With the introduction of Nvidia’s compact Max-Q GPUs, powerful gaming laptops have been able to rival Apple’s sleek laptops as far as form is concerned. Case in point: the 2019 Razer Blade Pro 17, the newest iteration of the outfit’s biggest gaming laptop.
Billed as ‘the laptop for desktop-quality gaming,” the device boasts the maximum performance you can pack in an enclosure of this size, allowing you to play resource-intensive titles without being tied to your gaming desk at home. Whether you spend your game time on FPS multiplayers, single-player RPGs, or dancing the night away on Beat Saber in an HTC Vive headset, this thing will let you enjoy them at home, in a hotel, or anywhere with a power outlet.
The 2019 Razer Blade Pro 17 has a 17.3-inch screen that’s surrounded by ultra-thin bezels measuring just 6mm on the top and sides, boasting 1080p resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, and 100 percent coverage for the sRGB color gamut. With that generous screen real estate and high refresh rate, there’s a good chance you can play on this thing without missing your gaming monitor at home. Even better, it puts that large display on a laptop body that’s 25 percent smaller than its predecessor – so small, in fact, that, the outfit claims, it’s more comparable to the body of a 15-inch laptop.
Inside the aluminum unibody enclosure, the machine can house a maximum loadout of a 9th-gen Intel Core i7 processor (2.6GHz base clock speed and 4.5GHz overclocked), a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU, up to 64GB of RAM, and up to two 2TB SSDs. That means, this should handle, pretty much, any recent game you can throw its way at the highest settings. Can it match a similarly-equipped desktop setup muscle-by-muscle? No, it’s been quite proven at this point that Max-Q GPUs don’t quite manage the same performance numbers as their desktop counterparts, but it definitely can come close.
The 2019 Razer Blade Pro 17 uses vapor-chamber cooling, which relies on a large surface area to maximize heat dissipation, allowing you to push the hardware to its performance limits without bogging down to overheating. It also sports an anti-ghosting keyboard, with each key sporting an individual RGB LED, so you can synchronize it with the rest of your Razer Chroma-compatible gear, along with a 720p webcam, an IR webcam, stereo speakers, a microphone array, and support for immersive audio technologies (Dolby Atmos and 7.1 codec). A 70.5WHr module sits in the battery slot, which should be enough to keep it running for up to five hours of light usage, but expect it to run out a whole lot quicker, depending on the game you’re playing.
It’s got the usual wireless connectivity options, along with a generous selection of slots, namely USB-C, Thunderbolt, USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet, 3.5mm, a UHS-III card reader, and even a Kensington security lock. If you have a Razer Core X, you can even hook it up to the box in order to leverage the power of two GPUs for even more processing muscle.
The 2019 Razer Blade Pro 17 is available now.
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