Razer Blade 16 Review - Worth it for 2024?

okay so here we have the Razer Blade 16 and this thing is kind of like the mac daddy of 2023 and 2024 gaming laptops one of the most expensive on the market and with some of the best specs that you can find this year Razer made some massive improvements here over the typical blade 15 and I'll get into that and I had this laptop for quite a few months so this is going to be sort of a long-term review and this is the 2023 model here but it's quite literally identical to the 2024 model other than the screen and I'll talk about that too like even performance-wise this review should pretty much apply to whichever year model you get but I'll still touch on the differences nonetheless so this thing has the RTX 490 in it the top laptop GPU which is really a desktop 4080 clock down but regardless it's running at the full wattage of 175 Watts Yes you heard that right Razer who typically only had like 100 or 110 watt gpus in their laptops now has a full wattage mobile GPU in their machines yes it is a tiny bit bigger than the blade 15 but the thermal advantage and wattage Advantage is well worth the tradeoff in my opinion and we love to see it I'll also give some graphs that can show you what to expect if you go for the RTX 4080 or 4070 version of this machine we also have an Intel I9 13950 HX in here which is one of the top spec Intel chips seen in laptops in 2023 it can run at about 170 Watts at the highest is what I achieved which is pretty insane considering this is not a very thick laptop um this CPU has 24 cores including eight performance cores and 16 efficient cores and 32 threads and the 2024 model has the 14950 HX which is basically the same but just with a higher boost clock speed but yeah this CPU just really dominates mostly everything out there and it's basically almost in premium desktop performance territory as of making this video at least however it is a very power hungry chip and we'll talk about some of the downsides because of that and the display is really the star of the show with this variant with the dynamic resolution switch you can either use it at 4K 120 HZ or full HD 240 HZ and yes it is capable of 4K gaming as I'll show later on is it the best choice for a display H we'll talk about that but one thing right off the bat is amazing is that it's mini LED technology giving it insane brightness and colors which is currently my favorite type of laptop display um if you go for the 2024 model you get the choice of a QHD OLED display instead and I'll also give an opinion on that later in the video all right so first we're going to talk about the design so I've always compared Razer Blade to a Macbook that joined the dark side of the force so okay it's one of the only Windows gaming laptops to feature a chassis this premium with a full CNC aluminum build we all know it's beautiful we all also wish there were more options out there for gaming laptops that could look like this but unfortunately there isn't however it does look like Asus took a page out of razer's book for 20124 because the new zephrus G14 and g16 actually do have a very similar build now there's also a Mercury silver color for this model that looks almost identical to a Macbook but sadly that one does not come with the RTX 490 variant for some reason or I would have have easily swept that thing up another advantage of the Mercury silver is the fingerprints are much more manageable my least favorite part about a blade is how often you have to clean the fingerprints to keep it looking good it's unfortunately a fingerprint magnet there's not much they can really do about it with a dark aluminum chassis like this but at least it's not hard to clean them off with a microfiber cloth um the top lid has the razor logo which illuminates with a few brightness and effects options and the Razer synapse software the bottom has surprisingly small vents compared to most other gaming laptops and the feet of the laptop aren't too big either so that's pretty nice the hinge feels amazing just nice and sturdy something about a tight hinge can really just make a laptop feel more premium and razor nailed that although it doesn't fold back all the way flat but whatever another part of the stealthy design is this MacBook like keyboard it's clacky the travel distance is a little low but I never really found that to be an issue personally I know some people hate Razer keyboards some love them I really don't mind them I'm not super picky on travel distance and I felt like I could type quite fast and comfortably on it so here's the sound sample compar with some Asus keyboards which are my favorite keyboards among gaming laptops also the keyboard is centered which grants us some upward firing speakers and no number pad which I strongly prefer I've set in a million times but on a laptop smaller than 17 in it just makes more sense to have a centered keyboard um it keeps everything uni form and keeps the trackpad in the center as well usually speaking of trackpads this thing is massive probably the largest trackpad I've used on a laptop ever people had problems with pal rejection when this thing first released but Razer has been quick to put out firmware updates that have fixed that issue I had no trouble with pal rejection and since it's a glass trackpad it feels insanely smooth to use and click um here it is in comparison to some other glass trackpads from Asus laptops and to a plastic trackpad like on the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i which in comparison to this one feels much less premium and a bit more annoying to [Music] use you've also got a 1080p webcam nothing too crazy but it's nice to have especially with the little privacy shutter it's a simple implementation but it works also Windows hello is very convenient so glad to see that being used here