This is the 2020 edition of the razer blade pro 17. I don’t know why they call it pro. There’s not a pro 17 but anyway it’s a refresh of an existing laptop. But they’ve done a couple of things not surprisingly.
Review
Overview
We got the intel 10th generation cpus and they’re using the higher end core i7. That is eight cores and 16 threads assuring that’s nice also we have nvidia rtx supercards rtx 2080 super max q as a matter of fact so the super gets you 10 or 15 percent improvement in performance.
Then that kind of offsets the max cuteness. There’s also a redesign hinge that allows for more airflow on the back of the laptop. Very important thing and as ever beautiful anodized black aluminum unibody build is the nicest looking gaming laptop on the block with the price tag to match.
You want to see that maybe well you got it here so that’s nice that’s the option we have it’s not a cheap option though. This is a non-cheap laptop. You probably know that already razor blade laptops are premium, they are not cheap.
You do get a lot for your money so that helps but the cheapest model is 2600 that gets you the full hd 300 hertz display and nvidia RTX 2070 graphics. If you go up and you spend 3200$ then you get the rtx 2080 max q super edition.
The faster one still has the 300 hertz full hd display and our model which has that rtx 2080 super max q and the 4k 120 hertz ips wide gamut display. It makes my eyes bleed 3800$ but it’s there for you.
If you got the money and the desire for it all of them are going to have the same cpu. Which is intel core i7 8 core 10th generation 45 watts cpu. it’s a good performer you’re looking at equivalent to the core i9 from the previous generation.
Basically so hard to argue that you get vapor chamber cooling same Cooling regardless of which skew. You get on this sort of thing you get 16 gigs of ddr4 ram supporting xmp. It has two slots so you can upgrade that yourself.
They don’t actually offer it pre-upgraded from the factory but it’s very easy to take off the bottom cover on this. If you have a torx screwdriver and put in whatever memory you want.
It has two m.2 ssd slots supporting nvme and the two more affordable models have a 512 gig nvme ssd.The most expensive one that we have has at one terabyte. We have intel wi-fi 6 on board ax201 card. That’s a good thing.
It’s got a microsoft precision trackpad and that works just fine. That’s good times there, it has a 720p webcam and a windows hello Ir camera. That’s nice to see that we’re finding biometrics on razer laptops 720p.
Webcam is you know average okay you’re not going to use that if you’re like a famous twitcher are you going to get something better for them. So compared to the high end competition.
I suppose you could look at the alienware area 51m. which gets to be equally as expensive that has a desktop cpu inside. So that’s kind of a plus there’s that gigabyte aero 17 hdr that we reviewed that i mentioned too.
I like that gigabyte a lot actually and for those of you again who prefer matte display still wide gamut. It’s very nice. I like the keyboard better. It doesn’t look as classy as the razer blade. It doesn’t have the aluminum unibody chic thing going on.
looks count for a lot of people but that’s a strong offering too but equally as expensive pretty much uh with when it comes to alienware. You know they have some lessons to learn from razer.
These days this razor is very easy to open up and replace the cpu and gpu if you want to upgrade the internals with alienware they’re still putting in extra plastic baffles supposedly for rigidity inside.
That just makes it so hard to get to some of the stuff that’s inside of it. Now alienware is soldering their ram in and the casing is kind of boy eraser looks like plastic and has graphics on it and stuff.
I mean no offense to you folks who like the alienware look but this one just kind of says i’m worth that much money when it comes to just looking at it so i think that’s still one of the biggest selling points for Razer.
Display
We’re going to look at it now. There’s one more thing that I left out and that’s the fact that we have a new display option which is the 300 hertz refresh rate display. Yes that’s kind of overkill when you’re going to get those frame rates in the game.
Do you need 300 frames per second i don’t know but it’s there and it’s pretty amazing. That’s a full hd display that is matte ips. It’s non-touch and for those of you who are content creators or say look man i got all this horsepower in my laptop.
I want a game at higher resolution than full hd especially because you’re talking a 17 inch screen. You can take advantage of that well. There is the 4k display with wide color gamut 100 of adobe rgb.
