Welcome to something pretty different. I’ve always been a very big fan of Razer Laptops and have always considered them to be the very best Gaming Laptops that money can buy. This is not just because of their outstanding industrial design, but also because of their incredible performance, amazing Displays and of course, the stunning Razer Chroma RGB Keyboards.
Well, this is our very first video on a Razer Laptop, we have featured the Razer Core X GPU before, but not a Razer Laptop, and what better way to start featuring Razer Laptops than to review the highest-end one that they make. This is our first look at the brand new Razer Blade Pro 17 (2020), which is likely the best Gaming Laptop that money can buy right now.
Design
Design wise, the new Razer Blade Pro 17 2020 looks pretty much identical to the 2019 model. The 2020 iteration is a spec bump rather than a complete redesign, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. That’s because the Razer Blade Pro 17 has one of the most premium designs that I have ever seen on a Laptop.
It is made entirely out of machined metal, with an anodised finish that gives it this dark grey or even black look. It’s very sturdy and feels like a tank. Just by using this for a few minutes, I could immediately tell how high the quality of the experience was going to be, just judging by the extraordinary build quality. In a way, it reminds me of using a MacBook Pro. They both have that machined unibody look, the only difference being that the Razer Blade Pro 17 is much larger as it has as 17 inch Display and is also thicker & heavier than the MacBook Pro. You’ll see why that is, when we get to the performance section.
The Razer is built for Performance, but it still looks the part.
Razer also sent over a brand new Razer Studio, which is a beast in its own right with a full 4K OLED Display. That thing is just nuts, but definitely stay tuned for a completely separate video just on the Razer Studio 15.
On the back we have a Razer logo which does light up, just like on the old-school MacBooks, and then on the bottom we have three massive Vents, with another Air Out-Take on the back of the Hinge. On top of that, the new Razer Blade Pro 17 also features a Vapour Chamber. So, the Cooling on this Laptop is extremely well thought-out, which it really has to be because of the insane specs that we’ll talk about in just a second.
When it comes to the Ports, on the left we have the proprietary power connector, which supports up to 230W of Power. We then have a 2.5Gb Ethernet Port which is two and a half times faster than your usual Ethernet Port, meaning that you can get wired speeds of up to 2.5Gb/s, pretty nuts. Then we get two 3.2 Gen 2 USB A Ports, a USB type C Port, (Gen 2) as well as a 3.5mm Headphone Jack. On the left we have an SD Card reader, I love seeing that. We also get a Thunderbolt 3 Port, I love seeing this even more. It can be used to connect even more powerful Desktop-Class GPU’s, 5K Monitors and more. We then have another USB A Port and a HDMI 2.0B Port, which supports 4K 60 Output as well as a Kensington Lock. So there you go, Port select wise, the Razer features everything you could wish for, which is great.
In terms of portability, the Razer Blade Pro 17 is definitely not the most portable Laptop out there. It’s pretty massive and it also weighs 2.75kg, but at the same time, there are other 17” Laptops out there that are not portable at all. You can at least put the Blade Pro 17 in your backpack when you want to take it to places. So, it is portable, just not as portable as a Razer Studio 15 or a MacBook Pro 15”/16”.
Display
When it comes to the Display, the Blade Pro 17 comes with…a 17” Display of course, which in the case of our unit, is a 1080p Panel. Now, 1080p at 17” is probably not the best idea. The Text looks noticeably blurry and it’s just nowhere near as sharp as a QHD or a 4K Laptop. But, on the upside, it is an IPS Panel with 100% sRGB coverage, so the Colour Gamut on this Display is very good, the viewing angles are great. Overall, it’s just a very good 1080p Panel, one of the best I’ve seen.
With the Blade Pro, you can get up to 10 times the FPS that you might be used to on the current Games Consoles.
But, what makes this Display so special, is the Refresh Rate. On Consoles, you mostly get a 30FPS experience. On PC, 60FPS is pretty much standard and this is what gamers aim for. However, over the past two years, we started seeing more and more high Refresh Rate Monitors. These were mostly 144Hz Panels and in order to achieve 144FPS, you needed a pretty beefy GPU, something like a ‘2080’. Well, this panel isn’t 60Hz, 90Hz or even 144Hz. This Display is 300Hz, Meaning that It can display up to 300FPS in a game! That’s absolutely insane. I have done a few tests where I got around 220FPS on this Laptop and it felt unlike anything that I’ve experienced before. Everything was so smooth and so fluid, it almost felt like real life.
So, there you go. This is why we have a 1080p Panel, because if this Resolution was any higher, we wouldn’t have been able to hit 300FPS. The highest that I have seen is 270FPS, which was in Starcraft 2 with everything maxed out.
Now, if you really want, you can actually upgrade this Display to 4K. It won’t be a 300Hz Display in that case, but it will still be 120Hz, which will also support Touch-Input. It does depend on the game that you usually play but I would personally go for that. 120FPS is more than enough and unless you’re an e-sports player, a sharper 4K Display would make a more noticeable difference than the 1080p 300Hz Panel.
Keyboard & Trackpad
When it comes to the Keyboard and the Trackpad, the Trackpad is absolutely brilliant. It’s made entirely out of glass and there are no other buttons to it, it is just one piece. It is definitely one of the best Trackpads I have experienced on a Windows Laptop, with full multi-touch gestures. It’s not quite as good as on a MacBook but that’s mostly due to how well the Trackpad is optimised in macOS, compared to Windows. Overall, still a very similar experience to a Mac and one of the best Trackpads on a Windows Laptop.