and the charging brake on these is actually pretty nice it's 330 WTS which for some other laptops is like the size of an entire Mini PC but since this one is a gan charger it's way more compact much closer in size to like a 240 or 280 WT charging brake out there um although I'm not a big fan of razer's proprietary charging cable as it's super easy to scratch a laptop with like I really don't know what they were thinking there while it is a little thicker than last year's blade 15 and a bit heavier it isn't terribly different in the look and feel at all like we're talking barely a difference of course many of us want the thinnest laptop possible but for the extra performance I'm glad Razer follows suit with the likes of MacBooks and went with a slightly thicker body and compared to the competition with these same specs it's actually pretty thin still like it still looks much more sleek and slim than the legion Pro 7i from Lenova this year so good job Razer and good on them still for offering the blade 15 with updated specs 2 for those who still want to keep things even Slimmer but with less power all right so the display we have to talk about this display because it is amazing and there are quirks um so first of all it's mini LED which is already a huge selling point you've got thousands of dimming zones with an array of LEDs used as a backlight this means insane brightness over a th000 nits extremely vibrant colors and some of the best HDR you can get on a laptop without the risk of burn in from oleds and obviously going way brighter than OLED the downside of this of course is some blooming in certain scenarios which is hard to spot in games and movies but can get pretty noticeable in browsers and creative applications especially when the brightness is lower I've made a whole video on this so I strongly recommend checking that out after this if you're interested in learning more the basically even though there's about a thousand dimming zones on this thing it's still not quite enough to eliminate blooming and and the dimming algorithm also plays an important part I'll admit that this panel's or Razor's dimming algorithm is better than asus's mini LED algorithm but it's not perfect either and it also depends on the panel you get so you'll either get a Boe panel or an aoou panel those are the manufacturers and I'm not sure of a way to guarantee one over the other but basically people have had a lot of issues with the Boe panel having more blooming and other glitches while the aoou panel tends to be much more reliable with a solid dimming algorithm like the one I have here you can check which one you have using a program like HW info and while it looks great of course there's still one big issue I have with it and that's the lack of a single zone dimming switch esus has these on their laptops to allow users to switch to a more uniform brightness across the whole display but Razer for some reason has not included this here so creators may have to deal with colors that look off or Windows on your desktop with strange brightness variations it's just kind of sad to me that that's not there on this machine no one else has done this besides Asus for some reason I don't think it'll be a deal breaker really except maybe for some creatives out there but it's just weird to me that they didn't include that when half the marketing on this thing has been for creators and Gamers alike now on the OLED one for 2024 you won't have to worry about that but I'll talk about that more in a second now let's talk about the resolution switch so this is a 4K panel which I'd argue on a 16-in display is kind of redundant of course desktop icons and text looks insanely sharp like yes noticeably more sharp than QHD I'll admit but games as a whole to me they don't look that much different like I found myself just gaming at QHD most of the time even while I was in 4k because it gave me way more FPS and I found that it still looks good so I mean the cool thing though for some Esports players out there is you can swap over to the full HD mode and boost the refresh rate from 120 to 240 HZ which looks very smooth in high FPS games like OverWatch and obviously your FPS will be through the roof because full HD is much easier on the GPU um it is going to be a little blurrier as it doesn't look near nearly as good as a native full HD display unfortunately but but it's still cool to have personally I found myself not using the full HD mode at all I really wish they had just gone with a QHD mini LED display as that I I think it's just a better sweet spot for FPS and resolution but at least the 4080 model does have QHD and the 2024 models are all QHD so which is weird that they just took that option away like it's you can't even have a 4K in 2024 so sorry also of course this is razer's first dive into the 16 X10 aspect ratio they were a little late to the game but it definitely works and it looks really cool in a chassis like this because it makes that chin way less prevalent I still wish it did have a glossy coating option um but I don't really mind this matte coating too much the brightness still shines through just fine and 2024 users do get a glossy display so I am a little jealous there um lastly for creators we've got a great color gamut here at 100% srgb 99% DCI ip3 and of course over 1,00 nits of brightness compared to the legion Pro 7i here this thing has more on the color thanks to that High color gamut and of course gets way brighter it would be really hard for me to go back to a traditional IPS display after using this and real quick I'm just going to elaborate a little more on the blooming and brightness since that is a main concern for many LED displays here we have a legion Pro 7i with the standard IPS panel on the left the blade is the second one the zephrus G14 mini LED model at a Max of 