Optus Mobile Review ALDI Mobile Review Amaysim Mobile Review Belong Mobile Review Circles.Life Review Vodafone Mobile Review Woolworths Mobile Review Felix Mobile Review Best iPhone Plans Best Family Mobile Plans Best Budget Smartphones Best Prepaid Plans Best SIM-Only Plans Best Plans For Kids And Teens Best Cheap Mobile Plans Telstra vs Optus Mobile Optus NBN Review Belong NBN Review Vodafone NBN Review Superloop NBN Review Aussie BB NBN Review iiNet NBN Review MyRepublic NBN Review TPG NBN Review Best NBN Satellite Plans Best NBN Alternatives Best NBN Providers Best Home Wireless Plans What is a Good NBN Speed? Test NBN Speed How to speed up your internet Optus vs Telstra Broadband ExpressVPN Review CyberGhost VPN Review NordVPN Review PureVPN Review Norton Secure VPN Review IPVanish VPN Review Windscribe VPN Review Hotspot Shield VPN Review Best cheap VPN services Best VPN for streaming Best VPNs for gaming What is a VPN? VPNs for ad-blocking Still, even the Razer Blade 15 base model that we were sent to review has enough power to keep you in the game at frame rates that surpass, meet or can be tweaked to come close to the 144Hz screen refresh rate. Nab it at the severely discounted prices that were going at the time of review and you can get a steal on a gaming laptop that’s great for gorgeous offline gaming and powerful enough to give you a competitive edge online. On one hand, this keeps your mouse hand and cables free from hot exhaust air, but it also means you really shouldn’t use the Razer Blade 15 on your lap. Placed on a solid surface, though, there’s plenty of space between the bottom-facing vents and fans to exhaust air and keep things cool. The keyboard is flanked by two big-by-laptop-standards speakers, and at the top of the right one is where you’ll find the power button. On the sides of the laptop you’ll find the right amount of ports: most importantly, three regular USB-A (two on the right, one on the left) and a USB-C port on either side, which means plenty of options for peripherals. My review model had a 144Hz 15.6-inch 1080p display, which is the right size to make it feel like you’re not squinting while playing and the right refresh rate for the hardware inside the base model. Switching to dedicated-GPU mode is where the true gaming power is found, as well as the option to have a smooth refresh rate of 144Hz. For comparison, that refresh rate isn’t as fast as the 240Hz display in the Asus TUF Dash F15, but the Razer Blade 15’s 144Hz display on my review unit is far more practical when hitting frame rates between 60 frames per second (fps) and 144fps (and sometimes beyond). Check out the benchmark results below. The only game that falls below 60fps is Watch Dogs: Legion but, in fairness, that’s to be expected given how it performs with ray tracing set to ultra. Horizon Zero Dawn defaulting to medium fidelity settings was a surprise, particularly given the 103fps result, but the number of games scoring over 100fps is a good indication that you can tweak settings to take advantage of the 144Hz display. More impressively, the 3070 inside the review unit held its own in comparable results with the full-sized Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super that I used as a reference in my 3070 Ti review. The Blade’s 3070 came close to beating the desktop 2080 Super in a few cases. For those hoping they can take advantage of ray tracing and DLSS on the Razer Blade 15, the answer is “absolutely”: Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Dirt 5, and Wolfenstein: Youngblood all had very playable frame rates with ray tracing on (and even better performance for the supported games with DLSS enabled). The table below shows how the Razer Blade 15 performs in benchmarking software 3DMark in terms of its CPU and GPU. In terms of practical use, the strangest thing about the Razer Blade 15 is that the fans power on to an audible (albeit low) whine occasionally during basic use, and sometimes when there’s nothing really going on outside of basic Windows background functions. During gaming, you’ll hear the fan, but it’s not obnoxiously loud, which means you shouldn’t have to up the volume too much to compensate when playing on speakers. As for battery life, this is where the Razer Blade 15 base model falls well short. While the F15 managed nine hours in a Full HD YouTube video test, the best I could get out of the Razer Blade 15 was just over a couple of hours. If you leave it in dedicated-GPU mode, that number is even worse at around 90 minutes. While you can get a full charge in about the same time as that second battery test, it’s clear the Razer Blade 15 is meant more for gaming than everyday power-cable-free laptop-ing.
