When the Razer Blade first came out, it felt like a big deal. Until then, we were convinced that gaming laptops had to look and feel like it’s some kind of spaceship from one of the video games we played. Instead, Razer gave us a sleek-looking machine that looked more professional than anything we’ve seen. The 2020 version of the outfit’s Razer Blade 15 Advanced retains the same sleek look, premium build, and powerful performance in a reasonably slim and lightweight package.
Unlike other manufacturers that seek to bring some type of innovation on their gaming laptops, Razer seems content to just roll out well-made, premium machines that can breeze through the newest and greatest AAA titles. And that’s what we get here – a professional-looking laptop with cutting-edge gaming hardware that looks just as comfortable sitting in your gaming desk at home as it does in your workspace at the office.
The 2020 Razer Blade 15 Advanced gets a massive beef up in the muscle department, as it packs an eight-core 10th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics (which is, supposedly, 20 percent faster than the RTX 2080), 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage. While both the CPU and GPU are a definite step-up, the 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage do sound like last-gen specs and, from what we can tell, that’s really all the laptop’s relatively slim frame is going to accommodate. The GPU, by the way, comes with Nvidia’s latest efficiency-boosting tweaks to their Max-Q graphics, so you should expect improved frame rates without sacrificing battery life.
It comes with a 15.6-inch 1080p display that boasts a high 300Hz refresh rate, so there should be little to no latency between in-game actions and what’s being shown onscreen. For content creators interested in picking up the laptop, though, they can swap the 1080p display in favor of a 4K OLED panel that covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color space, albeit with a much lower refresh rate.
The 2020 Razer Blade 15 Advanced gets a custom vapor chamber, custom fans with 44 blades, and integrated heat exchangers to efficiently dissipate heat from the laptop while generating very little noise. It also uses nanoparticle thermal blockers to reduce hotspots, limiting the heat in the areas where they originate, making it easier for the cooling system to do its job. The keyboard comes with individual RGB lighting on each key, allowing maximum customization, while a glass touchpad provides navigation control for those times you don’t have a mouse in tow.
As with its predecessors, the laptop comes in a precision-crafted unibody aluminum chassis, giving it a premium look to match the powerful hardware inside. As you can see from the photos, there’s a good load of ports here, including one USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) slot, one USB-C slot, two USB 3.2 ports, HDMI out, a 3.5mm slot, Gigabit Ethernet, and an SD card reader. You can also opt for the base model, which gets a slightly less-powerful CPU and GPU, in case the Advanced version is a little too rich for your tastes.
The 2020 Razer Blade 15 Advanced comes out in May, priced starting at $2,599.