600 nits and then lastly the Zenbook Pro 16x OLED display which can also hit about 550 600 nits I have a full video comparing these displays that you can watch on the channel but right off the bat you can see that the blade is the brightest of the bunch and the camera can't really capture what the human eye can really see but beyond the brightness it packs the most vibrant colors of these laptops as well and the legion over here just doesn't even compare so so I swapped it out for another 1000 in mini LED laptop the Asus flow x16 now it's much harder to tell them apart but the blade still comes in at the brightest so I got to respect how awesome this panel is again you can watch the full display comparison video here on my channel and then for 2024 like I was saying we have an OLED display on the blade 16 these are 240 HZ QHD OLED um with g-sync similar to the one on the new zephrus g16 from Asus in fact I think it might be the exact same panel so you're looking at over 500 nits so it's going to be less bright and because it's OLED there is that risk of burning over time um there probably going to be auto brightness limiter a unfortunately but compared to mini LED OLED has perfect blacks better motion Clarity and that near instant response time so you know you're going to be sacrificing a good bit of brightness but if you're not looking for HDR 1000 with you know crazy full screen brightness then maybe the 2024 model is a better choice for you I mean I think for many people the trade-off to have a glossy panel with perfect contrast might be worth it but you know there's no 4K options so if you want that 4K option you're going to have to go there with a different laptop or go with the 2023 so I've been chatting with some 2024 blade 16 owners and there is one thing that is kind of odd about the display and this is also present on the new zephrus g16 I actually have a video of it here that I'm throwing in these OLED displays have this weird kind of texture that you can only see on like some gray backgrounds I'm not sure I'd call it an isore or anything it's not as bad as like the screen door effect that I've seen on like the Zenbook Pro 16x but it is just something to be aware of like the gray backgrounds look a lot cleaner here on the G14 and then when you move over to the g16 which is the same panel as the blade 16 you see this like grittiness it's it's hard to explain but there's like it's almost like sandpaper on the gray background you can kind of see it here around the text and then switch back over to the G14 looks great again switch back over to g16 and notice that texture on the Grays so not sure if I'd call that an issue or just something that's just part of these new panels or just the OLED technology they used but I'm already seeing a couple posts about it on Reddit on the blade 16 so it is there just something to be aware of again this will not affect the 2023 mini LED model this is just for the 2024 all right so for ports so Razer did a good job here on the left of course you've got this weird scratch prone power cable connector which they really need to do away with but um you got two USB type a 3.2 Gen 2 ports a thunderbolt 4 port and your headphone combo Jack on the right you have a Kensington lock HDMI 2.1 another usba a port a USBC 3.2 Gen 2 port and an SD card reader which has pretty good speeds the SD card will stick out a little bit which is kind of annoying but sometimes that's just the trade-off for going with a full size size versus the micro SD card slot something to keep in mind and I really don't know why Razer did this same with the legion Pro 7i is that all the display outputs so the two USBC ports and the HDMI are all connected directly to the Nvidia Graphics so if you connect any monitor the GPU will always be awake so if you're on battery for example this is going to destroy your battery life so just keep that in mind I think it's a much better option to at least have one port connected to the integrated Graphics so that the laptop isn't constantly working so hard when you're just trying to do something like basic task on a monitor so I mean it's just a weird Choice there on their part and the speakers on this thing are just all right um I honestly expected better when I saw that they were increasing the size of the chassis especially when you're paying over $4,000 in the US for these um but sadly these speakers don't really even come close to even like thinner machines like the zephrus G14 here which is really weird considering they're upfiring as well but here's a comparison all right now internally um you have two SSD slots um they're kind of weirdly stacked here which makes it kind of hard to get a double-sided drive without some modifications so it's probably best to just run two like two terab sticks that are one-sided if you have them you've got two Ram Slots of course which can run up to 5600 megat transfers per second also if you got the 2024 model instead of Wi-Fi 6E you're going to get Wi-Fi 7 from the Wi-Fi card here so that's pretty cool the 95w hour battery here which is quickly eaten up by the components but I'll talk about that later and then youve got your two fans here and then of course in the middle is the vapor chamber which is largely responsible for keeping this thing from throttling in a body that's thin so let's take a look at the software so inside Razer synapse is some pretty interesting functionality and I'm glad to see Razer improving it because I noticed synapse has a few more key features now than it used to when you buy one of these this is pretty much all that's ins installed so you don't have any blow Weare from the factory which is pretty nice however because of this you're responsible for updating all of your drivers so for Intel drivers you're going to want to get those from Intel's website NVIDIA