The Razer Blade 15 (2021) Review: Amped Up With Ampere
by Brett Howse on March 11, 2021 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Gaming
- Razer
- Razer Blade
- Ampere
Battery Life
While battery life is normally one of the key aspects of a notebook computer, gaming laptops are somewhat of an exception. Their high power components often come with significant battery life penalties, which can tend to tether them to a desk. There are extreme cases of this, such as desktop replacement laptops, where they are meant to be plugged in basically all the time, but the Razer Blade 15 somewhat skirts the mid-ground, offering a reasonably thin and light design for mobility with a reasonably decent battery life for non-gaming tasks.
Razer offers two battery configurations, with the Base model coming with a 65 Wh battery while the Advanced model bumps that up to 80 Wh. Razer also offers NVIDIA Optimus, which not all gaming laptops do, allowing the dGPU to be disabled when not needed to conserve power. Countering that though is the QHD display with a 165 Hz refresh rate, which will almost certainly increase the base power draw of the system.
To test battery life, we set all laptops to 200 nits of brightness to make the test as even as possible.
Web Battery Life
Our web workload is quite demanding as an active workload, rather than just opening a set of pages every few seconds. The Razer Blade 15 ended up about mid-pack in terms of battery life, compared to other gaming systems. The base power draw is just too high to expect the kinds of results you would see on a less-powerful system such as the MSI Prestige 14 Evo.
Looking at the battery life with the battery size removed from the equation puts the Razer Blade in a somewhat better light. What is holding the battery life back is that the Razer Blade 15 Base we tested includes just a 65 Wh battery, compared to larger packs in most of the other gaming systems we’ve tested. Still, the minutes of runtime per Wh of the Razer Blade is slightly higher than all of the other proper gaming systems in the comparison. If Razer had shipped us the Advanced model with the larger battery, and all other variables being equal, the Web result would have been right up with the Acer Predator Triton 500.
PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery
One of the newest battery tests that have been added to the suite is the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test, which runs a set of workloads from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite in ten minute intervals, so if a device has better performance, it is able to complete the test sooner and get more idle time out of the ten minute window. As it is a new test, we have not been able to run it on most of the other gaming systems we’ve reviewed, so for this comparison, all other devices that have been tested so far are in the list. Several of them include dGPUs, but none of the other devices offer anywhere near as much performance. That, coupled with the relatively small battery in the Razer Blade 15 Base model, drop it to the bottom of this list.
Movie Playback
A very common task is video playback, and it also happens to be one of the least demanding, as all modern processors include fixed-function hardware for video decode which allows most of the chip to be idle. The Razer Blade 15 lasted about an hour longer than it did on the web test, slotting in above most of the other gaming systems. A larger battery would really have further helped here.
To give another perspective on the battery life results, we divide the runtime in minutes by the length of The Avengers movie, to see how many times you could loop the movie. Gaming laptops are a long ways off Ultrabook-style notebooks such as the MSI Prestige Evo, and the Razer Blade will only give you 2.5 viewings of The Avengers.
Charge Time
Razer ships all models of the Blade 15 with a compact 230-Watt AC Adapter, and it bears mentioning that they have moved to a proprietary power plug that is rectangular in shape. This allows them to provide a large power feed through a relatively narrow connector, and it fits into the chassis very nicely. Unlike some of the barrel plugs or multi-pin plugs, it does feel like this connector is a lot more robust than pretty much any other gaming laptop system we’ve seen. Time will tell, and a proprietary plug does limit choices if the adapter ever fails, but it feels like a very well designed way to charge this laptop. It also features a 90° angle on the connector which provides simple cable management with the side-mounted cable.
With a high-power AC adapter, and a relatively small battery capacity, the Razer Blade 15 charges from 0% to 100% incredibly quickly. Under two hours to recharge is a great result.
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Brett Howse - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Yes there is an entire industry of Clevo rebrands. Cheap. Powerful. Plastic. Heavy.Oxygen12 - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
This review surprised me a little bit.(I am an owner of a 2020 Razer Blade base with a max-q 2070 and OLED screen).
