Table of Contents
Today, we are here with our Razer Blade Pro 17 Review. This 17-inch stunner is an embodiment of slim with its 0.8-inch thick black aluminum chassis. But the Razer Blade Pro is more than just a beautiful sight. It features an Intel 9th generation processor and an RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU, which ensures a formidable gaming laptop and content creation system. A few lightning-fast SSDs and a surprisingly effective cooling system only make the proposition sweet. The Blade Pro screen could have been a bit brighter and more vivid for the price, but in general, this system deserves a spot on our best list of gaming laptops.
Razer Blade Pro 17 Review – Design
Like its smaller siblings, the Pro 17 is an obsidian dream. The new Razer laptop is made of black anodized aluminum and closed the curved corners and lid flanges for the boxy design of this current generation of Razer Blade. But no matter how the shape changes, one thing remains the same: the three-headed snake. Because the rest of the frame is black, the logo glows in that seductive, yet creepy, green.
In the future, I hope that Razer will consider having owners change the color of the Razer logo using the Chroma software, just like with the keyboard. It would also be good if we could get a Mercury White version similar to the upcoming Studio version, and I would not want a 17-inch quartz pink or any other funky color. A combination of gaming and workstation must have enough ports to accommodate the many doodads that you wish to link to it.
The Blade Pro 17 delivers by offering a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, one Thunderbolt 3, an HDMI 2.0 port, and an SD card reader on the right. On the left, you will get a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a USB 3.2 Type-C port, a 2.5 GB Ethernet connection, a headset connection, and its power port.
Keyboard and TouchPad
The island-like keyboard of the Blade Pro is spacious and offers a fair amount of pop – and I’m not only talking about the fascinating sparkle of the color of the Chroma lighting. Although it only has a head stroke of 1.1 millimeters (1.5 mm is our minimum) and an actuation force of 79 grams (60 g is our minimum), the keyboard allowed me to hit 71 words per minute, slightly above my usual 70.
But The Best part of the Razer keyboard is the customization. This time the company kicked things up considerably and renewed Razer Synapse to make serious adjustments possible. You can not only set color and functionality for each key, but there is also a new pen function that allows you to draw the desired light pattern in the editor necessarily. Or you can use the Paint function and color large parts of the board in one go. But if you don’t want to go deeper, you can also use the presets. And of course, you can create macros for different games with specific profiles.
With 4.1 x 3.1 inches, the touchpad of the Blade Pro is enormous, which means that I never had to worry about unintentionally hitting an edge. The pinch zoom of Windows 10 gestures, scrolling with two fingers and tapping and swiping with three fingers were quick and responsive.
Razer Blade Pro 17 Review – Display
Large, beautiful, and fast. The 17.3-inch, 1920 x 1080 screen of the Blade Pro offers bold colors with a rapid refresh rate of 144Hz, which is useful for gaming. But it’s as good for watching movies as I learned while watching the trailer for The Last Black Man in San Francisco. The bronze skin of actress Tichina Arnold radiated, playing only her ruby red lipstick and royal blue blouse. Details were good enough that I saw the soft wave pattern of her back-combed hair.
Far Cry New Dawn, with its pink flowers, lush green forests, and clear splashes of blood, is beautiful on the Blade Pro display. I happened to look up during a night mission and was shocked by the hazy pinkish-green glow of the lights accentuated by thousands of small white dots of starlight. Details were bright enough that I saw the loose wire hairs of a wild boar as he rushed toward me.
The Blade Pro can produce 109% of the sRGB range, which is above our 100% minimum. That is good and means that the screen is indeed lively. However, it is below the average of 147% premium gaming laptops and 122%, 140% and 161% of the Y740, m17, and Stealth.
When we measured the brightness, the Blade Pro had an average of 267 nits. That’s better than the Y740, which only recorded 247 nits, but it’s still far below the 294-nit category average, along with the Stealth (339 nits) and the m17 (395 nits).
Audio
When I used the Blade Pro on my lap to watch movies or listen to music, I didn’t have to take an uncomfortable position to prevent poorly placed speakers from being lowered at the bottom. Instead, I just sat in my recliner while Rose Royce played “Wishing on a Star,” enjoying the delicate violins as they swelled and faded, the rhythmic pitter chatter of the bongos and the powerful piano that supported a lilting soprano. The speakers aren’t the loudest I’ve heard on a gaming laptop, but they offer clean warm performance.
