okay um i've been thinking about doing this
video in a really long time but uh given the number of notebooks
that are coming into the studio i just never got the chance to sort of
compile my thoughts and share my experience
uh using the Blade 15 Advanced from Razer for
more than a year now i do need to be very transparent here for a sec
razer is a channel partner but this video
is not sponsored by any means they're not paying a single dime to talk about
this laptop i just wanted to share my thoughts uh
some of the issues that i had with the 15 Advanced or just Blade
notebooks in general in the past and then how Razer has addressed some of
them over the course of say a year or so so
let's talk about that right after this say hello to proper airflow with be
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okay so i think it's important for me to set the stage for you guys
as to what i've been using for the past 10 years or so
my very first laptop was an hp g60 when i first moved to canada about 10
years ago i needed a laptop to get through high school
and so after researching and researching my mom and i went to fujishop which was
an electronic store here in canada back then
but now it's owned by best buy we finally pulled the trigger on it
and i enjoyed using that laptop it wasn't a gaming
powerhouse but it was able to get me through high school
just fine and then i upgraded to the xps 15
l 502 x it was a legendary machine that came with a quad core processor and
a discrete graphics card i remember editing my very first short
film on that machine i made a few upgrades
as well on the inside fast forward a few years later and i started working for
hardware canucks and i was just introduced to this whole new realm of
the pc masterways where i got to build desktop pcs i built my very first
desktop pc on the channel and i just started using
desktops moving or ever since then just because of the
raw horsepower that it was able to deliver compared to a laptop
so that was fascinating but then i had to go to shows like ces and copy text so
i ended up using a eurocom laptop it was it's a canadian brand
but it had the specs to back up the workflow that i used to do but it wasn't
the best laptop it didn't have the greatest build quality
and it just felt cheap but it had the power and it got the job done and then i
switched over to my very first mac that's right i bought myself a
13-inch macbook pro uh one of those models that had ports
like actual ports and i loved it the display was great the
trackpad was amazing the keyboard was awesome
the keyboard actually worked i took it to shows with me unfortunately it didn't
have the performance that i needed to because it
was a 13-inch macbook pro didn't come with a discreet graphics card
and so i was using premiere at the time and it wasn't optimized
for that laptop so i had to sacrifice on rendering times and all that stuff but
the battery life the portability that was the best part about that machine and
then Razer hooked us up with one of their
first blade gaming laptops remember the one that
came with a 14 inch display and a discreet graphics card
in this case it was a gtx 1060. to me it was just a perfect upgrade coming from
my macbook pro 13 inch because i wasn't losing a lot in terms of form factor
and size but it had its own issues for instance it ran hot it was too loud
a battery life wasn't that great and a lot of users were reporting
battery bulging issues although i didn't encounter any of them but it
was pretty common among a lot of users and razer's customer support was pretty
terrible back then and i'm sure a lot of you guys were
vocal about that especially when it was a common issue fast forward a few
years later and razer comes up with the Blade 15 series
and i got myself the Blade 15 base model it was a welcoming upgrade
over the previous generation because it came with a bigger display
the design was refined a little bit the boxy look is still pretty reminiscent
within current generation and i was able to upgrade the memory and
it also came with a secondary hard drive slot which i was able to populate with
an ssd so overall i really enjoyed my time using
that machine for about a month until i started experiencing this
and this and this seriously the number of bsods both myself
and dimitri encountered on our blades were really frustrating
i actually remember time during computex i wasn't able to edit a video properly
on my Blade 15 base model because 10 minutes
later it bsods i had to restart edit a video i wasn't able to edit it
properly and then it just crashes on me again and again and again
it was really i mean i was almost to a point where i wanted to throw that
laptop out the window but um yeah it really i mean we were all
pretty pissed at razer at the time and we had to i mean actually remember
just going out to the show floor and seeing if we can find another competitor
from asus or gigabyte to see if they had a
spare sample for us to use temporarily temporarily to get work done it was
really that bad guys in fact that whole thing
made it into a vlog so i'll make sure to leave a link down below if you're
interested in checking out fortunately we were having conversations
with Razer in parallel to really find out the culprit
of these crashes and bsods i ended up replacing my base model with the
advanced model that i have right over here this exact same
uh unit and it just kept happening basis just kept happening over and over again
so we just i honestly i was at the peak of
giving up and switching entirely to a different notebook until we
diagnosed and we narrowed down the issue to Razer
synapse basically synapse had trouble
communicating with nvidia studio drivers and so that caused the machine to crash
so razer rolled out an update and
magically everything just was everything worked i did not experience and i still
haven't experienced a bsod on this machine uh
even a year later which is just software update
yeah what do you know now there are certain things that i don't like about
this laptop the first being the keyboard the travel
distance is very short i feel like the competition has better offerings than
this notably the zenbook 15 from asus xps 15
from dell heck even the tough a15 from asus is
better than this in terms of feedback with that being said i love the led
backlighting on the blade razer has just nailed it
on this model there's very little spill around the keys
and it gets really bright so that's awesome i also wish that the screen got
