So you’re interested in Razer’s Blade gaming laptop, but which size do you pick?
I’ve compared the Blade 14, 15 and 17 to help you decide!
Let’s start out with the most obvious difference, the sizes.
In order to fit a larger screen, the actual body of the laptop has to get bigger to accommodate
it.
Based on this, it’s no surprise at all that the 14 inch model is the smallest, the 15
inch model is a little larger in all three dimensions, and then the biggest 17 inch version
is the largest of the three.
A larger size means more materials used, and that contributes to more weight.
The Blade 14 is definitely the most portable, it’s the lightest as well as the smallest
out of all three laptops.
You don't have to use those large power bricks unless you need full performance, because
all 3 laptops can be charged over USB Type-C.
Most devices these days can, and you can charge everything with the 100 watt GaN Power Strip
from Ugreen, who have sponsored this part of the video.
With 7 different power ports and up to 100 watts of Type-C charging, you can stay organized
and plug all your devices on your desk into this little hub.
There are 3 USB-C ports, a USB-A port, and even 3 AC outlets so you can run basically
anything.
With the latest GaN tech, you can charge an iPhone 13 to 60% in 30 minutes, or fully charge
a MacBook Pro 16 in an hour and a half.
Check out the Ugreen 100W GaN Power Strip with the sponsored link below the video, and
now back to the laptop comparison.
Basically the larger you go up in size, the less portable the laptop becomes because it
gets bigger and heavier.
Personally, I prefer 15 inch screens, as I think they're a great sweet spot.
Sure 14 inches is the most portable, but unless you’re connecting it to a larger external
screen when playing games, it’s just going to be a bit harder for most people to see.
Now gaming on 17 inches definitely looks the best, you’ve just got more viewable screen
space, but for me, the tradeoff of less portability just isn’t worth it.
Let’s see how the screen’s actually compare!
I’ve actually got two Blade 17 results, one with a 4K 144Hz screen and another with
a 1440p 240Hz screen, and interestingly the 4K one with slower refresh rate had a faster
response time.
The Blade 15 and 17 were basically the same with the 4K 144Hz screen, while the smaller
Blade 14 was the slowest.
The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot
actually fires on screen in CS:GO, and the ordering is quite close to what we saw with
the screen response time results just before.
The 4K screens in the Blade 15 and 17 were also the brightest too.
The 1440p 240Hz screen in the Blade 17 still gets above 300 nits, but it’s not as bright
as the 500 plus from the 4K panel.
Even the way smaller 14 inch Blade was brighter than it, however out of the 17 inch models,
only the 1440p screen offers G-Sync and advanced optimus, so that’s the tradeoff.
Color gamut wasn’t too different, all are great results as far as gaming laptops go,
though the 4K Blade 17 or 15 seem to be winning in most of the tests.
The keyboards are all quite similar, and none have a numpad, not even the largest 17 inch.
The touchpads get bigger in the larger models, but they all felt big enough and good to use.
All three laptops have front facing speakers on either side of the keyboard.
The Blade 17 also has some down firing ones, and it sounded the best as a result.
The 14 and 15 didn’t have as much bass and were tinny sounding, though the 15 gets louder
than the 14.
Bigger laptop also means more ports.
The 17 is the only one with a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port, while the 14 only has room
for one USB Type-A port on the left compared to the two available on the 15 and 17.
They’re even more similar on the right, basically the 14 is only missing an SD card
slot compared to the bigger 15 and 17 on this side.
All three of my Blades here have Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti graphics, and although I don’t
think the 3080 Ti is worth spending more money on compared to the 3070 Ti for all the reasons
covered here, this does still mean that we can use these three laptops to fairly compare
performance against each other.
Now the Blade 14 does come with an AMD Ryzen based CPU while both the Blade 15 and 17 are
Intel based.
Larger laptop means more space for cooling.
Although all three sizes of Blade use vapor chamber cooling, having more room allows for
more metal and bigger fans.
In the case of the Blade 17, it also means an extra third fan in the battery area.
Despite more cooling space, the temperatures actually get warmer with the larger laptops
when running a combined CPU and GPU stress test with the highest performance mode in
use.
The Blade 15 was cooler than the 17, while the smallest Blade 14 had the coolest GPU
temp.