It just wouldn’t be a Razer Laptop without the RGB Keyboard.
The Keyboard on the other hand is interesting. I found the typing experience to be… I don’t wanna say bad but let’s just say that I was making more mistakes with this Keyboard, than I was on my horrible MacBook Pro Butterfly Keyboard. Most of this is just me not being used to this Keyboard but, the layout of the Keys is a bit strange. The Left Shift Key is quite narrow on the European models, even more so than on other Laptops. The Arrow Keys are similar to the ones on the MacBook Pro’s, with the Butterfly Keyboard, rather than the usual T-Shape style.
But it was mostly the typing experience that felt odd. Something about the Keys didn’t feel right, maybe that’s just me. Anyway, what definitely blew me away was the Razer Chroma RGB functionality. Every Razer Laptop comes with the built-in Razer Synapse App, from which you can adjust the Backlight of the Keys in almost any way you can imagine. You can have a specific Key light up in a specific way when you press it and really have a bunch of different styles and effects that just immerse you into the gaming experience.
The RGB Lighting makes this one of the most unique Laptops that I have ever seen. For those of you who think that RGB is a gimmick, it might be, but it’s so cool! You can’t argue with that.
Camera, Microphones & Speakers
The stand-out feature with the Camera is definitely the Windows Hello functionality.
Now, the next most important thing in a Laptop for me are the Speakers, the Microphones and the Front-Facing Camera. The Razer Blade Pro 17 comes with a 720p Camera. The good news here is that we also get Windows Hello, meaning that we can log into Windows by just using our face, which is nice. In terms of the Speakers, they do sound good and you can check out the comparison between the 2020 Blade Pro, my MacBook Pro 15” from 2019 and the Blade Studio, in the video.
Performance
Now let’s talk about the reason why you’ll want to buy this Laptop, the performance. The new 2020 Razer Blade Pro 17, comes with the new Intel 10th generation i7-10875 Processor, which is an Eight-Core CPU with a Turbo Boost of up to 5.1GHz. This makes the Razer Blade Pro 17 one of the very first Laptops to come with an Intel 10th Generation H series Processor.
With the GPU, our unit comes with the brand new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER, Max-Q, with 8GB of Dedicated Video Memory. We also get 16GB of DDR4 2933MHz Memory, which is upgradable to 64GB, as well as a 512GB PCIe Flash Storage. This is combined with a free m.2 Slot, in which you can install your very own m.2 Flash Module. On paper, that sounds pretty amazing. So, how does all of this translate to some real world usage?
Despite all that the Blade Pro already has, you can add even more.
Well, in Doom Eternal, with everything maxed out to the teeth, we were getting an average of 240FPS. Do keep in mind that this is a flagship 2020 game, imagine what you would get in older titles. In StarCraft 2 for example, a game that I’ve never been able to play fully maxed out, the Razer Blade Pro 17 can do this at an average of 270FPS. Overwatch runs at 200FPS with everything maxed out. Fortnite runs at 120FPS with everything maxed out, I was expecting to see even better performance in Fortnite here. Finally, in Modern Warfare, more specifically in Warzone, I was getting around 130FPS with everything maxed out aside from Ray-Tracing. When I enabled Ray-Tracing, I was getting 120FPS, which is still pretty insane.
Also, as a disclaimer, I did those tests about three weeks ago with an unreleased Razer Blade Pro 17, so the Drivers weren’t even up to date. In fact, I was even getting errors that I have unsupported Drivers, yet I was still getting an insane 120-270FPS in all the games that I tested. Once the Drivers do get updated, expect those numbers to be even higher!
Temperature wise, I haven’t’ seen this Laptop exceed 75 Degrees, which is very good. It’s just that if you want to do any intensive tasks, you need to have it plugged in, otherwise you will get less than half of the performance that you get when plugged in.
Battery Life
With its size and capabilities, the Blade Pro will drain its Battery very quickly.
When it comes to the Battery Life, I cannot really talk about that as much because my time with the machine was pretty limited and I’ve mostly used it plugged in. We do have a 70.5Whr Battery, which is fairly decent, size wise. But, the MacBook Pro 16”, which has a much smaller body, comes with a much larger 100Whr Battery.
Now, when the Blade Pro 17 was not plugged in, it would discharge basically overnight. So, standby time wasn’t great. Do keep in mind that this was with a pre-release unit though. But, considering that you need to have to plugged in, in order to achieve peak performance, I wouldn’t expect a great Battery Life out of this. Especially when you’re gaming.
Value
Finally, when it comes to the value, is the new Razer Blade Pro 17 2020..worth it?
At a starting price of $2500/2900 Euros, which can go up to $4200/3800 Euros, the Razer Blade Pro 17 is one of the most expensive Laptops that you can buy. However, you do get an outstanding level of performance with the ability to play pretty much any game in well over 100FPS, sometimes even getting close to that 300FPS mark. Also, if you’re not a gamer and you’re into content creation and 3D modeling, the Blade Pro is still incredibly powerful for that as well.
There’s really not much to complain about it. My only wish would be that the next version would feature a QHD Display at maybe 144Hz. This is just because 4K is honestly overkill on a small 17” Display. You won’t be able to reach 4K 120, but you’ll definitely be able to reach 144fps in QHD and overall, it would be a much better experience.