Also calibrated the factory and they do a pretty good job. That one’s glossy so you’ll get a bit of glare and it is a touch screen too. So, that’s nice but wait there’s more. It’s 120 hertz refresh rate so far when.
We’ve seen 4k displays they are stuck at 60hz so for those of you who want to have those higher frame rates for games. 120 hertz is pretty good because you’re getting maybe 100 or 120 frames in a game.
So yes it effectively radiates heat but yes it radiates heat when it comes to the display. We have the 4k 120hz ips wide gamut display. You’re not kidding, our colorimeter measured it at complete adobe rgb coverage.
So this is for content creators and also just for those who really like a really good looking display. It’s great if you’re watching movies. It’s obviously fantastic if you’re creating content especially cinematic content or content for print which requires the wider gamut.
It’s joyous the only thing and it does have glare. It is a glossy display because it’s also a touch screen if you like touch then that’s a good thing. If you like the look of a glossy display and the sense of looking in the black looking a little deeper.
You’ll be happy that the 300 hertz display is matte. I like this display just as well as the gigabyte arrow 17 hdr. Which also has the same wide gamut display. But that one is matte and non-touch so no touch but matte means no glare.
Anyway it’s a really nice looking display. I would love to have this laptop just to enjoy watching movies on this and games really. I saw some details in far cry new dawn in the benchmark scene, the kind of pinkish red characters written on the side of characters like that i really didn’t see before. So there are reasons to have a wide gamut display when playing games too.
keyboard
We have the usual razer chroma perky rgb backlit keyboard and with the secondary keys. now let so like your multimedia keys and stuff. You can see those in the dark now also you have stereo speakers.
The keyboard is well. It’s the same as the last generation which is a great razer chroma rgb per key programmable backlighting. The backlighting is a bit less pwm. Now which i appreciate because the old keyboard looked to strobe a little bit to me.
I don’t like the keyboard a whole lot. It’s not hideous or weird or like a butterfly keyboard but there’s not much travel and tactile feel. It might be anti-ghosting and all that sort of thing but if you spend a lot of time typing you’re probably not going to adore the keyboard.
speakers
You know it used to be gaming laptops had really good speakers and not so much anymore this one has good speakers man they are loud loud at 50 volume. They will fill a room and they’re pretty full too.
You get some bass on them so that’s nice for those of you who don’t always wear headphones when you game speaking of the speakers. If the laptop is so noisy you have to wear headphones.
Anyway it hardly matters right unless you’re watching movies when still that’s cool to have good speakers. But the good news is here that the cooling is very effective
Cooling System
The cooling is very effective as before they’re still using four fans the two major fans that you would use for the cpu and gpu at the rear the bigger ones and two towards the palm rest area to keep the battery cool.
So it doesn’t swell and bulge in to keep the ssds cool and those are smaller fans and we got that vapor chamber cooling all this adds up to a laptop. That doesn’t get so loud that it drowns out the speakers. This is good for a gaming laptop.
Especially a thin one where thermals are usually constrained; they have effective cooling here happy to see that. the core temperatures when gaming were also quite good so they have.
It’s a pretty easy simple way of tuning it with the razer software. You can just choose to boost the cpu or the gpu or both so we did see a difference in fact say geekbench which is a cpu test.
If we ran it and we boosted the cpu the score was noticeably better and really very good class leading for this processor. Likewise we use the gpu boost but not the cpu boost when doing most of our 3d benchmarks very effectively.
Gaming Review
Even if you’re using boost on both of those. We did for our gaming tests it doesn’t get that loud by gaming laptop standards which means yes you will hear the fans. It’s a gaming laptop but it’s not going to scream and fill the room the way sorry but the Alienware m17 does.
Core temperatures were actually fairly good on this too. Again impressive because it’s slim so hopefully you’re getting what you’re paying for. Here with a good thermal design so core temperatures on this really we didn’t see hardly any throttling at all.