drivers from Nvidia and then Windows update usually handles the rest you know and then of course any razor specific drivers and bios updates can be found on the product support page so in synaps you have and it might look different from this in 2024 because I know they're actively working on it right now but um come over here to the system and you can turn gaming mode on which is kind of dumb but it just basically disables window Windows key um you can disable alt tab you can disable alt f4 so that's really all that does it doesn't actually do anything for performance um you can change your function lock here which is nice um you can disable the trackpad entirely if you want you can even change like uh Keys what they do if you want to make the a key have a mouse click function you can do that here so that's pretty cool um then on the performance this is where you can pretty much do everything for tuning the laptop how you want it to perform so balance mode is pretty great um you can have it just automatically adjust fan speed as needed or you can set a Target fan speed and it will adjust performance as necessary silent mode is I mean basically silent although I did find the fans to actually be constantly on just at a very low RPM in silent mode uh which is kind of annoying but again they are super quiet still which that is good um of course performance is a bit limited here but it still does really good and I'll explain that later and then lastly you've got custom mode so this is where some magic is happening here this is much more intuitive than the blade 15 you can do um CPU option for power you can do GPU low medium and high you have a Max fan speed mode here which is sweet and then enabling CPU overclocking is really cool so you don't actually even have to overclock your CPU when you enable this it just really gives you full control over your wattage your Boost wattage your sustained wattage so that's just nice to see like you could actually even just your wattage here if you wanted to like you could have it run at maybe 60 wats Max or something or 20 watts Max so this is cool and you can undervolt here too they might have removed undervolt now but if not you can still undervolt in throttle stop and then on battery the only thing that's going to be available is balanced for some reason not silent mode which is really weird to me but you know balanced is still pretty good I guess it's just weird like why is there no silent mode on battery but whatever um and then the display tab is where you can change your refresh rate um in the 4K mode here like I'm in I can only go up to 120 HZ or 60 HZ um you can have it change automatically as soon as you unplug which is nice and then you can also switch switch right here to the native display mode if you're on the mini LED 2023 model you can change it to that full HD 240 HZ right here it does require a restart though which is really annoying but I guess it's what they had to do for some reason you can also change your color profile and then if you click here for GPU mode you can look at your Advanced Optimus settings in Nvidia control panel Advanced Optimus is a feature that is nice to have and new on the 2023 models of the blade where it will dynamically switch between Optimus or just the Nvidia Graphics only for your laptop so that can increase FPS especially in games that are high in fps already like OverWatch and csgo and stuff like that so that's where that comes in handy and you can even enable this little um switch so you can do it on your own on the battery tab you have a battery health Optimizer which is good to see from them so you don't have to worry about degrading your battery as fast if you leave it plugged in often you can leave it at 80% so it doesn't degrade your battery as much or lower than that down to 50% and then the lighting tab is where you can adjust the brightnesses and effects that your laptop is going through whether you're plugged in or on battery so that's nice you can set you know idle times when the display turns off stuff like that here and then you have your more Advance effects at the bottom here you can go to chroma studio for example even customize each key a separate way and do different effects um it gets pretty complicated I'm not going to go over this whole thing because it's pretty self-explanatory you kind of just have to mess with it to figure it out and you have some of the more gimmicky things like the connect connects your lighting to certain games so sometimes like a certain action in a game might trigger certain Lighting on your keyboard which is kind of cool um again the studio for creating lighting effects you got the chroma visualizer and you can set like macros here so lastly um in the general settings you can check for synapse updates um turn off notifications you can also check your firmware updates here it'll launch your browser and take you to the support page for your laptop which is nice because the blade 16 has actually had some pretty significant updates so if you go to the page right here you'll just click like blade 16 and you can see they've had a firmware update BIOS update and a display firmware update basically you just follow the instructions on the page and you can get the latest bios there and that's pretty much it for the software so moving on let's kind of talk about my favorite part about this thing and that's the fan noise if you're subscribed to my channel you'll probably know that fan noise is important to me I like to bring my laptop places since you know it's a laptop I don't want people staring at me as my machine just prepares for takeoff sounding like a jet engine so I was actually really happy to see some great fan tuning here from Razer so at the custom highest profile our fans only max out around like 47 and half 48 DB so kind of nice to