 The Razer Blade has been a rollercoaster of emotions for me over the years, with the highest peak being when I dropped a crap-ton of cash on them for my staff, and the biggest valley being shortly afterward, the defect rate of the aforementioned blades that I bought for my staff. Now, the most recent last-gen blade was fine. In fact, we've got two units that are both still working like the day we got them, but it was such a boring, pure spec update that, honestly, I was having a hard time figuring out what the heck Razer has been working on for the last few years. Fortunately, all of that changes today. This is the Blade 2018. And this is our sponsor today, Corsair. Corsair's next-generation Strafe Mark II keyboard features a variety of Cherry MX RGB keyswitches, and 8 megabytes of onboard profile storage. Check out the link below to learn more. [♪ music playing. Clicking sound effect. Music playing. [♪ music playing. Clicking sound effect. Music playing. Once I got over the shock of Razer moving to kind of a boxier design compared to their older, curvy one, my initial impressions of the Razer Blade 2018 are actually very positive. The aluminum chassis is extremely rigid in spite of its overall slimness, and the significant reduction in bezel size makes it feel far more 2018 than its not-so-2018 predecessors. Probably the most important change to the ID here, though, is that Razer has finally made a laptop that will impress both your gaming friends and your business associates. That is, assuming, of course, that you do get at least a little bit of help from dbrand, and maybe tone down the RGB on the keyboard. So it has HDMI, Mini DisplayPort, and USB Type-C, along with three full-sized USB Type-As, and that Type-C I showed you, that's a Thunderbolt 3 port. Very nice. Not to mention, it's got significantly better performance. So its Core i7-8750H and GTX 1070 Max-Q might seem a little pedestrian compared to other manufacturers who have been bitten by the Core i9 bug, but as we've seen over the last couple of weeks, unless you're building a machine like this one, you can actually end up better off with a less powerful CPU, but one that you can actually cool compared to an OP one that ends up throttling all day. So we're gonna fire up an AIDA64 test here, and we're gonna see that while the 2018 does actually trade some clock speed for thermals when hit with a synthetic load, so you can see here it's running at 2.6 GHz for a short while, then it's gonna drop down to our base of 2.2 GHz. In games, this thing regularly turbos up to 4 GHz, ending up in about the 90 degrees range, and never thermal throttled in our 24 degrees Celsius office, and our GPU stayed nice and cool in the low 70s, and as you can see here, I'm gonna lean in close to it, the fans are certainly audible, but not distracting at all, and what else is cool is that this generation Blade keeps the keyboard nice and cool even while gaming, though it should be noted that this area right here, right above the keyboard, that's where your heatsink is, you are not going to want to touch that. Now performance is right about where we expected, with the 1070 Max-Q getting beaten, but even then only slightly by the full fat GTX 1070 in the Asus Zephyrus. But Linus, you might say, what I really loved about the old Blade was how loud it was. Oh, if you're not concerned gamer, just gonna fire up synapse here, all you have to do is enter gaming mode, which actually boosts up the clock speed, here we go, of our GTX 1070 Max-Q, takes the CPU's TDP from 35 to 45 watts, with a max turbo power of 85 watts, and generally makes the Blade 2018 a worse laptop. If you were blindfolded in gaming mode with the Blade 2018 in front of you, we'd forgive you if you mistook your gaming rig for a drone taking off. We would actually recommend leaving gaming mode off until Razer provides maybe some finer control of the power and fan profiles, because the performance gain is in our estimation not really worth it. Now on the subject of options that gamers should actually use, the 144Hz 1080p version of this notebook is the one to get. You can completely ignore the 60Hz 4K version unless you desperately need a touchscreen. 1080p 144Hz is a perfect fit for this CPU GPU combo, and the IPS panel in this version is bright and vivid, with the higher refresh rate making everything from games to even just mousing around on the desktop navigating windows feel smoother and more responsive. I think the only thing that I would like to see added in Razer's options is a touch version of the 1080p one, because right now they're really making you choose between the ultimate compact gaming laptop and one that is still optimal for productivity. Though this might be something that we have to take up with the actual panel manufacturers and not so much with Razer. Now above the screen here is the webcam, pretty decent compared to other laptop webcams, which is to say that it is still behind literally every flagship phone on the market, and we really wish that laptop makers other than Microsoft I guess would be the only one that seems to be taking it seriously. Still bad. Still bad. We wish they would start doing a better job given how small of a camera element you can have, and how inexpensive a camera element you can have that can end up with a very nice looking image these days. With that said, at least Razer borrowed some of its mobile expertise on the speakers for this puppy. They do lack a little bit of punch on the low end, but they make up for it with clear sound that is pretty loud and excellent stereo separation. Wait for the drop. Now back to the bit that we talked about before about how this machine could easily be used for gaming and productivity. What about the keyboard? Now Razer keyboards have been a real sticking point between me and Alex, who has kind of become our defacto notebook editor. Now I have liked most of Razer's notebook keyboards, with the notable exception being the Blade Pro. He on the other hand literally changed my personal Blade Stealth desktop background to this when he had to use it for like an hour. Now fortunately Razer has actually made some revisions to the keyboard in this model, and we can finally agree it's very good. It's got a nice snappy feel to the keystrokes, it's not too loud, and we both feel comfortable typing on this machine for hours. Then below that very satisfactory keyboard is one of the biggest touchpads that I have ever seen on a Windows machine. In fact it might be the biggest one, like check this thing out. It is awesome to use. Like it baffles me that it has been two years since the Apple MacBook Pro 2016 and no one has ripped off that design yet. Like it's still not quite as good as the one on the MacBook Pro, but with its glass top, really nice feel, nice clicky buttons, although not the whole surface is clickable. It's the closest that we've seen in a Windows machine. Opening up the Blade 2018 reveals actually pretty impressive upgradability given its size. Both the RAM, that's a new one, and the storage can be easily swapped. And that is a hecking impressive 80 watt-hour battery that gives it four hours of life in our PCMark test. Now that's not an amazing result compared to other productivity-centric notebooks, but it absolutely smashes other gaming laptops that are this powerful. Bringing us to the price. Our model here comes in at 2400 US dollars, which is considerably more than the ASUS Zephyrus that I'm gonna put next to it right here. And remember guys, this is a laptop that already had a substantial fintax built into the toll that it was gonna take on your wallet. If you're gonna be gaming day and night, we feel that the Zephyrus is a better choice. It offers a bit more performance while making less noise, it has more room for games thanks to its hard drive in addition to its SSD, and it offers silky smooth visuals thanks to G-Sync. By contrast, the Blade is still very competent for gaming and crushes the Zephyrus when you're on the go thanks to its more professional looks, excellent trackpad, smaller form factor, and double the battery life. But of course, you get to pay a thinness tax and a razor tax. Speaking of taxes, dbrand ships worldwide. Does that have anything to do with that? Whatever, it doesn't matter. dbrand makes awesome vinyl skins for laptops, phones, tablets, consoles, controllers, and more. They use high quality, true textured 3M vinyl on every product, and their skins are cut with unrivaled precision. They measure many times and cut once only to ensure they have a factory fit for your product. Not only do they look great, but dbrand skins protect against incidental damage and scratches. Like, say for example, one of the main reasons I love a dbrand skin on my laptop is sliding it in and out of my bag. That way you don't end up with a completely scuffed up surface on both sides of your laptop. That sucks, especially when you're paying this much for it. Their products are affordable and they ship worldwide, so check them out at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys, if you just liked this video you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one, well, like this one in the sense that they're LTT, not like this one in the sense that you can buy this design anymore, and a link to our community forum which you should totally join.