Windows Laptop manufacturers have been on a roll lately, and the new Razer just took it
to a whole nother level with their first Productivity laptop, the Razerbook 13.
It’s like Razer watched our Stealth 13 review, and fixed every single complaint that we had,
making this my new favorite windows laptop,
and yes I think it's worth the extra price over the XPS 13 for 2 reasons I’ll cover in just a bit.
In this review, I’ll tell you everything they fixed and improved along with 1 absolutely
horrific change they made which makes no sense at all, and could be a dealbreaker for some people.
Along with that I have to make a few comparisons to the new M1 MacBooks
since those have made a huge bang in the market
and even dedicated windows fans are being tempted to change, but I’ll save that for the end.
Starting off, the build quality was great with older Razer but this time its Amazing
with no chassis flex and parts that used to be plastic are now all aluminum and comes in at 3lb.
My only 2 complaints here is the display is very tough to open one handed,
a deeper grove would have helped. The other is there's random glue residue on both sides by the
ports even though it was brand new, which is really off putting on a $1600 laptop.
The RazerBook is only sold in their great looking Mercury color,
and fingerprints are no longer an issue, at least on the chassis itself.
On the left side we have 3 ports, a USB-C thunderbolt 4 port, a standard usb port,
and a headphone mic combo jack which I really like being on
the left side since it gets in the way less when I’m using a mouse.
Thankfully we have another thunderbolt 4 port on the right side,
which was one of my complaints in the past so I’m really glad Razer finally
added another one so you still have a powerful port if you use an eGPU.
We also have an HDMI 2.0 port for connecting to displays without limitations, and a microsd card
reader. Personally I’d much prefer a full size SD card slot but micro SD is more flexible since you
can use a card adapter in regular cameras, and its much better than what Apple offers.
Powering this machine is a new slim 65 Watt usb-c power brick which is
so nice after huge chucky ones in the past, meaning you can power it from either side.
Taking a look inside, the keyboard looks and feels great. We have razors usual customizable RGB
lighting which I don’t really care for personally, but on the bright side, the backlighting is very
bright which you kinda need for white keys, which also show dirt much easier than black keys.
As far as keyboard feel, it's very good, so much better than what Razer offered a few years ago.
I personally would rate it just as good as Apples new Magic keyboards, which puts it just slightly
behind the new Dell XPS 13 non 2-in-1 model which have my favorite laptop keyboard.
With that said, Razer has a winner on their hands and most people will be thrilled
typing on this thing, and below that we have a massive Apple like trackpad.
Just over a year ago Razer had the worst most frustrating trackpad I’ve used in
a premium laptop, and now it's one of the best in terms of windows laptops,
matching up to the new XPS, so great job Razer for this massive upgrade.
On the sides we have speaker grills which no longer use a cloth cover so they
look and feel more premium, and at the bottom of the laptop we have a THX sticker
signifying the speakers should be fairly high quality.
Unfortunately that's not the case, at least out of the box,
go ahead and take a listen for yourself compared to the cheaper MacBook Pro.
Sound comparison.
Yea. it's that bad.. I don’t know how this kind of sound is coming from a premium
laptop, I know Razors speakers were never good
but the Razer Blade stealth not only sounded better but it was much louder as well.
We have no bass, the mids are very thin, and the high frequencies are way too sharp, and the
volume cuts down as soon as there is any bass in the audio, leading to probably the worst laptop
audio I’ve heard in many years which doesn’t make sense because Razer made dedicated speaker
enclosures that sit on rubber mounts which many companies don’t do so why is the sound so bad?
I dug into the settings and was able to disable the THX spacial audio
which fixed the crunchy highs and volume modulation while adding some bass, but at
the same time it made the speaker way too quiet for normal use which is a bummer.
Now you can crank up the EQ all the way which
does increase the volume but sound quality goes down a lot.
I don’t know how they could have messed it up so bad
when 6 months ago I praised them for the speaker upgrade.
