Razer Blade 17 Gaming Laptop: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti - 12th Gen Intel 14-Core i9 CPU - 17.3" UHD 144Hz - 32GB DDR5 RAM - 1TB PCIe SSD - Windows 11 - Chroma RGB - Thunderbolt 4 - SD Card Reader

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.

I'm glad i was able to get this laptop used and discounted since it was out of stock pretty much everywhere (3080 Ti 16GB Vram laptop is much better than a 4070 with 8GB Vram). However, the laptop runs hot like my previous HP envy did, and while I don't game everyday to truly wear out the system I think it should last another 4yrs. I'll update my review if anything changes, but so far it's able to run palworld max settings at 60fps, and higher with DLSS or reduced shadows. Note, if you have one of these you're going to want it at an incline for more air, temps dropped by about 10c when I did so. You also don't want to put the power brick on the carpet as it got super hot to the touch when I did so, I'm assuming that's why some other reviews claimed their brick broke.

I previously owned the Razer Blade 14 and was sad when I had to part with it at the time. I'm definitely glad I went with the 17" this time. The screen real estate is really nice on-the-go, as this doubles as a work machine and gaming laptop for me. When I'm at home, I have an external monitor I use for more work space. No issues there. Where it really shines is the cooling on this bad boy. I bought some simple, adhesive laptop legs to raise the back up so it can breathe better (Anybody whose got knowledge of gaming laptops knows this works just as well as a "cooling pad"). Even under maximum load, the GPU only runs at about 87C, and after 5 hours of intense AAA gaming, the hottest it ever got was 89C. Vapor chamber, raising the laptop, and the bigger foot print of this laptop overall really helps dissipate the heat. The on-board sound isn't terrible either. Of course I did some tweaking on the mixer to dial it in but it can get pretty damn loud. Speaking of noise, this thing runs impressively quiet. Especially when I'm not playing the most DEMANDING games, it's completely tolerable even without headphones. I owned an ASUS TUF laptop a couple years ago and that thing was like sticking your head inside a vaccum cleaner. The 3070 Ti in this model being able to push 150W when needed really squeezes every bit of performance out of this card. Very happy I went with this, over the 4060. I understand the newer card draws less power for similar performance, and has access to DLSS 3.0, but running at 2k this is more than enough.

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.

This will likely be the last Razer device I've purchased. I really want to remain loyal to the company but I've recently bought things such as keyboards, mice and others that just didn't cut the mustard. For whatever reason though, I decided to drop 4k on a top of the line laptop to replace my 6 year old Origin PC. That was a mistake. Let's start however, with the positives. The computer is slick. I bought a Blade 17 with 32gb of RAM and a 3080TI. It's super thin, easily 40% thinner than my 6 year old Origin and very light for a 17 inch laptop (comparatively speaking). The screen is beautiful, crisp and bright and you definitely notice the 240hz in QHD. It's fantastic. It's also surprisingly quiet. I expected more fan noise but there is very little to be honest. I bought a laptop cooler just in case because I wanted to protect my new baby from overheating but it seems to do well on it's own. I've never seen the GPU heat go above 58 degrees Celsius in any game thus far. When I got it ready and got my games installed, I was very pleased. The computer could easily push 140 FPS in the most demanding games and still didn't feel hot to the touch. It crushed anything I loaded and I briefly debating using this in lieu of my personally built desktop with a 3070 and 32gb of ram because I felt this laptop was outperforming it in many regards. Unfortunately, that lasted about two weeks. Suddenly I started seeing artifacts and flickers in games. Previous experience instantly told me that is not a good sign. My FPS dropped dramatically. Whereas in my favorite shooters I was seeing between 70 and 120 FPS, I now see 40 at the most, usually 35 or less. Nothing I do changes this. Every game looks great but runs awful. I ran additional benchmarks on the computer to see what was wrong. The GPU is now benchmarking at ZERO percent after just two weeks. Either I got a lemon of a GPU or perhaps the chassis cooling is not what i's cracked up to be. Either way, spending four THOUSAND dollars on what should be a premier gaming laptop and it lasting all of two weeks is beyond unacceptable. Spending 4000 dollars on anything should all but guarantee and near perfectly functioning device. Sadly, that is not what I received. I received something that performed slightly above where I expected for about two weeks. However, after two weeks, my 6 year old Origin PC with a GTX 570 can actually play my favorite games at a higher FPS than this computer. It would appear that Razer's QC is once again lacking. I would stay away from this laptop and consider a different brand. Edit: 6 Months later. Razer fixed the problem with the FPS. It took 3 months and required them to send me a new power brick because the one I had was the problem and not feeding sufficient power to the computer. Fast forward another 2 months and the touchpad stopped working. Because Razer makes trash, low quality products with no QC. STAY AWAY!