It’s the ultimate big-screen gaming experience for the ultimate price.
Razer has made big laptops in the past — but they apparently weren’t big enough. The Razer Blade 18 is the biggest-screened Razer Blade ever released, and it’s hard to overstate how immersive that 18-inch, QHD, 16:10, 240Hz display is. That massive 2560 x 1600 screen is the primary draw of the device, but a few other staples of the Blade line — the six-speaker array, the per-key RGB keyboard, the best build quality you’ll find in the high-end gaming space — as well as some features coming newly to the 18, including a CPU overclocking feature, a battery health optimizer, and an absolutely massive touchpad, all make for a solid package.
While the smaller Blade 16, with its dual-mode Mini LED screen, may be a flashy and fancy reimagining of what a Razer Blade can be, the Blade 18 is a more traditional offering — Razer took the Blades we knew and loved and just kind of blew them up. While some may aspire to the ideal of a fully-specced RTX 4090 Blade 16, I think this toned-down, 2560 x 1600, RTX 4080 Blade 18 is a more pragmatic buy for high-end shoppers. It’s a whole lot cheaper, but the experience delta is not that wide.
Before I get into my results, I do need to make one caveat: Blades are more expensive than they used to be. The Blade 18 I tested was the cheaper of two currently available Blade models, and it includes a 24-core Core i9-13950HX, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, 1TB of storage, and the RTX 4080. It currently costs $3,799.99; if you think that’s expensive, don’t even click on the RTX 4090 model, which is going for $4,499.99.
For context, the most expensive QHD RTX 3070 Ti model of last year’s Blade 17 is going for $3,399.99 — a full $400 cheaper. I know that eight is technically a bigger number than seven, but that is still a comparable model to our test unit when it comes to the tiers they occupy in Razer’s lineup. If you compare the top chips on offer, Razer sold a QHD 3080 Ti Blade 17 for $3,999.99 (though this was discontinued in the U.S.), which is $500 cheaper than the 4090 Blade 18. There is not currently a Blade 18 you can get for the price of last year’s QHD 3070 Ti models.
Basically, these gaming laptops are getting better — but they’re also getting more expensive (and they have been for the past few generations).
Diving into the gaming performance, which is presumably the reason you’re here: The Blade 18 did well. At QHD resolution, it ran every game at over 60fps — even Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing on, which is bonkers. Peruse the provided benchmark chart at your leisure. But what kind of a performance penalty do you see when moving from the 4090 down to the 4080? The answer, as far as I can tell, is… not a big one.
On many of the games we ran, the Blade 18 got a similar (and identical, in some cases) score to the Blade 16. (Our Blade 16 unit had this same Core i9 but an RTX 4090 inside.) In cases where the 4090 machine won, the deltas were generally in single-digit percentages. That often means frame rate increases of single digits — nothing that’s going to significantly impact most people’s gameplay.
The Blade 16 is a smaller machine than the Blade 18, so things like cooling and power limits might be coming into play there. For what it’s worth, though, MSI’s Titan GT77 HX, which has an RTX 4090 and is enormous, is also only single-digit percentages ahead of the Blade 18 on many of these titles. All in all, the RTX 4080 is looking like a solidly better value than the RTX 4090 based on these results.
Oh, the Blade 18 also put up a massive 43 percent increase in Horizon Zero Dawn performance over our Blade 17 review unit from last year (which had an RTX 3080 Ti). I’m just sharing that because I found it humorous. Anyway, games looked great on this QHD+ screen, which reached 574 nits of peak brightness in testing (considerably more than the average gaming laptop) — and is also, I have to remind you, 18 inches, which is so big.