If you use headphones it won’t be a big deal but for me it's my only major complaint,
so let's hope they can fix this in software. On the plus side, Razer absolutely killed
the webcam and Mic. It was pretty good last year but Razer took a clue from our current situation
and doubled the mics to 4, all of which are front facing, and the 720P webcams
processing is also fairly good. Here is how it compares to the new XPS 13.
WebCam comparison.
And to make it even better, it supports Windows Hello which we love,
so it logs you in as soon as you open it, no need to enter a password or touch a fingerprint sensor.
And now finally getting into the display, where Razer once again made major strides. Ours has a
1200P touchscreen panel so you do loose out on some sharpness compared to the 4K model, but
with that you gain about 3-4 hours of battery life which is a worthy tradeoff if you work on the go.
I always complained about the massive bezels or chins on Razer laptops,
and that 16x9 isn’t great for productivity and now we have a beautiful 16x10 display
which not only gives us more real estate but also gets rid of that chin.
We also have super slim bezels on the sides, Apple Please take notes for the 14” MacBook Pro.
These changes alone would be enough to us to praise Razer, but they didn't’ stop there.
Brightness went from an average 350nits to a class leading 500nits, and with that reflectivity was
also really cut down so this machine is perfect for bright rooms and outdoor use, and on top of
that viewing angles are also super wide at 178 degrees, smoking Apples displays.
My only complaint is we don’t have the DCI P3 wide color which Apple and Dell offer, so if you’re a
high end photo or video editor wanting more than SRGB on the internal display keep that in mind.
Now let's get into performance, and the RazerBook delivers with the best on the go
performance you can get in an ultrabook, aside from going with a new M1 Mac.
Our model has 16GB of RAM which isn’t upgradable, and 256GB of SSD which is about half of what
competitors offer for this price. Thankfully its super fast storage beating out the new Macs
even at half the capacity, and it's very easily user upgradable so for about $200 you can pop in
our recommended 2TB ssd which is even faster, I’ll go ahead and link that in the description below.
Taking a look at CPU performance the top end 11th gen i7 intel processor about the
same in Geekbench 5 as the competitors like dell using the same processor.
That alone isn’t a surprise, but whats amazing about the Razerbook is the performance doesnt’
go down when we unplug it like most windows laptops, but it actually goes up slightly,
and yes we did makes sure all the throttling options were turned off on the dell.
This means when you’re on battery power the Razer smokes the dell,
and not only that, but the new vapor chamber cooling runs cooler quieter than the XPS as well.
Because of that, under 100% load in cinebench the Razerbook is able to run faster and scores
significantly higher than the XPS 13. When we unplug it the performance does drop this time,
but the razer performs close to the dell when its plugged in.
Graphics wise, the Razerbook performs really well, scoring about 1000 points higher than the same GPU
in the dell in Geekbench, and it gets 9FPS more in GFX bench for Gaming thanks to the great cooling.
Of course the more expensive high end RazerBlade 13 with the dedicated 1650ti
has more graphics power which really helps if you can keep it plugged in,
and with that the MacBook Pro with M1 also beats it out not only in terms of
graphics as you can see in Geekbench, but also in CPU performance as well.
With that it also runs quiet thanks to the CPU only needing 13 watts of power compared to over
25 watts, and because of that the Mac will get about double the battery life doing the same
tasks, so is it worth buying the RazerBook if you’re someone that doesn’t need windows?
No not really, even though the Razerbook is the best windows ultrabook the Mac beats it in
display, trackpad, performance, and its actually cheaper as long as you don’t want a massive SSD,
but of course many people need or prefer windows, and the ability to not only hook
up multiple external displays but also an eGPU wich will catapult the graphics performance
when you’re not on the go, all things that the M1 MacBooks can’t do.
So if you’re in the market for a windows ultrabook,
the Razer Blade is an excellent machine and in my opinion the best windows ultrabook,
and as long as you don’t need good speakers I’d highly recommend it.
If you don’t need windows, check out my ultra detailed comparison to the M1 MacBook Pro
or my video editing comparison right there, and if you enjoyed this video click that circle above
to subscribe. Thanks for watching, this has been Max and I’ll see you in the next video.