Snaky peripheral maker Razer has just released a new laptop designed to bridge the gap between a laptop and a desktop. It doesn’t just have a massively-powerful spec, but it also has an enormous 18-inch screen and a big slab of a chassis to hold it all. Forget buying a desktop replacement, you could probably attach legs to the new Razer Blade 18 (2024) and replace your actual desk with it.
We’ve been impressed by Razer’s portable gaming rigs lately, awarding one of its recent efforts a score of 8/10 in our Razer Blade 16 review, earning it a proud place on our guide to the best gaming laptop right now.
This new gaming machine isn’t the first 18-inch gaming laptop to come out of the Razer stable, of course, but it does make some key updates to the spec, including an 14th Gen Intel Core CPU and a very high resolution 3,840 x 2,440 (UHD+) screen with a 240Hz refresh rate. That’s a big resolution upgrade over the 2,560 x 1,600 140Hz screen found on last year’s Razer Blade 18.
The only problem is that you’ll need a serious amount of GPU power to output a decent frame rate at that resolution, and while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU supplied with the machine is about as fast as they come in the mobile world, it’s still going to struggle to maintain 200fps at that resolution in today’s most demanding titles. On the plus side, Razer has unlocked the full 175W of power available to the GPU, so it really will be the fastest mobile GPU you can get when the machine is plugged into the mains.
Razer is making a big deal about the Blade 18 having the world’s first 18-inch 4K 200Hz display, but it does also offer a 300Hz 2,560 x 1,440 Mini-LED option for the laptop, which we’d argue is a much better option, as the spec will be able to handle even demanding running games at that resolution. There are also spec options with RTX 4080 and 4070 laptop GPUs, which reduce the cost significantly.
The rest of the spec includes Intel’s latest Core i9 14900HX CPU, which has eight P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, giving you a total of 24 cores and, unlike the Core i9 13980X CPU used in the Blade 18 2023 model, it has a maximum 5.8GHz turbo clock speed – a 200MHz bonus over the previous chip. However, given the high thermal output and power demands of Intel’s Raptor Lake CPU architecture, you’re unlikely to see the CPU boost that far very often.
Meanwhile, another big introduction to the new Blade 18 spec is the addition of a Thunderbolt 5 connection, enabling you to hook up fast, high-resolution monitors, high-speed external SSDs, and other fast add-ons to the laptop, with up to 120Gbps of bandwidth at your disposal. It also sports a Wi-Fi 7 connection, as well as up to 64GB of DDR5 memory (spec options start at 16GB), and up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage.
As always with Razer’s Blade models, it’s all housed in a super slim chassis, with a thickness of just 0.86 inches (21.99mm), but it’s also a big beast, with the case crowding the little keyboard in the middle. Its area measures 10.84 x 15.74 inches (275 x 400mm), but it still has a comparatively light weight (for the spec) of 6.8lb (3.1kg).
It’s not cheap, though, as you would expect. The new Razer Blade 18 (2024) price is $3,099.99 for the basic spec with an RTX 4070 GPU and the 2,560 x 1,600 Mini LED screen, but you’ll need to pay a huge $4,799.99 for the top spec with an RTX 4090 GPU, 64GB of memory, a 4TB SSD, and the new 200Hz 4K screen.
The Razer Blade 18 is available to pre-order now, but in the meantime, make sure you read our Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 (2024) review, where we take a look at Asus’ latest 18-inch gaming laptop.
