Speaker 1: One of the big trends for PC gaming in 2023 is 18 inch gaming laptops. There are at least four or five coming this year, and I've just gotten a chance to test and review the very first one. It is the razor blade 18 from Razor. And when you look at it, you go, wow, this is an amazing gigantic 18 inch screen. I've never seen anything like this before. And then I thought, wait, maybe I have seen something like this before. It turns out we have tried 18 inch laptops in the past. I look back in the old, uh, archives and I found that [00:00:30] I reviewed a Dell Alien Wear 18 in 18 inch gaming laptop way back in 2013, and that might have been the first and last 18 inch gaming laptop of that era, and it's taking us 10 years to get around to it again, which is a shame because it's actually a great idea and I certainly hope it has more legs this time.
Speaker 1: A lot of the gaming laptops that I see are 15 inch screens, some sixteens. There's still a few seventeens around, but frankly, if you want to game on something, you know, with a bigger, more immersive display, a 15 inch [00:01:00] isn't really gonna do it. Otherwise, you have to find a living room with a TV in and, and a console or hook your computer up to the TV or get a monitor and set that up on your desk, and that's another big hassle and can maybe eat up too much space. So the fact that you can have a really big screen like this on a laptop is a great compromise between needing portability and really wanting a big display. But the 18 inch screen may not be the most notable thing about the Razor Blade 18. This is also the first laptop we're testing with the mobile versions of NVIDIA's 4,000 series GPUs.
Speaker 1: You can get [00:01:30] the, uh, 40 80 or the 40 90 in here. I've actually got the 40 80 in this version, and you can get Core I nine cpu, new 13th Generation. This is actually the least expensive of the two configurations razors offering right now because you've got the, the 40 80, the core I nine, you got one terabyte of storage, 32 gigs of ram, and it is 37 99. The more expensive version trades up to the 40 90 gpu, you get two terabytes of storage, and for that it's gonna be 44 99. Uh, [00:02:00] that is an expensive gaming laptop no matter how you slice it. That said, I was perfectly happy with this lower end version. Uh, performance was great. Uh, gaming on a bigger screen was great. Uh, large touch pad, I always like those on a gaming laptop. Even if you don't use a touch pad for gaming that much, it makes it that much more useful for, you know, everyday stuff.
Speaker 1: It's got all the razor chroma lighting effects. You can literally paint your design on this key by key in any different color you want or set it to, you know, run through a rainbow of colors just like you can with a lot of other razor products. [00:02:30] Now, razor says this has a desktop level set of ports and connections. I don't know if I would go that far. It's got, you know, U S B A and u s bbc. It's got H dmmi, it's got SD card slot, it's got ethernet. So that actually is a really good collection and certainly better than most other gaming laptops and way better than most non-gaming laptops. A couple of my small issues with the Razor Blade 18, some of my favorite gaming laptops break out media keys, volume up, volume down mute, mic mute into a separate buttons. Usually along the side here are somewhere else, making it real [00:03:00] easy to just reach out and hit them.
Speaker 1: Uh, by default, you've got the traditional function key here and you have to go function in F two in order to lower the volume. I've always hated that in any laptop, especially gaming ones. However, you can go into the razor synapse software that's built in and switch that. So the volume control and other media controls, uh, it just becomes the default functions here. So at least there's a workaround. I still like dedicated keys better. You'll also note that even though this is a gigantic laptop, it doesn't have a breakout number pad like some other big laptops do, but it's the screen [00:03:30] here that's really the star of the show. It's an 18 inch display qhd, which means 25 60 by 6,000 in this case because this is a 16 by 10 screen, which is becoming more and more common. So it's a little bit taller than 16 by nine screens, which are still found on a lot of laptops and a lot of gaming laptops.
Speaker 1: But slowly they're being swapped out for these guys. This is actually just a pretty basic LTD screen. It's got a 240 hertz refresh rate, which is great for gaming, but if you want something a little bit fancier, there's [00:04:00] actually a sister model to this called the Razor Blade 16 that we don't have yet, but that has a mini l e d display, which is only available in that 16 inch model, not the 18 inch model, which is a real shame because uh, that seems like a real winner of a display. It's actually a dual mode display that can switch between, uh, two 40 hertz at full HD or one 20 hertz at U hd, basically 4k. So it works for gamers and also for content creators. Uh, that's a really advanced display. I'd love to see it in something bigger like this. [00:04:30] I don't think anybody's making, uh, a screen like that in this size right now.
Speaker 1: Maybe in the future. Azure, you would expect performance is fantastic from this thing. In addition to our regular benchmark test, I also ran the New Dead Space remake. I cranked everything up to ultra full resolution. I was regularly getting, you know, at least 80 frames per second and well into the hundreds, uh, running around the ship. And, uh, I thought it was a really impressive experience, especially because this big screen is so close to your face. It's a very visceral experience. Another thing gamers are really gonna like about this, [00:05:00] and something else that borrows from gaming desktops is that the ram and the storage are both upgradable. You can access those with pretty minimal effort. Now I've only been playing around with the new Razor Blade 18 for, you know, less than a week. So these are my preliminary impressions of it based on our early testing and my early hands-on testing.
Speaker 1: But I am cautiously optimistic about this new generation of 18 inch laptops. It really fills a need between, you know, smaller gaming laptops and big monitor gaming and big screen tv, living room gaming. And I think that especially if you're [00:05:30] working from home a lot and your home office is also your gaming setup, and you want something that you can use for let's say, you know, office work and Photoshop and all kinds of other high-end tasks, and also game honored with a big screen, that's almost like having a small all in one on your desk. Uh, then an 18 inch screen feels like a great idea to me. I certainly hope the screen size catches on and it does not die out as quickly as it did last time. Now I'm gonna have to wait till I can see some of the other 18 inch gaming laptops coming this year from, uh, ACEs and Acer [00:06:00] and Alienware to really compare these against each other. But based on previous experience with all these brands, when comparing similar laptops, head to head, razor's Blade Line usually comes out at or near the top of the list.
