Hey everyone, this is my first tech review so hopefully it won’t be too rough to read 😅
Quick backstory:
My original laptop was the MSI GL62M. For those that aren’t familiar with laptop/PCs, it was considered a budget laptop of MSI from 2017. The graphics card was a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 and in 2017, it was pretty great. As time went on though, and with games becoming more and more graphic intensive every year (especially since the next Gen consoles were released), the MSI started to struggle to run all the new games I wanted to play. The latest being Spiderman Remastered, which I could only play 30 mins - 1 hour until it started to drop to unplayable levels of frames.
So that being said, I was super excited to splurge (yes I have been eating ramen noodles for the last few weeks) on a new laptop. After researching for days and days, I went with Razer, mainly due to its design. Gaming laptops in general are really bulky and hard to move around. The Razer Blade series almost resembles Apple’s Macbook with how thin it is. It also is the only gaming laptop I know that you can open with one hand. I being someone that moves around a lot, decided this kind of design appealed to me the most.
Unboxing Experience:
As my favorite tech YouTuber Flossy Carter would say, if you are paying big money for a tech product, you deserve a nice unboxing experience. I would say Razer comes through with a solid 7/10 for presentation. The box comes with some Razer stickers (still unsure where I’ll be using them), a box with a nice message on it, and the laptop + charger.
Display:
I love everything about the screen! The display itself is 17 inches (hence the name Blade 17) and 165Hz, feeling silky smooth especially when you are gaming. The colors are great and watching movies on this screen feels amazing.
Keyboard:
I usually don’t use the laptop keyboard since I have my own mechanical keyboard but I gotta admit, the RGB on this thing is crazy. You can even make it an audio waveform on the keyboard itself! Of course, this doesn’t affect the performance at all but it is extremely satisfying to have.
Performance:
The specs on this laptop are pretty crazy. The main course being: NVIDIA GTX 3070, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB Memory.
What does that mean in english? Well it pretty much means you can run any game smoothly. Believe it or not, there is an even more powerful version with a better graphics card and i9 core, but I think this is more than enough for me.
In the past few weeks since I started using this laptop, I’ve played Destiny 2, XCom 2, and Spider-Man Remastered. The Spider-Man game was the perfect benchmark test, as it is a 2022 game that released very recently. I’m happy to say, it runs perfectly and looks so good that my wife thought I was watching a movie, not playing a game 😂.
[screenshots I took from the game]
Negatives:
The only real complaint I would have is the cooling on this device. As you can see I have a laptop cooler hooked up to this and also have the AC on pretty cold in my office room. With all that it still gets pretty hot around the top part of the keyboard area. This complaint isn’t really towards Razer though, as most gaming laptops run into this issue. You can only fit so much power in this limited laptop chasm before you hit the point of diminishing returns. That’s why at the end of the day, it still makes more sense to buy a PC desktop.
Conclusion:
Should you buy this? I would say it depends. I think for most people I would say no. The price is too high and you can have similar specs in a PC for a lot cheaper. However, if you need a high end PC that you need to take with you everywhere for work and gaming, the Razer Blade 17 is perfect for you.
Thanks so much for reading! I had a lot of fun writing this. Feel free to give me any tips on the review and let me know what you think of the Razer Blade 17 in general.
