Construction
If you know the Blades, you also know this one: Razer hasn’t changed the design of its series for several years and keeps the sobriety of the metallic black dress which is not to displease us, especially in the face of the proliferation of models that drool RGB in all directions. Only the brand’s neon green logo on the hood betrays the PC’s belonging to the world of gaming. If the construction is as always neat, especially with a screen occupancy rate of 90%, we note all the same that this cover lacks rigidity; pressure on it lets it sink in and taints the painting a little.
If the chassis is neat, the hood is not very rigid.
The touchpad is huge and perfectly fluid. However, one can wonder the interest of such a size on a PC intended for video games, which will therefore be used mainly with a mouse. Nothing to complain about on the keyboard side, with a reactive keystroke and extensive RGB customization, which can of course be configured key by key in the Razer Synapse software.
The touchpad is huge and the keyboard effective.
The connection is complete and includes an HDMI 2.1 port, a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port, a USB-C 3.2 port, three USB-3.2 ports and an SD UHS II card reader. All that’s missing is an Ethernet port for those who wouldn’t want to compromise on the connection.
The connection is quite complete.
Bluetooth 5.2 is present, as is Wi-Fi 6E and a Full HD webcam. Despite its definition, its quality is disappointing and the image is very noisy, even when the light is present; Shame. As it is equipped with an infrared module, you can unlock your session with Windows Hello to go faster, which is always practical, especially since the PC does not have a fingerprint reader. Note the presence of a small physical cache to manually lock it if necessary.
The PC is very easy to disassemble and you can change the RAM, the battery and one of the two M.2 SSDs. unfortunately, the second is not directly accessible.
You can easily change the RAM and one of the SSDs.
When it comes to heating, you shouldn’t have expected a miracle given the components integrated into the Blade 16. We noted hot spots at the air outlet (around 53°C) and in the center of the keyboard (a little less 45°C). Nothing risky, but as often on this type of computer, you can feel the heat coming out and the ventilation blowing hard. We have indeed noted 46.5 dB in game. It is better to play with headphones on the ears to avoid the noise of the fans.
Like any model gamingthe Blade 16 heats up.
Performance
The Blade 16 that we are testing is equipped with an Intel Core i9-13950HX processor, one of the most powerful models of the moment, with 24 cores (8 powerful and 16 efficient) that can climb to 5.5 GHz. The thermal envelope is for its part 55 W. As we said above, it is accompanied by 32 GB of DDR5 5600 MHz RAM and 2 TB of SSD. As you will have understood, the Razer Blade 16 does not do half measures and the processor is simply the fastest we have been able to test to date.
It scored a CPU rating of 245 after our tests; an impressive figure that can be put into perspective with a few other PCs tested. It is for example 46% more efficient than the 12900HK of the MSI Raider GE76 from last year or the M2 Pro released at the beginning of 2023. Processing speeds in all software are impressive, even in the most demanding tasks. heavier; in short, a new reference among laptops!
For their part, the SSDs are very fast, since we noted 4.5 GB / s writing and 6.9 GB / s reading.
Screen
The Blade’s 16-inch screen comes in a 16:10 format with a mini-led panel adorned with technology dual-screen interesting for gamers. It allows two different displays: a 4K 120 Hz mode for a gaming experience focused on graphics quality, and a Full HD 240 Hz mode for ultra-fast refresh, focused on competitive multiplayer.
After passing our probes, it simply turned out to be the best panel we tested, even better than that of the latest MacBook Pros. Its maximum brightness reached 710 cd/m², a laptop record, which it owes to mini-LED technology, which also provides unlimited contrast. The colorimetry is very precise (Delta E at 2.1) and the average color temperature (6620 K) is very close to the video standard. Creators will be able to work on it without a second thought. Finally, the remanence of 5 ms is very low — model gaming obliges — and the panel being matte, the average reflectance is only 20%.
All good!
Mobility / Autonomy
Compared to last year, the Blade 16 has become much thicker, at least on this model equipped with an RTX 4090 and which is 2.2 cm thick. And its 2.4 kg on the scale does not make it an example of lightness, all the more so when you have to add almost a kilogram (947 g exactly) for the particularly imposing charger. Flaws found on most PCs gaming of this format, often more transportable than truly portable.
The charging block is really impressive.
On the autonomy side, we should not expect a miracle. This is again a defect of computers intended for gamers. The Blade 16 lasted just over 4 hours of video playback on Netflix, headphones plugged in, volume at 50%, keyboard backlight off. Enough to watch a movie, but not enough to work for a whole day without plugging it into the mains.