see and I'm just going to go ahead and pull up my fan noise to Performance ratio here so you'll see like in the turbo like the highest performance mode the blade is pretty much at the top here with the legion Pro 7i really only reason the legion beats it is because it just has a slightly higher graphical output um it is actually a little bit louder and it sort of pulsates in comparison to the blade 16 which seems to run at a sort of steadier lower level than the legion um and then balanced mode is really where this thing shines you can see here it's 43 DB and leading the charts like it does so good in Balance mode and that's really honestly where I prefer to use this thing like I was playing OverWatch in Balance mode like you can game for hours in Balance mode and barely hear the fans 43 DB is really not that much so that's really nice to see how well it does there um and then silent mode it's again it's I mean it's right up there with the G14 which to me has like the best silent mode but this is just the stock silent mode 40 DB and we're killing it like we are so far ahead of the competition now and again like you can comfortably game in silent mode on this thing and that's one of the coolest parts to me is like I love it when uh manufacturers tune their laptops to where you can actually do something on silent mode like that is just awesome I hate it when they just performance in silent mode just for the sake of fans like give me a little performance if I need it you know I'd almost rather manufacturers have a silent mode and then like an ultra silent mode like Ultra silent can be just your super gimped like choppy performance sure for the sake of no fans at all but give me like a silent mode that actually has a little little kick to it you know and then of course you have a Max fan speed toggle which will lower temperatures a bit but it pushes those fans well past 50 DB um I don't really recommend this unless your thermals are just your top priority as far as the 2023 model compared to the 2024 for fan noise from what I'm understanding they're about the same I've talked to a couple 2024 owners who have had both and and the consensus is that there is a little bit of variance the 2024 might be a little bit louder in certain scenarios or maybe a little bit higher pitch in certain scenarios and sometimes it's quieter so it's it seems like there's really barely any difference in fan noise uh between the two so if that's a major concern I wouldn't really worry about picking one year over the other So speaking of thermals and I can't really give the most honest review here for the blade 16 because unfortunately I did buy this from someone who while they didn't have it for very long they had switched the stock thermal paste to liquid metal on both the CPU and GPU so unfortunately I have god tier thermals no I mean not really they're they're still not the best but I'll at least show you what I'm getting and I'll even have a video of me reapplying the liquid metal um so you can sort of see what to expect between running stock Pace liquid metal or PTM on this thing so it's pretty easy to do just some simple precautions really but first of all just to be fair liquid metal definitely seems to benefit the CPU more than it does the GPU so you know with the liquid metal you can really get that CPU wattage much higher in games and benchmarks by doing this since the system recognizes is that it has more head room to use and it will use it but that doesn't mean like in a 3-hour gaming session that your temperatures are going to be consistently High the whole time it it really helps mostly just in benchmarks and things like that so once that Vapor chamber is all heated up and the heat is soaking everywhere I mean it's it's not that much of a difference as long as it's applied evenly even the stock Pace can do really good so I mean my recommendations unless you're unhappy with your performance and you're getting just constant throttling I wouldn't bother I mean I think Razer designed this thing so that the CPU would throttle a little a little bit to allow the GPU to use more power overall though I don't think repasting makes enough of a difference to Performance to negate The Benchmark results I've gotten I might have gained like a few FPS here and there depending on the game but I've seen people with stock Pace get basically the same scores as me in games and benchmarks like I basically just saw better temperatures from stock having liquid metal and the capacity to boost the CPU higher for a little bit if I really wanted to push it like Max cin bench scores or something um however like like I said once the heat has soaked from play for some time it's not all that different at least not too much from my observations and comparing to other people that I've seen on Reddit so on apex Legends here for example we're playing in 1600p um this game you know it likes a little bit of CPU power we're looking at just the regular Max performance profile which is Boost high without Max fans you know that GPU is close to 80 but not really quite hidden there usually between like 75 to 79 the CPU is going to be touching 90 a bit more here though and it's actually using less wattage on the CPU than when it does when you have Max fans toggled so seems like enabling Max fans does give you a little more CPU power to work with now here's what we're looking at after toggling Max fans on you know this is the coolest that it's going to run that CPU is kind of hovering around you know as low as like 77 79 but it's you know it's occasionally getting up into the 80s GPU using about 140 150 watts in this game and it's kind of just chilling around like 7273 so pretty good I mean that's when it does get like closer to the 175 Watts this GPU definitely will get a little bit hotter um it might hit 80 or a little bit