Yahoo Finance Razer's new Blade 15: OLED display, RTX graphics and 9th-gen Intel
More power in the same-sized body.
Razer has unveiled the mid-2019 versions of its popular Blade laptop series that boost performance thanks to Intel's new 9th-generation portable CPUs. It has also joined a rare club with a 4K OLED option, delivering on technology it teased at CES 2019. As before, there are three new models: The Razer Blade 15 Basic, Blade 15 Advanced and Blade Pro 17. All of them are slim, light and pack top-end specs, like 9th-gen Intel Core i7-9750H CPUs, NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing GPUs, and displays perfectly suited for gaming and content creation.
Kicking things off is the Razer Blade 15 in "Basic" and "Advanced" versions. If you've got the bucks, the Advanced model is the one that you want, packing NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q GPUs and a 240Hz 1080p 15.6-inch screen for high frame-rate gaming. It comes with 16GB of dual-channel DDR4-2667 RAM (expandable to 64GB), an 80 Wh battery for maximum endurance, per-key RGB Razer Chroma and three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. All of that fits in a 17.8mm thick body weighing as little as 4.73 pounds.
If you want a more immersive experience for gaming or multimedia creation and have the budget, you'll want the top-end Blade 15 Advanced model with GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q graphics and a 4K 60 Hz OLED touchscreen. It covers 100 percent of the advanced DCI-P3 color gamut and conforms to the new DisplayHDR 400 True Black OLED standard, delivering a superb 400 nits of brightness for HDR gaming and entertainment content.
The basic version, meanwhile, scales things back, both in terms of performance and size. The GPU is limited to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 graphics, a 1080p 144Hz display, smaller 65 Wh battery and three USB 3.1 Gen 1, not Gen 2 ports. That's still a lot of power for a 4.63 pound laptop that's a bit thicker than the advanced model at 19.9mm. Neither the Basic or Advanced laptop have an SD card reader, so boo to that.
If you need a bigger screen, that's what the Razer Blade Pro 17-inch model is for. Powered also by the 9th-generation Intel Core i7-9750H 6-core CPU, it gives you a choice of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, 2070 Max-Q and 2080 Max-Q graphics. Oddly, your screen choices are limited to a 144Hz 1080p 17.3-inch model, though it's bright at 300 nits and covers 100 percent of the sRGB gamut.
The Blade Pro 17 comes with 16GB of DDR4 2667 Mhz RAM, NVMe SSDs, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type C (Thunderbolt) port and a UHS-III SD card reader. Weight-wise, you're looking at 6.06 pounds (2.75 kg) and it's 19.9mm thin.
The Blade Pro 17 model starts at $2,499 with RTX 2060 graphics, but will run you $3,199 with the top-end RTX 2080 Max-Q option. Meanwhile, the Razer Blade 15 Base model costs $1,999, while the Advanced unit starts at $2,399 with RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics (there's no pricing yet on the RTX 2080 4K OLED model, but expect to pay a lot more). They're available starting tomorrow in the US and Canada, and will arrive in May in other markets.
