Razer has announced the 2020 version of its Blade Pro 17, a laptop with a 300Hz screen and an 8-core Intel Core i7 processor.
The Laptop is built for professional gamers, designers, and game developers. There is a 4K 120Hz touch display option for creative professionals. But Razer has improved the gaming-focused display option to a 300Hz 1080p panel. Razer tells the 4K screen will cover 100 percent of the Adobe RGB space, and the 1080p display comes with a glare-reducing matte finish.
The most advanced version of the Razer Blade Pro series hasn’t evolved much on the outside. But on the inside, it has an 8-core 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10875H, and it has options for up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics processing unit (GPU) chip. The earlier version had a six-core processor.
The new model has been bumped up to the latest generation of mobile processors from Intel and GPUs from Nvidia. Razer states they’ll make the innovative Blade faster than its predecessor, both in gaming and creative work.
You can get the 300Hz screen with Nvidia’s RTX 2070 Max-Q or an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, for $2,599 and $3,199, each. The gaming rigs appear with a 512GB SSD upgradeable to 2TB, while the creator version appears with 1TB (also upgradable to 2TB). There’s no RTX 2060 model this time around.
The Razer Blade Pro 17 features a vapor chamber cooler for active cooling, joined with an adjacent dual-fan system for new passive cooling. This decreases both ambient noise and heat. It does add additional weight to the Blade, though; this one is just over six pounds.
Razer has made a tweak to the keyboard. There are presently half-height directional keys, with the right shift key extended above them, like how Razer’s new Blade 15 and Blade Stealth updates have.
The 2020 Pro 17 doesn’t seem too different from last year’s model; you can observe the same reasonably thin bezels and speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard.
But we found that the 2019 Pro didn’t deliver the performance its massive price tag led us to expect; we weren’t capable of reaching the screen’s FPS ceiling in 4K resolution without bumping down the graphics. It’ll be exciting to see whether a brand-new generation of hardware does a better job.
The all-new Razer Blade Pro 17 price will begin at $2,600 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q and 300 Hz full HD display. It will be available later this month at Razer.com and through select retailers in the United States and Canada.