over that on balance mode the GPU doesn't really drop too much it's like 130 Watts now uh CPU is like 40 to 60 watts or so and still looking pretty good I mean like 72 again 73 74 on the GPU uh low 80s on the CPU and this is with a lot less fan speed if instead we do silent mode seems like it activates a temperature limit around 75 for the GPU so it's hitting about 100 Watts or so which is really good and then CPU still kind of chilling around low 80s using a lot less wattage of course now we're closer to you know like 26 to 30 Watts all right so we're going to talk about CPU performance so if you get the 2023 model you're getting an Intel I 93950 HX and if you get the 2024 model you're looking at Intel I9 14900 HX so they got rid of the 50 which is basically the same CPU but with a slightly higher boost clock speed so between the two you won't see much of a difference sadly 2024 is just an odd year for CPUs and gpus like there's really not much going on however the 13950 HX is a tremendous leap over the 12th gen Intel performance so if you're coming from an older laptop you'll be excited to see how this thing does I like to look at more than just max performance of these chips efficiency in a laptop is just as important to me if not more important because like when you're gaming the CPU is not going to be using all that wattage and that's where these CPUs kind of fall short you can see in this chart here it's getting beaten out by like the much weaker ryzen 7940 HS at anything below 50 WTS like yes it goes way above it but you know in a lot of scenarios when you're just using your laptop normally or you're gaming you might not even be above 40 WTS so you're typically in that range or lower especially when you're GPU bound so that's really not that great to see and it means worse performance on battery as well but overall it's still a killer CPU and it just shreds like the max performance on this thing is crazy you're looking at cinch scores over you know 29 30k or higher and that's just crazy that you can obtain that in a laptop this thin that's like nearly desktop level performance even surpassing many desktops honestly so like that's just great now moving to the GPU the blade 16 is known not to quite hit the full 175 Watts that it has but I will admit it does get close in some games and sometimes it actually does stay around that level um especially if you're gaming in 4k for example you're going to see it hit 175 Watts much more often cuz the CPU just isn't as needed in those scenarios whereas if you're in 1200p mode you're going to see that CPU demand a bit more power and and it's going to take that away from the GPU so typically what I found in normal QHD gaming when I was GPU bound was the GPU would hover in the mid to high 160s and the CPU would be at around like 33 to 40 Watts so this results in pretty great performance I mean across the board really and pretty much matches other full powered 4090 laptops or at least it comes close enough to not really tell a difference and then like I was saying the GPU is still prioritized pretty well on balanced in silent mode I found that I could easily game in both of those modes like it felt like kind of weird like I shouldn't be able to game on a laptop this quietly but it just worked you know but on battery that is obviously not the case it's just not nearly as good of a laptop when it's unplugged so I just really do not recommend doing anything intensive on battery at all like it just cannot handle it unfortunately all right so creators I think creators are going to love the blade 16 like pugent benchmark scores for Photoshop Premiere Pro and da Vinci resolve are all looking great and it even holds up really well in balanced and Silent modes I love to see that because you have some laptops like the legion Pro 7 and I who really fall behind in that department where they look great in their Max performance profile but as soon as you drop it down to balance mode there goes all that power you know and the only area where the blade suffers here again is just on battery speaking of battery we've got a 95w hour battery here but it does not go far at all unfortunately the 13950 HX is just way too power hungry and with no option to disable it on battery you're going to find that it just eats away within just a few hours it's over and people might think that the 2024's 14950 HX will are better but sadly no it just no it's still the same power hungry CPU so the HX chips are just not meant for good battery life nor are they efficient enough to offer great performance while on battery either which is kind of unfortunate so like if you really want a high performance but good battery life laptop your only option really is like the zephrus G14 with a ryzen CPU I mean the Intel like H chips like the ultra 9 or the 13900 H from 2023 are you know quite a bit more efficient not quite as much as is like ryzen but those will definitely do a lot better so maybe like a zephrus g16 with the 490 might do well too with power and Battery um but yeah the options are really limited with them putting like these crazy power hungry CPUs in so many of these laptops so gaming performance and yes I know my voice just got more nasly I got a cold in between recording different parts of this video but anyways so gaming performance let's go ahead and just start with Call of Duty here this is Modern Warfare 2 eventually I'll have Modern Warfare 3 benchmarks here but for now this is the Modern Warfare 2 Benchmark which I have a good amount of data for so the blade comes in second place uh just 119 FPS versus 129 FPS on the legion if we turn on dlss we are now just barely behind the legion which is good to see and if we drop it into balance mode we see the blade 16 make its way to the top here so that's why I like to include these balanced and silent mode