Are 300 Hz displays and 10th gen Intel processors enough to get consumers to pick up the Razer Blade Pro 17?
That’s what the company hopes and they’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the project in order to woo the often fickle PC consumer back to Razer.
A notch above the Blade Stealth and Blade, the Blade Pro 17 is the one with the big 17 inch screen and it comes in three hot configurations that are all ready to burn a hole through your wallet.
These are the $2,599.99, $3,199.99, and $3,799.99 version with the cheapest variant rocking the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q and the middle-tier and top-tier iterations use the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q.
All share the same CPU, a Intel Core i7-10875H, and 16GB DDR4 RAM. The models also share the same battery, a 70.5 WHr, and the same wireless Intel AX201 Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0.
The cheapest and middle versions of the Blade Pro 17 use a 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD for storage while the top-of-the-line model uses a 1TB PCIe NVME SSD.
When it comes to the display, the Blade Pro 17 truly distinguishes each model from one another with different variants geared towards gamers who really care about this kind of thing.
The cheapest and middle versions of the computer come with a 17.3-inch, 1920 x 1080, 300 Hz display while the most expensive version has a 17.3-inch, 4K, 120Hz.
Basically, the display is pretty amazing at any level. But that’s also where we had our biggest issues with the product. More on that later.
To round out the Blade Pro 17’s list of features, you get an SD card reader, 3 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, RJ45 Ethernet, HDMI, Thunderbolt 3, and 2 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports.
The Razer Blade Pro 17 should start shipping to consumers and retail outlets later this month. In our opinion, it’s a pretty solid offering and we think the specs justify themselves.
The prices are also not uncommon for this kind of laptop and we didn’t really expect Razer to engage in intense price competition. What we did expect were the specs and the display, in particular, and that’s where we are concerned.
Can a gaming laptop consistently maintain 300 Hz over its lifetime?
We doubt it. Thermal throttling should become an issue because that’s a ton of power just to the display alone without even considering the rest of the power-hungry components that make up this system.
Outside of that, though, we’re impressed. If the system holds up when it starts to be subjected to real world conditions across multiple users, then we’ll change our mind but, for now, we’re cautiously optimistic.
Some people might take a wait-and-see approach as a verdict to not buy the product but, really, we just want to make sure its capable of delivering on the promises it is making.