Razer's Retooled Blade 18 Gaming Laptop Is Now Available To Replace Your Desktop
Razer just finished honing its big and bold Blade 18 gaming laptop with cutting-edge hardware upgrades (versus the Blade 18 we reviewed last year), and it's now available to purchase, provided you have the requisite coin. The asking price is as bold as the configuration—the cost of entry is $3,499 and it goes up from there, depending on what hardware bits you want to splurge on (like a faster GPU).
Is it expensive? Sure, but even the baseline Blade 18 configuration wields enough horsepower to replace a typical desktop gaming PC, while remaining portable and surprisingly svelte for its 18-inch panel size and hardware makeup.
"Engineered to deliver a premium desktop-class experience in a portable form, the Blade 18 combines top-tier gaming performance with the power to handle demanding creative workflows. With a complete redesign focused on maximizing performance, it is the ultimate powerhouse for gamers and creators on the move," Razer explains.
Let's talk dimensions. The retooled Blade 18, built around a CNC-milled aluminum chassis with an anodized black finish and fingerprint resistive coating, measures 15.74 x 10.84 x 0.86 to 1.1 inches (399.96 x 275.4 x 21.99 to 27.94 millimeters). That's pretty slim, though it does pack considerable heft at 7.06 pounds (3.19 kilograms).
One of the stars of the show is the 18-inch IPS display with a 3840x2400 resolution. At its native resolution, the laptop supports a fast 240Hz refresh rate. It's a dual-mode display, and if you want to game at 1920x1200, you can crank the refresh rate all the way up to 440Hz for an edge in competitive esports titles.
You need some serious horsepower to drive those kind of refresh rate, and the Blade 18 obliges by pairing a Core Ultra 9 275HX processor (24C/24T, up to 5.4GHz, 40MB of L2 cache, 36MB of L3 cache) based on Arrow Lake with a mobile GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU based on NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture.
It also comes standard with 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory and a 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 solid state drive (SSD).
While the CPU is static, you can bump the configuration up to a GeForce RTX 5080 for $600 more, or a GeForce RTX 5090 for $1,400 more, the latter of which also doubles the storage to 2TB. You can also double the RAM to 64GB, though doing so also upgrades the config to a GeForce RTX 5090 and 4TB of storage, bringing the tally to $5,199.99.
One of our main criticisms is that you can't really piecemeal certain upgrades like you can at a typical OEM. Meaning, you can't pair the baseline GeForce RTX 5070 Ti with more storage or RAM—upgrading either one also upgrades the GPU.
Outside of the core hardware, all of the configs boast "desktop levels of connectivity," including two Thunderbolt ports (1x Thunderbolt 5 and 1x Thunderbolt 4), Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 for wireless, a 1Gbps LAN port, and an HDMI 2.1 output.
Other notable features include a redesigned keyboard with scissor switches (35% more travel and a 63g actuation force, according to Razer) and a new 10-key number pad, along with dual-LED per-key backlighting, 7.1 virtual surround sound with THX Spatial Audio support, and a 5-megapixel camera with Windows Hello support and a privacy shutter.
We have not tested the newly honed Bladed 18, though we have been impressed with previous hands-on experiences with Razer's laptops. For anyone interested, the Blade 18 with updated hardware is available now exclusively at Razer.