benchmarks sometimes because people are not always going to be full blast full fans 24/7 so you know if you're playing around other people or you're at a friend's house you know you're using your laptop portably maybe you're even playing in a coffee shop or something you know these are good numbers to have you know you can see that you're still getting a lot of performance on this laptop in Balance mode and then in silent mode here it takes the lead by a lot you know especially compared to the legion looking at cyberpunk 2077 this is the RT Ultra preset on The in-game Benchmark 1440p the blade 16 again is just right underneath the legion Pro 7i which I mean this is great to see you know both have that full powerered RTX 490 and the blade despite it being more compact is still right up there with that Legion if we do the ultra preset on Cyber Punk we are pretty much tied with the legion 109 FPS and at 4K you're still getting about 55 FPS on the RT Ultra preset so like I said earlier you can game in 4k on this machine you could always lower settings a little bit too if you're really worried about FPS and then just the high preset looking at about 134 and cyber Punk is just one of those games with a lot of different crazy settings that you can do so I went ahead and did one with the RTO overdrive setting um this has the ray reconstruction on and we're getting about 89 FPS here this is with frame generation so pretty good you know about 90 FPS basically on what are essentially the max settings for this game and keep in mind these benchmarks are going to be pretty much the same whether you're getting the 2023 or the 2024 as I've shown earlier in the video If you skipped ahead these two laptops are almost indistinguishable in performance and if you did Skip ahead I definitely recommend going back and just watching those parts just to understand what you're really going to see as a difference between two and if we go back to the RT Ultra preset but this time in Balance mode you see the blade 16 now takes the crown at 67 FPS and in silent mode we're almost doubling the legions FPS at 42 the G14 also has a god tier silent mode so it also did crazy good in this Benchmark moving on to Horizon zero Dawn in The in-game Benchmark we're getting 149 FPS just 10 FPS behind the legion um about about 20 FPS ahead of the G14 and M16 here drop it down to 1080P and again we're sitting about an in between spot between the legion and the M16 if we run it in Balance mode again the blade takes the crown and that goes the same for silent mode where the legion really couldn't even finish this Benchmark shadow of the Tomb Raider has a good balance of CPU and GPU here you're seeing about 178 FPS at 144p on the highest preset in The Benchmark just a few FPS behind that Legion if we drop it down to 1080p it actually takes the lead and I think that's just because of that 13950 HX kind of coming into play a little bit more there and running this one imbalanced we get a pretty good lead over the other laptops if we run it in silent again we're right up there with the G14 where the legion really falls behind here control as I've mentioned before is a very GPU heavy game really pushes the 4090 to its limits we're getting about 83 FPS pretty much tied with the legion and a good bit ahead of the M16 and G14 in this Benchmark if we turn on dlss again we're sitting about the same about 30 FPS ahead of the G14 and M16 and still pretty much tied with the legion csgo is more demanding on the CPU and here we're again tied with the legion 557 FPS uh you can't even run this Benchmark anymore unfortunately with the counter- strike 2 update but I did have this data from before they updated and then when we drop it down to 1080p again it looks like that 13950 HX is really coming into play here giving us more of a lead over the legion Red Dead Redemption 2 in The Benchmark with the favor quality slider maxed out on Direct X2 getting about 108 FPS which again is a really good result you know you might be picking up on this but these 4090 laptops are just leagues ahead of of the 307s 470s 3080s and all these gpus from previous years or just lower tier gpus here Forza Horizon 5 on the extreme preset in The in-game Benchmark 1440p we're looking at 119 FPS here for some reason in this game the legion takes more of a lead I really don't know why but the blade is barely ahead of the G14 here I don't I really don't get it but this game really liked the legion Pro 7i for some reason but if we instead run it in Balance mode the blade only loses 4 FPS which is just crazy so it easily takes that number one spot and if we run it in 4k now it's pretty much neck and neck with the legion I think that's really what helps it push closer to that 175 watts is when you're in this 4K mode and again this is another example you can run this laptop in 4k and get really playable frame rates in a lot of games like look at this 100 FPS in 4k on for of horizon 5 like you know when you see this data you can't really say that this is not a 4K capable laptop it definitely is and Starfield it barely leads the pack here at 78 FPS still a pretty good lead over the G14 and way ahead of the flow x16 there unfortunately this data was towards the launch of the game so it would definitely get more FPS now across the board after the updates that they've been putting out and then if we do balance mode the blade takes a pretty huge lead here at 75 FPS only losing like 3 FPS and if we run it in 4k yeah you lose about 25 FPS or so but again you're still getting playable frame rate rates here at 51 FPS if you want that 4K 60 FPS experience you could easily just drop a few settings and like I said this game has been patched to run a lot smoother now so i' bet it probably is hitting over 60 FPS now in 4k Apex Legends we're looking at about 255 FPS for some