I am less glowing about the battery life, in my personal use, for whatever reason, background processes etc., I never reach four hours of battery life doing standard surfing activities. It's a tradeoff I am OK with, but do wish the life was longer... the battery shouldn't be smaller than the one in the advanced. I just couldn't swing the price of the advanced package overall, although I wish I could have.
Regarding thermals - this is the most surprising topic to me. The laptop is very performant and I like it very much, but the thing gets very hot and loud. I don't have any tests performed, I don't know if it throttles or not. I don't know how many dba it is generating - but the fan noise is very annoying at full and the laptop itself gets very, very warm. After playing Call of Duty black ops for almost 2 hours, I had to stop as the laptop itself was just getting just too warm physically to the touch and was uncomfortable to use.
Packagewise, I think this is still the best product out there - the aluminum chasis is great, the OLED screen is outright amazing and the performance for such a small chasis is phenomenal. That said, if I could have swung it, I would have gotten the advanced.. bigger battery, better cooling, USB-C charging.
Spikke - Tuesday, April 20, 2021 - link
I have the 2020 base model with 2070 Max-Q as well. The primary contributing factor of the insane temps was the cpu turbo boost. I disabled that in the BIOS and my peak CPU temp dropped by a little over 20 degrees Celcius while gaming, made a huge difference in overall temps with very little impact to frame rates. Try disabling that and see what kind of difference it makes.Matthias B V - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Really don't understand the use of a 360hz Display. 144Hz great, maybe 240 but anything above is useless - At least on a notebook. And then it is not even bright. Lenovo does a much better job in their Legion 7i where they offer 500 Nits HDR400 240hz display.Anyway would wait for at least for the mid / late 2021 version of the Blade 15 that might come with TigerLake. Comet-Lake is crap and part of the reason runtimes are so bad. Also would prefer a 95Wh battery rather than the 80Wh.
Used to have a Blade 15 Advanced with a 2080 Super but returned it for above reasons. Maybe I give it a try with Alder/MeteorLake + RTX40xx Lovelace as it is on 5nm [No fan of Samsung 10/8nm. Their 7nm EUV would have been ok] and in combination with the much better CPU should provide massive increases in performance and runtime!
Zensation - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
I wish I could post ever email I have, the entire 50 something long list that backdated this comment of absolute crap im having to put up with because their piece of crap blade 15 motherboard failed on the second day of ownership on my 2021 model. I have a 2020 advanced model I bought less than a year ago which the battery has swelled and bent the case to the point of not even being able to use the track pad. Their customer service and product in my opinion is of the lowest grade trash. This was actually purchased on a corporate account as well so guess what now the entire corporation has black balled razer good riddance. Steer absolutely clear of this POS. Yes I registered an account just to call this pos company out.Tomatotech - Friday, March 12, 2021 - link
If I was looking at dropping $2200 on a laptop, I’d be comparing this to a MacBook Pro. Runs all of Windows, MacOS and Linux perfectly fine, good battery, amazing resale price making it possibly considerably cheaper than the Razer overall.Graphics not so good but it’s for work not play.
The MacBook Pro is in a funny place right now. The current 16” model runs Windows but you get the overheating power hungry Intel chip. Later this year the new Apple Silicon model will come out and is widely expected to be a giant leap forward for power, battery life, and graphics. As yet there is no indication if it will run Windows though. A cloud-based Windows VM might be a useful backup for using the odd application, or Apple / Microsoft might work out something around Windows on ARM, it’s still unknown.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, March 12, 2021 - link
You should also compare a panasonic toughbook, since they are also in the same price range.scineram - Friday, March 12, 2021 - link
Not Cézanne, not interesting.ciparis - Friday, March 12, 2021 - link
Intel in a laptop in 2021? I'm sorry Razer, but no sale.gijames1225 - Friday, March 12, 2021 - link
I've convinced my employer to get me a Rog G14 as my next developer laptop. I'd sell them on one of these instead if I could get one with a 8 core Ryzen processor, but no dice. I just don't see why anybody would go with hex-core i7 when you can get 5800H in the same price bracket, if not cheaper.