Razer Blade 15 Advanced Gaming Laptop 2022

Razer Blade 15 Advanced Gaming Laptop 2022: Intel Core i7

Razer Blade 15 & 17 Gaming Laptop Review

Welcome to my very first laptop review of 2022 and we're starting it big with the razer blade 15 and 17. They're both rocking the latest 12th gen intel H series processor and I want to get you guys a bit hyped because the performance boost you're getting this year is way more significant than the previous years it's just a good jump this year, plus the selection of laptops you have to choose from because a lot of good ones is going to be a great year!!! If you plan on upgrading now the blade 15 and 17 design has not really changed it's been the same for the past few years. I still dig it I think it looks super clean. The only thing that has that gaming vibe to it is obviously the logo but overall it's still a very attractive laptop!!

Regardless of whether you buy blade 15 or 17 the port lineup and positioning is identical e.g. on the left-hand side you have your power connector which is razer's proprietary connector, RJ45 two USB ports, Thunderbolt 4 headphone jack. And then on the other side, you have an HDMI 2.1 port USB port, another thunderbolt 4 port and then SD card slot, and UHS 2 SDcard reader. Now the only difference in terms of ports is that this only has one Thunderbolt 4 port the other USB type C port, on this is only USB 3.2. And both of them are thunderbolt 4. I do want to command a razer for reducing the size of the power adapter on the 17-inch model. This is a 230-watt power adapter that comes with the blade 15, there is a size difference the 230 is taller than the 280 watts ( that comes with Razer 7) and let me tell you what MSI is still using right now because it's kind of ridiculous if you think about if this is MSI 280 watt power adapter not only is it one and a half times thicker it's also longer than both of them I mean come on MSI is releasing expensive laptops now, you put some money into power adapter research and get this thinned down so people don't have to break their backs when they carry their laptop.

The other changes happen to be with the keyboard, I didn't really like Razer's keyboards in previous models. I always felt them a little bit difficult to type on there was a bit too much spacing between the keys. What they've done this year is they made the keys bigger, so that there's less spacing between them and I find it so much easier to type on than the previous model!! You'll also notice that there's no more power button inside of the speaker that's because the speaker has now been laser cut into the top deck of the chassis, for a seamless look, and to do that they had to move the power button over onto the keyboard so this is going to be standard on blade 15 and blade 17. The typing experience still feels like a productivity focus laptop first gaming second but of course, you still have that crazy chroma RGB, that you can customize per key. The touchpad is still glass it feels the same it's no different from the previous model so if you've experienced that you know exactly how this guy is going to feel too!!!

Now the blade 15 with me is the new 4k 144-hertz panel and it is absolutely gorgeous very low response time color accuracy is fantastic, it has really good screen brightness over 400 nits!! This screen is like the perfect screen if you're like a gamer and content creator. If you're still a gamer and content creator but want a higher refresh rate I will honestly recommend just going for the QHD screen. Because you get a high refresh rate of 240 hertz and even though the color accuracy is not as good as the 4k panel it's still really good, good enough that you can trust it for design work! The one thing that I really love about blade 17s compared to some of the competition is that the hinges are always nice and stiff stiffer on the 17 in fact I think they actually stiffened it up a bit more this year and they just don't wobble when you open them!! Which is great both of them have 1080p webcams they look nice and sharp and of course, they support Windows Hello facial recognition to quickly log you in.

Another cool thing is that the blade 17 got a speaker upgrade there are now eight speakers inside, the performance of these is exciting on both of these models!! This one comes with the i9 12 900h the blade 17 is rocking the i7 12 800h both have the latest RTX Ti Nvidia GPU the blade 15 can boost up to 110 watts, the blade 17 can boost up to 130 watts!! I ran Crossmark across all of these laptops and the Macbook Pro M1 Pro I don't have the m1 max anymore, and they trade blows you know mostly these two laptops win the only area that the MacBook comes close to is the creativity score but the single-core clock speeds on these guys are the fastest I've ever seen on a laptop!!! They're incredible they're hitting the 1800s which is a new feat for intel in laptop space multi-core speeds are good, faster than most 11th gen laptops and the AMD 5000 series and if you're a creator you're gonna absolutely love it it it these things.

I still think the MacBook Pro has the advantage over these guys when it comes to Adobe Premiere Pro but as soon as you start dabbling in after effects, that's where the Nvidia GPU comes into play and it just completely dominates the MacBook!!! As for compiling code they do really well much better than the previous year but they fall short compared to the MacBook Pro, in all fairness the MacBook Pro is based on a Unix kernel so the compile times are going to be a bit better. But still, a nice upgrade compared to previous models the one area that I saw a major difference was gaming and that's all down to the faster single-core clock speeds!!! Full HD results on these guys are absolutely incredible but I truly feel like QHD is the sweet spot. No matter what laptop you're buying with a 3080 or 3080 Ti QHD is where you want to be. So make sure the display that you get on it supports QHD and gets a nice high refresh rate maybe 165 hertz which I still feel is a good place to be.

As for heat management, I was kind of shocked, know I was expecting these guys to overheat and melt on my desk but the combination of the performance cores and efficiency cores did really really well in all fairness, Razer is a bit conservative with their heat management because they're trying to balance out fan noise and a bunch of other things, to keep the temperatures below 90 and because of that I feel like a bit of performance is lost on these laptops and I bet you in the weeks to come you're going to see other 12th gen intel processors that really push the performance and the expense of fan noise.

Speaking of fan noise they get up to about 50 decibels when they're completely under low that's still loud, but when you compare it to other gaming laptops that tend to go up to 60 it's still much better!!! Here I would like to mention that Blade 15 17 and even the upcoming 14 all come with a switch. 

Now blade 15 if you're switching between Optimus and discrete GPU requires a restart you can also do it in the BIOS, Blade 17 you don't have to restart the computer at all you can just switch it on the fly. Now internally there are a lot of similarities for example they both have a vapor chamber cooler two big fans at the top these ones are a little bit bigger, but the Razer Blade 17 gives you that fan by the battery. Both of these laptops have DDR5 memory 4 800 megahertz, these are 32 Gbs in total, but yes it can be upgraded to 64. The Blade 15 only comes with one NVME SSD, this is a gen 4. The read and write speeds are insanely fast, same with the Blade 17 but if you do go with the Blade 17 you do have a second slot. If you want to add some more storage.

Now this year the Blade 17 comes with an 82-watt hour battery this is up from 70-watt hours, compared to the previous year and you also have an 80-watt hour battery inside of the Blade 15. Battery life has been awful like literally only three hours of use which I don't think makes sense like this again is an engineering sample, but they said I can do full tests on it so I'd probably wait for a retail unit to confirm it.

What else should you know!!! WiFi 6E so if you have the router to support it you'll get the fastest speeds and yeah that's about it honestly. These are nice performance updates and the way Razer works is not so much, giving you the fastest laptop on the market!! Other laptops are faster than this coming out, but they tend to try to balance everything you know performance, fan noise, heat all of it!!!! And if you want a kind of more balanced experience this is the product to buy!!! If all you care about is performance then obviously there are other laptops to choose from I will say this though the i7 1200h was faster in some scenarios and that's probably because of the bigger chassis. It's easier to cool and obviously when you saw in some of those performance benchmarks having more power to push towards the GPU does make a difference in the games you're playing!! So yeah that wraps up my review of blades 15 and 17. I do have a crazy powerful laptop review coming out on soon that even beats out the M1 max in video editing so. For the best deal in Razer 15 click to Amazon tab below.