brighter because this 2019 model comes with a 240hz display
and it only goes as far as 350 nits so it's perfect for indoor use
but as soon as you take it outdoors it gets a bit challenging to
see things and uh yeah that's a little bit unfortunate
now i am aware that the newer models come with a faster 300s refresh rate
honestly i just think that's marketing bluff i don't think you necessarily need
300 hertz until or unless if you're an esports player
but it just doesn't really mean anything to me personally but with that being
said i love how color accurate this display
is i can comfortably edit photos using lightroom and photoshop
and edit videos comfortably on davinci resolve this is a fantastic panel i have
absolutely no complaints when it comes to color accuracy another thing i need
to point out is that when i use this thing in battery mode
performance takes a huge hit clock speeds don't boost higher i've seen them
go below 1 gigahertz and with nvidia's maximus technology
the discrete graphics card is disabled and so when you're doing casual stuff
it doesn't really kick in it uses the integrated gpu i feel like it treats
itself as an ultrabook to yield higher or longer
battery life now obviously if you're looking to get
the highest performance on any windows machine you have to have it plugged in
which is exactly what i did on this laptop but i am super annoyed by
the power connector on this machine for some reason
razer uses this thick braided cable which is just really hard
to um organize and especially if you have it plugged in in the wrong
direction it completely blocks that extra usb port which
i mean whoever designed the power cable really needs to go back to the drawing
board and fix that because it is pretty annoying now in terms of performance
i'm actually pretty happy with it guys it's not the fastest gaming laptop out
there and the 9750h is a peasant compared to
the ryzen cpus that are available in the market right now
and i'm hoping Razer will offer options sooner than later because everyone seems
to be begging for it these days one thing that you'll notice
is that the scores that i'm getting now are lower compared to what i had before
and the reason for that is i actually ran these benchmarks with
some of the background applications that i use on a regular basis so that
includes my antivirus program there is uh you
know adobe creative cloud and a few other
applications as well including my wireless mouse software as
well so there's a lot of things happening in the background which is why
you're seeing those lower scores the gaming
performance is also pretty good is it the fastest out there not really
but considering the form factor the acoustics and razer's efficient
vapor chamber cooling system it's good port selection is good on this
machine even though it's a 2019 model Razer has equipped it
with usb 3.2 gen 2 ports which is the 10 gigabits per second protocol
and that's awesome because a lot of the other notebook manufacturers even in
2020 failed to implement all of the usb ports
with that standard you probably might only get one or two but in this case
all these usb ports are 3.2 gen 2 and it also comes with a wi-fi 6 module
so i guess it's still worth it in 2020. the lack of an
sd card reader is a bummer but the 2020 models do come with one so
that's awesome battery life is good but not great i'm
only getting roughly five hours of use when i'm doing some casual stuff like
browsing the web or writing out a script and if i switch
over to something more heavy i can only squeeze about an hour worth
of use which is respectable but it's not the greatest
compared to you know some of the amd offerings that
are available in the market right now the last thing that i want to talk about
is the design and build quality because razer just nails it in that department
the unibody design is unlike anything that you can find
with the competition right now and i've yet to find a laptop that can sort of
compete with uh the standard that razer has sort
of set because you're getting a robust hinge mechanism which is nice and solid
the keyboard layout is awesome the trackpad is great
i mean it just works that's the beauty of this machine which is why i keep
coming back to it not to mention the advanced cooling
system inside does a relatively good job cooling the
2080 max-q gpu and the core 7 processor i mean it
doesn't necessarily give you the fastest uh performance but
it's overall a balanced high performance portable machine now Razer
if you're watching this video i would like you guys to improve on a few things
with your blade 15 notebooks first and foremost if you can implement
a brighter screen with higher refresh rate and better color accuracy
that would be awesome a bigger battery would be highly appreciated because if
you look at the competition msi is coming out with 99.9 watt
batteries on their slim chassis so i'm sure you can come up
with something that can compete with those standards if you can also
improve the speakers that'll be great they're good but i mean
maybe perhaps add a woofer at the bottom to enrich the bass response
and i think that would be a solid sort of experience
and also perhaps look into amd for your next revision as an option
because the chips the ryzen chips are definitely
faster and the numbers really do speak for
themselves intel does have a lot of catching up to do
and those chips are also pretty power efficient as well so
you know figure something out with amd get something sorted and
then we'll start talking finally this is the most important one
i like to see the customer support uh support system sort of just get revamped
a little bit because a lot of you guys have been
vocal about Razer's customer support and for the most part it has been
negative especially when you look at issues from previous designs
but they worked hard since the 2019 models to improve that perception
for example there are some pretty critical videos out there with some
legitimate concerns about internal build quality and poor resolutions
by razer's technical team keep in mind that i've had very few issues but that's
based on a single model so that knows thank you so much
for watching guys and if you are an existing Blade 15 owner
i want to know your experience using that machine and if it somewhat
reflected my experience as well i'll be hanging on the comments
down below thank you so much for watching
and i'll talk to you guys in the next one