Kicking off with the 2020 Razer Blade 15.
The new revision of the popular gaming notebook will be available in May in
what are actually two separate, very similar, yet a bit different versions.
Among other design tweaks, both are getting a new keyboard layout, which now
has a smaller, but arguably better-positioned arrow key arrangement - the older
layout was subject to quite a bit of criticism.
Starting with the base Blade 15 variant,
for US$ 1,599 you get a new 10th Gen i7-10750H processor, which packs six cores
and eight threads and a base clock of 2.6GHz, with a boost of 5GHz. It comes
with a GTX1660 Ti in its base configuration and can be configured with the
older Nvidia RTX 2070 Max-Q. It starts with a matte 144Hz FHD LCD and can be
upgraded to an OLED. It also gets an Ethernet port, which is not the case on
the “Advanced model".
Speaking of, the Razer Blade 15 “Advanced”
gets a UHS-III SD card reader and the ability to charge via any of its Type-C
ports. There are other external and internal differences in the “Advanced” as
well, including, but not limited to a more complicated Vapor Chamber cooling
design, per-key RGB Razer Chroma illumination and, of course, higher-tier
silicon.
It packs the new eight-core,
sixteen-thread 10th Gen i7-10875H beast, which might not be the highest-tier
i9, but still goes up to a 5.1GHz turbo. It starts with one of the new Nvidia
GeForce RTX 2070 Super cards and can be specked-up to the RTX 2080 Super. Both
of these are of the Max-Q variety, which Nvidia claims has seen a generational
improvement in power efficiency up to 50%. In the monitor department, you get a
300Hz LCD in the base model, or, you can upgrade to an OLED. The OLED panel
even comes complete with touchscreen and Corning Gorilla Glass for protection.
Both the base and “Advanced” Blade 15
models ship with 16GB of DDR4 RAM, employ a glass-covered trackpad with Windows
Precision drivers and use an expandable M.2 2280 SSD - 256GB and 512GB,
respectively.
