (while the laptop was connected to power). This is a game where I’m constantly flying around the map in seconds, whipping out my pistol to headshot an enemy that wasn’t in my sight a third of a second ago, before running back to heal my teammates. . Three hundred frames per second is exactly what I need, and the Razer Blade 18 has the screen and power to give it to me.