reason the 1% lows were not the greatest in this game I really don't know why but I mean I say not the greatest but 146 FPS on the 1% lows is higher than a lot of previous laptops Max FPS in this game so in the grand scheme of things it's really not that bad and if we're looking at the average in all games this is like the highest performance profiles the blade on average is about 7 FPS behind the legion Pro 7i so in all honesty that's really a pretty minimal difference I mean depending on if you really want every ounce of performance in a laptop possible and again there's other things you can do to make it perform higher you can undervolt you can Max the fans out you can overclock the CPU you can overclock the GP you I mean to be honest I would put it pretty much right up there with basically every other 175 watt 490 and it's about 19 FPS ahead of the M16 and G14 490s um those are obviously the lower wattage but the reason those are tied is because the AMD CPU doesn't use as much wattage so the G14 is pretty much closer to that 120 125 watts the whole time whereas the M16 has to give up some of its GPU wattage to that 13900 H because it is a little more power hungry so so it also ends up running at about you know 120 to 130 Watts or so uh most of the time especially in CPU bound games you know it's a decent bit ahead of these um more portable laptops but again that's what those are for you know those laptops are much more portable and lighter weight I'm also going to be comparing this to the zephrus g16 490 model that came out in 2024 so be on the lookout for that make sure you're subscribed and if we look at the average with the laptop's balance mode instead you can see the blade just really excels here I mean now it's about 8 FPS ahead of the Legion so you know take that as you will I mean the legion balance mode is not bad by any means it's still doing really good and we're like 34 FPS ahead of the 4070 here and then in silent mode that's when that Gap really widens so yes the G14 does win here but the blade 16 is only 8 FPS behind on average compared to the G14 so I would call that a s tier silent mode I mean that is just beautiful so yeah if you're looking for a laptop that can be very quiet and still get on average 86 FPS in games like look no further and you can always just turn settings down you can always flip over to the full HD mode if you wanted I mean possibilities are endless all right my final thoughts so the Razer Blade 16 is arguably in my opinion the best thing to happen to Razer laptops in years like I guess Razer was tired of being picked on for charging way too much for products that didn't really offer enough to justify those premium costs so now they gave us pretty much every premium feature you could ever want in a laptop and they're charging even more for it do I think this laptop is worth the eye-watering price of over $4,000 in the US no I don't think any laptop should be that expensive even MacBooks like no they shouldn't there's no reason for them to be charging that but I still can't help myself maybe Razer has their reasoning for the prices being higher than almost everyone else out there but I really think they should lower it all right like that's really the biggest downside maybe if they had like the best support around then people would be more comfortable paying that price or like better warranties than the competition better repair services but they don't really Excel there either so and in the US like your warranty isn't even transferable with them if you decide to sell it which is just crazy to me like a warranty should follow the laptop not the person so yeah if you can look past the poor battery life and the poor performance on battery from these Intel HX chips then this is kind of genuinely a unicorn of a laptop it has basically like everything you'd want from a beautiful mini LED or OLED display on the 2024 you got software that's improving more and more over time with pretty good customization options coming out you know okayish speakers an awesome trackpad good keyboard if you're into it swappable Ram two SSD slots great fan tuning with an amazing balanced and silent mode so you can easily game with others around you and overall just having both a full power GPU and CPU in a razor laptop is the coolest part to me I mean it's honestly it's my favorite laptop chassis sure it's a little heavy and it's definitely a bit bigger than the blade 15 and it can be a fingerprint mat magnet but it's still just one of the sleekest options out there like I'd much rather carry this around than like a weird gamery thick 16-in laptop from MSI Lenovo or Acer some of the other thick boys out there so yeah I mean if you're someone after the best possible performance and a Sleek package with the most premium features a gaming laptop can have then this one's for you I mean it's just simply one of the best all-around laptops so as long as your wallet is ready to take a beating to get it so yeah that's all I got that's the blade 16 again thank you so much for watching Everybody if you want to check out my other laptop reviews please do make sure to subscribe to the channel leave a like if you like this video and leave me a comment which one would you rather have mini LED or Ola you know let me know in the comments below but yeah thanks again for watching see youall on the next one

Channel: Josh Craves Tech

Views: 22,045

Keywords: Razer Blade, Blade 16 laptop, razer blade gaming laptop, 2024 gaming laptop, 2024 blade 16, blade 16 4090, razer blade rtx 4080, razer blade 16 review, 2023 or 2024 razer blade, blade 16 vs legion, razer blade 16 fan noise, razer blade performance, best gaming laptops, Blade 16 gaming benchmarks, razer blade for creators, blade 16 vs blade 15

Id: je5_N9tZvtQ

Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024