Razer Blade 17 Gaming Laptop: RTX 3080 Ti

So I debated for months about what laptop to get to replace my trusty surface book 2. I simply could not find something that hit all the points that it had but I narrowed my search down to the razer 17 (4k 3080ti), the MSI z17 (3080ti), and the Gigabyte AERO 17 (3080ti). The MSI and Gigabyte had the downside of only being 90w and 105w gpus respectively. The MSI brought touch screen that I desperately wanted but lost out because it only ran at 1440p and I did not want to step down in resolution. So that left the Gigabyte in the running and it is significantly less expensive but lost out because they dropped all the ports off the laptop like some fruity company I know of. So we had the winner of the Razer from the selection. I also knew that I would be upgrading the unit right out of the gate as the storage and ram would need to be bumped up to better cover my software needs. So I booted the laptop to make sure that everything was working and then popped the cover off to swap the ram for a 64GB kit from Kingston (KF548S38IBK2-64) and a 4TB ssd from sabrent. The cover had a bit of a learning curve as you needed to slide it to the front of the laptop to get it to lift off but otherwise was easy to get into. I was disappointed to find a tamper seal on the boot ssd but it did not say warranty void so I will not dock it too hard here. I had some difficulty with the OS clone so I did a clean install from the recovery media from razers webpage (only accessible after you register the laptop). Everything came up and worked no problems when working from the recovery media (I do not recommend a truly clean windows install as there is no page to pull razers software and drivers from). The laptop is a joy to work with as it has tons of power ontap and after the upgrades the ability to replace my desktop in a pinch.

CPU

The new i9 cores are shockingly fast and chew through both lightly and heavily threaded workloads and under the right conditions outpace my old 1950x threadripper. An older cpu to be sure but it still blows my mind that a laptop could keep pace with a hedt processor.

GPU

Where this laptop really sets itself apart is in the gpu department where its higher power limit lets it stretch its legs pushing some titles in 4k at decent settings. I have also given it a shake at 8k but found that the vram buffer is on the very edge of working even in older titles. An example would be skyrim working at stock maxed settings but running out of memory once I enabled an enb.

Thermals/Noise

Experiments aside the laptop will get very loud if you select anything other then the quiet mode. The laptop keeps thermals under control though so I can’t knock it much here.

Battery

Expect to be married to the power cord for almost any task as the system sucks down power at an alarming rate. I think some of this is a combo of the high refresh rate screen and the fact that the dedicated gpu is not really disabled in optimus mode but just in a low power state. Do note that the power brick gets quite warm under normal loads and downright hot under stress loads. I strongly recommend keeping it well ventilated and off cloth surfaces.

Screen

The screen was a pleasant surprise for me as it was brighter than the reviews I read lead me to believe. Note it is not a photon cannon but it meets or exceeds the outgoing surface book 2. One thing that I wish it had here was an HDR rated panel. I would give up the high refresh rate for that in a heartbeat but I know that I am in the minority here. Colors are good and I feel that I can edit content on it without having to worry about being terribly inaccurate.

Keyboard

I have to give this a meh rating as it is just so so at best. The keys are mushy and the layout is somehow off a bit for me. I am guessing that I will get used to it but off the bat I find I am getting more errors than normal when typing. The chroma colors are fantastic though and I was able to setup a matching color scheme to my desktop. The colors are bright and vivid so A+ there.

Trackpad

This one surprised me as everyone raves about this track pad but I found the surface book despite its smaller size was better. It has a wedge click that misses my input frequently and its palm rejection is mediocre as I frequently would have the cursor move while I was trying to type.

Port selection

This was a selling point for me and it does not disappoint. The usb A ports are plentiful and the thunderbolt ports are fast. The 2.5G Ethernet is a nice touch though I can’t test this as my network is 1G or 10G with no ability to run the interim steps (I will update this if I get a different switch.). The HDMI is 2.1 so you get the full bandwidth to run all the way up to 8k 60hz. Wifi runs the new 6e standard and with a supported network pulls nearly gigabit speeds. Finally the sd card slot is on point reading at my cards rated speeds.

Build quality

Exceptional fit and finish here. Everything is sturdy and I was not found wanting here coming from the exceptional surface book.

Final thoughts

I love this laptop for everything it is capable of doing. It is not a true workstation replacement but no laptop will be able to reach hedt levels. Where this laptop shines is in that space in-between where I can’t haul my workstation but still need to edit a video or stitch some images together. I can render a h265 video without proxies on this and with the ram upgrade I can stitch raw files together with confidence. Also it can game and game well but don’t expect miracles here as while it has the 3080ti name it is still a notebook gpu so it struggles at 4k in newer titles. The deep vram buffer is a massive boon for work but don’t expect to make much use of it in games. If you are looking for a gaming laptop I would look at the 1440p units as it is a more obtainable resolution. For the “creative” that games on occasion I think you will be hard pressed to find a better laptop that combines all of these specs in this form factor.

Debating to return it. Bought what I thought was the beast. 12 generation I9, UHD, 17 inches, 3080ti. From the first day, it’s acting weird. Fan makes huge noise. Laptop gets very hot that I barely can touch it. In so many times screen turns black while running games and it stops the game and other times it just restart on its own even though the laptop just started. This is $6000 CAD laptop that we talk about, not a cheap machine.

I bought the laptop at the discount because it was previously opened. What they don’t tell you is that the laptop has a problem. The system reads it as a blade 15 and not 17. I called razer and they told me it’s a defective product and i should send it back.

I own 5 razer blade pro 17’s I have a 2019 i7 3080 a 202 i7 3080 early 12 i7 3080 and late 21 i9 3080 and this new 14 core 3080ti is literally 300% slower upload 4k video from premiere pro 22 and the early 21 i7 blows it away. and of course razer being razer its “oh well’ must be your wifi problem is I have a cat 6 ethernet connect at 5g all were tested side by side under exact same parameters. sending it back and never going razer again