Razer Blade 15 Base Edition (2021)

Performance

While the laptop will not reach the same performance as the desktop RTX 3070 it should non-the-less offer good performance for a gaming laptop. Unfortunately, I did not have a desktop RTX 3070 (or 3060 or 3060 Ti) to compare to so the tests here are more to give you an idea of the performance you will get without any good comparisons.

In cases where I could not run a built-in benchmark I used CapFrameX to capture the frame rates over a period.

Synthetic Non-gaming benchmarks

Let’s start with non-gaming benchmarks.

Cinebench R23

The MSI GE76 Raider has a faster Core i7 and it shows as it smokes the Core i7-10750H with over 40% higher performance in multi-core tests. The single-core performance however is similar. The new Asus Zephyrus G15 with a Ryzen 5900HS of course smokes both and it is a testament how good the mobile Ryzen GPU’s are. A Razer Blade with a Ryzen 5X00 would be awesome.

PCMark

While overall getting lower scores than the MSI GE76 Raider the Razer Blade manages to score a win in the Essentials category (App start-up, video conferencing and web browsing) while loosing quite badly in both Digital Content Creation and Gaming which is expected as the MSI comes with a RTX3080 while the Razer Blade has a RTX 3070.

3DMark TimeSpy

The performance is as expected and places the Razer Blade between last year Zephpyrus G15 with a GTX2060 and this years Zephyrus G15 with a RTX3080.

SSD

The SSD that is included is not the fastest SSD but still fast enough that you should not notice.

I added a 1 TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus and it is slightly faster but not much.

WIFI

Even if this is “just” Wifi6 and not Wifi6E the Wifi on this laptop is lightning fast.

I have 10 Gbps- fiber network at home and a good Asus mesh-system with a Asus 10 Gbps-router and several XT8 nodes (1 Gbps) and I get excellent speeds.

Battery Life

Razer promises up to 6 hour battery time but my testing never reached those numbers. I set the brightness to around 50%, which frankly still is bright enough, and then tested both using the Optimus settings (where it switches between integrated and discreet graphics) and just using discrete graphics. The Modern Office battery test in PC Mark 10 was used and Razer Synapse was set to the Balanced setting.

• Modern Office (Optimus): 4h 11 min
• Modern Office Discret): 2h 13 min
• Video (Optimus): 4h 25 min
• Video (Discret): 2h 6 min

Using the Optimus setting I could eek out 4 hours and 11 minutes with the modern office test which I think is ok. You probably could get even more by lowering the screen brightness even more. Turning to dGPU however means it is using the RTX 3070 all the time and I could only get a bit more than 2 hours out of the battery before it died.

Gaming Benchmarks

ASSASSINS CREED: Valhalla

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I first choose to run the built-in benchmark in Assassins Creed: Valhalla. I choose the very high setting. The Razer Blade 15 performs as expected and falls just behind the RTX3080-based laptops. Since you probably would like to get the 1% framerate up to over 60 fps turning down the settings might help. Still, for a gaming laptop the game is very playable although I probably would stay at 1080p.

Battlefield V and Outriders

Battlefield V is a bit older but still has great graphics. It has one of the first version of DLSS so I choose not to use that. With medium setting which still looks great, the game has no problems getting high frame rates even when looking at the 1% fps score. This means that 99% of the fps is higher than 60 fps.

Outriders is brand new and a game that really excells with DLSS. In fact, the game automatically set an Ultra High setting and DLSS to Quality without me noticing and it still looked awesome. The framerates though is a bit lower so I think you might have to turn down the settings slightly. I also quickly tested it on a Asus Zephyrus G15 (2021) with a RTX3080 and that plays even better so the RTX 3070 might need slightly lowered settings to be completely fluid. Honestly though I think it played very well anyway.