I even went and did things like testing battlefield 5 at 4k resolution which is a bit daring still for Mobile Processor and mobile cpu and it can handle it. Now if you want 60 frames per second instead of 45 to 50 well then you’re going to drop it to 2k resolution.
We ran those tests still and great thermals were ok if you want to just use it for everyday productivity. you’ll leave it on the balanced setting and you really won’t hear the fans much. So, they won’t be intrusive if you’re using it for 3d rendering.
Again you’ll probably boost it depending on the pack package. You’re using software whether you need cpu or gpu based rendering there. But you’ll hear the fans then but not egregious in terms of the actual heat.
It doesn’t get burning hot to the touch and we’re in texas and it’s getting on summer now so typically things get toasty here but like i said the surface temperatures. Oh they’ll get warm but they’re not going to burn you or anything like that.
It does it let me tell you it radiates heat effectively out of the ventilation system. It creates a zone of warmth around. It is the only way I can describe it. I had this set up in kind of a nook area of the house.
That whole two and a half to three foot zone there you could feel the warmth from it. So if you live in a northern climate you’re probably like i could live with that but keep it in mind especially in the summertime.
Battery Life
Honestly is the looks and the build quality and they’ve got it together with the quality control and all that battery life on this it has a 70.5 watt hour battery comes with a 230 watt charger regardless of which of the variation models that you pick.
It has an option actually in the razer software that you can set it to either run always on dedicated graphics which typically gets you better frame rates for whatever reason. You can have it on nvidia optimus switchable graphics.
So I’ll switch to integrated graphics. We run our battery life tests on switchable graphics because that’s going to have better battery life. That’s not a super huge battery given the power in this laptop.
It’s about a five five and a half hour laptop. You could push it to six if you’re doing really light work. That sort of thing depends on where you set the display brightness. Especially if you have this 4k display which gets inordinately bright.
I mean they claim 400 nits for it. But we measured it at 478. I mean the ports on this are the same as the last generation and they’re good. You have two thunderbolt 3 ports yes you can use razer’s egpu on this or any egpu you want.
Technical Specification
Processor
- Intel® Core™ i7-10875H processor
Operating System
- Windows 10 Home
Memory
- 16GB of Dual-Channel DDR4
Display
- 17.3″ 4K Touch 120Hz, 100% sRGB, 6.0 mm bezel, factory calibrated
Graphic
- NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2080 Super Max-Q Studio Edition with 8 GB GDDR6
Storage
- 1TB PCIe NVMe
Keyboard
- Per-key RGB powered by Razer Chroma™
Touchpad
- Precision glass touchpad
Networking
Wi-Fi
- Intel® Wireless-AX201 (802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax)
Bluetooth
- Bluetooth® 5.1
Interface
- 2.5Gb Ethernet,
- USB 3.2 Gen 2 (USB-A) x3,
- USB3.2 Gen 2 (USB-C),
- Thunderbolt™ 3 (USB-C)
Audio
- Stereo Speakers,
- Array Microphone,
- Dolby® Atmos Support, 7.1 Codec support (via HDMI)
Additional Features
- Windows® Hello built-in IR HD webcam (1MP / 720P)
Weight
- 6.06 lbs / 2.75 kg
Input & Output
- 2.5Gb Ethernet,
- USB 3.2 Gen 2 (USB-A) x3,
- USB3.2 Gen 2 (USB-C),
- Thunderbolt™ 3 (USB-C)
Manufacturer Warranty
- 1-year limited international hardware warranty
Summary
So that’s the razer blade pro 17 the 2020 model intel 10th generation cpus and the nvidia super graphics card option. Going on so sure it is the nicest looking gaming laptop. You’re going to find the build quality on this. It’s really nice so this is still the black macbook pro for those who don’t want to use mac os and want to have well serious game action going on and also 3d rendering.
Which isn’t so much the strong point of mac os as an ecosystem. It is expensive but you know what they’re competitors out there that cost just as much as the gigabyte aero 17 hdr. That i mentioned which is a great laptop but it’s just as expensive so you get what you pay for.