It’s difficult to fairly compare Intel and AMD CPUs here as the sensors are different.
The Blade 17 seems to run warmer because it’s using more power.
The CPU TDP wasn’t much different between all 3 laptops, however the Blade 14 and 15
were both limited to a 90 watt TDP on the RTX 3080 Ti.
The Blade 17 on the other hand could go up to 150 watts, so based on this gaming performance
will be better on the 17.
We can see that this is indeed the case across a few different games.
The higher GPU power limit ultimately dictates performance when the GPUs are otherwise the
same.
More power means more heat, which is why the 17 has more space for cooling.
That said, despite the Blade 15 being larger than the smaller Blade 14, both were performing
essentially the same due to their 90 watt GPU power limit, and this is an impressive
result for the smaller and more portable 14 inch model.
Bigger laptop also means more room for upgrades.
The Blade 15 and 17 both let you change two memory slots, the Wi-Fi card and two M.2 SSDs,
however the second slot on the 15 doesn’t have space to install a drive with chips on
both sides, so my 4TB drive didn’t fit.
The smaller Blade 14 on the other hand only lets you swap the single M.2 SSD and Wi-Fi
card, all RAM is soldered to the motherboard and cannot be changed.
For some reason the Blade 14 is also only sold with 16 gigs of memory, it’s not possible
to get more which may be a limit for some workloads.
The Wi-Fi performance of the Blade 15 and 17 were about the same, which makes sense
considering they both have the same Wi-Fi card.
The Blade 14 was behind as it’s using a slower Qualcomm card, but in theory you could
upgrade that yourself for less than $20.
More space also means more room for bigger batteries, and the Blade 17 has the largest
at 82Wh, though the smaller Blade 15 isn’t far behind at 80Wh.
Despite the smallest Blade 14 having the smallest battery, it was lasting for much longer compared
to the other machines in my YouTube video playback test.
All three lasted about the same amount of time when actually running a game, which is
still impressive for the 14 inch considering its smaller battery.
The Radeon integrated graphics and Ryzen CPU seem to be more power efficient compared to
Intel when it comes to video playback in a browser though.
I’ve got 4 results in Cinebench, because I’ve had two different configurations of
Blade 17, one with an i7 and the other with an i9.
The differences in multicore performance weren’t actually that big between all three sizes
of Blade laptop.
The i7 Blade 17 had the lowest single core score out of the bunch, and although the i9
is known to have a higher single core score, most 12th gen i7 laptops I’ve tested get
closer to 1800 points here, so not sure if there was an issue with my 12800H Blade.
The ordering of the laptops doesn’t change if we unplug the charger and instead run purely
off of battery power.
The i7 Blade 17 still had lower single threaded performance, but it was also doing much better
in multicore score compared to the exact same laptop but with an i9, so not sure what’s
going on there.
I would of expected those to be about the same.
The Blade 15 seems to be the most consistent, while the Ryzen based Blade 14 now had the
best single core score, granted its multicore score was the lowest on battery, but it does
also have fewer cores and threads compared to the Intel options.
Adobe Photoshop generally works better with higher single threaded CPU performance, and
given the Blade 15 scored the highest here in Cinebench it’s not too surprising to
see it scoring the best in this creator workload.
The Blade 17 was on top when it came to Adobe Premiere video editing though, perhaps as
the GPU matters a bit more in this one.
The gaps in DaVinci resolve weren’t that big, but like the games, the higher GPU power
limit of the Blade 17 allowed it to score the highest out of the three.
Personally I’d pick the Blade 15 for its larger screen compared to the 14.
It’s still small enough for me without sacrificing portability.
That said, the Blade 14 did still perform quite closely to the larger Blade 15 in games,
so the 14 could be a good choice if you want the most portability and still some good performance.
Not to mention the best battery life of the bunch.
The Blade 17 on the other hand looks the best while actually playing games due to that bigger
screen, and the performance was also on another level compared to these two due to the higher
power limit of the Nvidia graphics.
But for me personally, the 17 is just a little too large.
If I wanted a bigger screen I’d just connect an external monitor to the 15 instead.
I’ve covered all three of these gaming laptops in way more depth in these reviews over here,
so check out one of those videos next if you want more details on any of these laptops.
I’ll see you in one of those next!