Graphics and Gaming
The Razer Blade Pro 17 swings with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU and is ready for a fight. Despite the focus on low power consumption and quiet fans, the Max-Q chip has enough power to ensure that you get high frame rates while you sit back and take names.
During a mission to free a key figure in New Dawn, I crept to the stronghold of the enemy. I stumbled upon an unsuspecting sentry, triggered a silent murder, and buried my hunting knife in his throat at a smooth 83 fps at Ultra settings at 1080p. The frame rate jumped to 102 fps after I set the settings too high.
The laptop delivered 72 frames per second on the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark at 1080p, the reby beating the Stealth’s (RTX 2080 Max-Q) 65 fps, the Lenovo Y740 (RTX 2080 Max-Q) and the premium gaming average, which is 64 fps reached. However, the Alienware m17 and its own 2080 Max-Q GPU achieved 102 fps.
During the Hitman test, the Razer Blade Pro produced 110 fps, which was better than the average, the Lenovo Y740, and the Blade Stealth (105, 106, and 96 fps), but not the Alienware m17, which reached it at 111 fps.
The Blade Pro prevailed on the Grand The ft Auto V benchmark and scored 92 fps. That was enough to surpass not only the average of 79 fps but also the Legion Y740 (78 fps) and the Blade Stealth (77 fps) and the Alienware m17 (82 fps).
Razer Blade Pro 17 Review – Performance
With its 2.6 GHz Intel’s Core i7-9750H processor and 16 GB RAM, the Razer Blade Pro can multitask with ease. I streamed an episode of the DuckTales reboot on DisneyNow with 20 tabs in Google Chrome with Twitch, TweetDeck, and YouTube. I also had Far Cry New Dawn run in a separate window, but the Blade Pro continued to flush undisturbed.
On Geekbench 4.3, our overall performance test, the laptop scored 19,217, missing the average of the premium gaming laptop. The Stealth and Y740, which have their own Core i7-9750H CPUs, yielded higher results of 20,843 and 22,287, respectively. The Alienware m17, with its overclockable Intel Core i9-9980HK CPU, achieved a score of 30,267.
The double 512 GB PCIe NVMe SSDs of the Blade Pro duplicated 4.97 GB of mixed media files in a lightning-fast 4 seconds. That is a blistering transfer rate of 1,272.3 megabytes per second, which is much faster than the average of the 772.5 MBps category. It also has more to do than the competing systems, including the m17 (1,018 MBps), which itself has two 512GB m.2 PCIe SSDs.
Heat
Whether it’s a titan or a slim little minx like the Blade Pro, cooling remains a problem with gaming laptops. Razer managed to somewhat combat the problem by adding a full vapor chamber and a redesigned hinge that takes the hot air away from where your hands would touch each other. I spent 15 minutes with hell in Far Cry New Dawn, and when I was done, I measured the touchpad, center, and chassis of the notebook. I saw that the laptop registered the temperatures of 88, 105, and 115 degrees, respectively.
The last two scores are well above our 95-degree comfort region, but I still used the system comfortably on my lap while wearing shorts. After the laptop had cooled down, we measured temperatures again. The touchpad was cool at 88 degrees, while the center of the keyboard and the bottom reached 100 and 107 degrees, respectively.
Battery Life
No matter how thin the Razer Blade Pro 17 is, it suffers from the Achilles heel of any gaming laptop – short battery life. The Blade Pro 17 lasted only 3 hours and 12 minutes during our battery test, which consists of continuous internet use via WiFi at 150 nits brightness. The time of the Blade is a few minutes shorter than the average of 3:18 premium laptops but still better than the 2:30 and 2:29 of the Y740 and the Stealth. But the M17 lasted the longest after even 4 hours.
Conclusion
The Razer Blade Pro 17 skillfully across the border between gaming and creative professionals delivers strong overall and gaming performance, a fast pair of SSDs, and a beautiful screen to get it done. For $ 3,199, however, I wished the screen was brighter with better color reproduction, and longer battery life could not hurt. If your wallet can tolerate it, check out the $3,579 iteration of the Alienware m17 R2, which comes with an overclockable Core i9 processor in combination with an Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU. It also has a longer battery life and a screen that is both brighter and more vivid.
But if you are looking for an elegant laptop that can switch seamlessly from work to work, the Razer Blade Pro 17 is a great choice.