One of the most popular gaming laptops on the market continues to exist the Razer Blade. New for 2022, Razer has refined the blueprint and improved the internal hardware to go far even better than earlier.

With the 2022 Blade, Razer is fully on board with the thin bezel revolution. Previous models included fourteen-inch displays with fat bezels and it was a look that frustrated a lot of people. I mean why couldn't they have simply put a larger screen in the same chassis? With more competition from devices like the MSI GS65 Stealth Sparse and Gigabyte Aero 15X, using the same blueprint from the concluding few years just wasn't going to cut information technology this fourth dimension.

Clearly Razer'southward engineers accept been thinking the aforementioned affair, because the new Blade features a 15.6-inch display in a body that's essentially the same size. The event? Bezels on either side of the display that are only 5mm sparse, and it looks a whole lot improve because of it.

There's no nostril-vision photographic camera here either, which is good news. The bezel forth the top of the brandish is slightly larger than the sides, allowing the webcam to be positioned higher up the display, just similar with the MSI GS65. Yous're non quite getting that Dell XPS bezel look, merely it'south close enough and still significantly better than Razer'due south previous design.

The rest of the chassis has been redesigned slightly with a more squared-off wait, as opposed to the rounded corners of the previous-gen Blade, and that gives it a more modern look while yet delivering Razer's signature high-quality all-metal build. I loved the design of the sometime Blade just this new await is even better; it's just that touch on sleeker.

Plus the black metallic unibody is almost unrivalled in the gaming laptop space in terms of build quality. At that place'southward more competition these days, but Razer however does it all-time and in fact comparing the Blade to other laptops in general, y'all'll really only get this sort of build from a MacBook Pro. And we know how the latest MacBook Pros sacrifice some performance in order to maintain a thin profile (we'll meet how the Bract fares a bit later).

Razer positions the Bract as a dual-purpose laptop suitable for both gamers and professionals, and so there'due south plenty of ports on this laptop. Three USB 3.one Type-A ports, a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port, full-sized HDMI 2.0, mini-DisplayPort ane.4, a 3.5mm audio jack and a proprietary charging port of course due to the high power depict charger. That'south pretty much everything yous'd want on a laptop of this size, mayhap an SD card slot would take been prissy just I'm glad there'south plenty of other total sized ports.

In terms of thickness, the Bract is very impressive, at but sixteen.8mm thick despite packing a six-core Intel Java Lake processor and upwardly to GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics. The size of the laptop relative to its internal hardware is one of the best on the market, if non the all-time, though its weight of a touch on over 2kg (~4.6 lbs) isn't as grade-leading though that'southward down to the solid metal construction.

The minimalist base of this laptop only has iii elements: the keyboard, trackpad, and speakers. There's no numpad on this xv-inch laptop, with Razer opting for big speaker grills on either side. The speakers' output is not that impressive, certainly not as impressive equally the large grilles would propose.

The keyboard is very adept however. The travel distance to each central is ultrabook-form, but that'south non a bad thing equally the response is solid and reasonably clicky for a non-mechanical pattern. Typing up a few documents and gaming on the new Blade is a decent feel and of class you also get to savor the vivid per-key RGB backlighting. Razer still hasn't managed to illuminate the keyboard's symbols, though, which is a bit frustrating for night-fourth dimension users.

As for the trackpad, it's massive and extremely responsive; the perfect companion for productivity tasks on the get. In that location'due south no Windows Howdy integration on this laptop though, so no fingerprint reader or facial recognition support, a scrap of a thwarting because several other gaming laptops of this grade have begun integrating those handy features.

The display is one of the big areas that's received an upgrade, not only is it now larger than the xiv-inch console used in previous Blades, it'due south also high refresh in some models. The principal display that well-nigh people will exist ownership is a fifteen.6-inch 1080p IPS LCD with a 144Hz refresh charge per unit, then quite like to most other gaming laptops out there. Companies can only use the panels bachelor to them, and so it'due south corking to run across Razer keeping upwards and using the best mobile gaming laptop display out in that location right now.

At that place is too a 60 Hz 1080p option for the entry-level Blade and a 4K threescore Hz choice available at the high-end. I'd just recommend the 4K touchscreen if yous are primarily going to exist using this laptop for productivity tasks like video editing. For gaming, the 1080p 144Hz panel is a much better choice.

Razer is factory calibrating every screen across their Blade 2022 line-up, so even if you get the 1080p 144Hz panels, it will be color accurate to the sRGB gamut, and the 4K options even support 100% Adobe RGB coverage. In my testing, the Blade 2022 is on par with the Gigabyte Aero 15X when it comes to colour accurateness, with deltaEs correct on that 2.0 mark beyond greyscale, saturation and ColorChecker tests. White residue is very good too, with an average CCT very close to 6500K.

Information technology'due south not a perfect display, but for content creators the screen is authentic enough from the factory to not accept to worry nigh farther calibration. However Razer is still limited by the characteristics of this panel, so its brightness of 285 nits and contrast ratio beneath 1000:i isn't fantastic, and uniformity is just okay for this display size. For gamers, though, y'all'll love the loftier refresh charge per unit, even if there'due south no G-Sync support.