Razer Blade 18 review 2024: great gaming laptop

Another new Razer Blade gaming laptop has made its way to our test labs. This time, it’s a different size. The Blade 18 was shown for the first time at CES 2023. It starts at $2,899.99 and costs $3,799.99 as reviewed. It has a new 18-inch QHD 240Hz display and the latest Intel 13th Gen Core i9 processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 graphics processor.

That naturally leads to blazing-fast gaming performance. DLSS 3, in particular, makes high-frame-rate gaming at QHD possible in the few demanding games that support it, and it’s all wrapped up in the expensive Blade build we’ve come to expect. But even for this type, the price is high: It’s a bit more expensive than the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, which has better performance and an RTX 4090, so you’d have to really want the best-in-class Blade design to take the risk.

Razer Blade 18 Specifications

Razer Blade 18: Design and Display

If you can get over the price, there isn’t much wrong with the Blade 18’s style. Razer’s metal body is very strong, and its lid and deck hardly bend at all. It also has a great feeling keyboard with per-key RGB lighting, but some people might be disappointed that Razer couldn’t fit a numpad on a laptop this big. And because it has a lot of ports, like an HDMI 2.1 jack, Ethernet, a full-size SD card reader, and multiple USB Type-A and Type-C connectors, you won’t have to worry about carrying a dongle or dock. This is good, because the Blade 18 is already pretty heavy at 6.8 pounds.

Even though it’s not that much bigger than the Blade 17, Razer’s biggest laptop ever doesn’t fit in my normal shoulder bag, and it’s so big that it’s almost too big for my normal backpack. So, if I want to carry it around, I have to pull out my big travel bag, which is probably for the best because its padded straps are kind of a must if you want to carry around the Blade 18 and its 1.7-pound power brick for any length of time. Still, for a desktop substitute, the Blade 18 isn’t as awkward to use on your lap as you might think. Even though it’s big, the notebook is well-balanced and doesn’t get too hot during normal use. 

Keyboard and trackpad

The Blade 18’s keyboard is probably the least impressive part. It doesn’t do anything special other than have the same Chroma RGB lights that most products in its price range have. There’s nothing wrong with it in and of itself, and typing on it is fine once you get used to the oddly small arrow keys and strange power button between backspace and delete. Don’t hit that by chance.

Holding down the function key makes the F keys stand out, which makes it much easier to find the brightness settings when playing in the dark. It’s still fun to use the Razer companion apps to change the RGB, especially with the dynamic lighting, but there’s nothing new here. The Blade 18 has good keys, but people who like WASD controls might be disappointed by how little they move. You can buy this laptop from its official website

Razer Blade 18: Gaming performance

With the great 24 cores and 32 threads of the 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13950HX CPU, none of my notoriously demanding games had any trouble keeping at least 60 FPS. Even though the Blade 18 has a nice 240Hz screen, you can only get about half of that with most games set to high graphics.

If you lower the game’s graphics a bit, you can get closer to the maximum frame rate. This is especially true if you use NVIDIA’s DLSS technology to lower the internal rendering resolution and give up some other ray tracing perks. Unsurprisingly, this second-best version of the Blade 18 crushed our usual speed tests. Geekbench 5 even beat an MSI Titan GT77 with the same CPU.

Price and availability

The base version of the Blade 18 will cost $2,899 on February 22. For that price, you’ll get an 18-inch 240Hz QHD+ display, an Intel Core i9-13950HX CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB SSD for storage. You can pay more for a model with an upgraded RTX 4070 GPU and 32GB of RAM, and both models will have versions with up to 8TB of storage.

Final Words

Having a powerful PC that you can pick up and take with you without having to think about a case, cables, a monitor, or anything else is a real benefit. We know that college students can make good use of a PC replacement like this because we did the same thing when we were in school. When you want to buy a gaming PC but know you’ll be moving at least once a year, a gaming laptop looks like a great option.

Razer Blade 18 review: The good and the Bad

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