Review: Razer Blade 18 (2024)

Razer's Blade 14 is my go-to recommendation for anyone hunting for a good gaming laptop, but as impressive as it is, it trades power for portability. If that’s the kind of sacrifice you don’t want to make, then say hello to the Razer Blade 18—this is the powerhouse you’re looking for.

Side-by-side with the Razer Blade 14, the Blade 18 looks like a protective big brother. You can see the family resemblance, but the larger Blade is more imposing. Its 18-inch Mini LED display is so bright it’s almost overwhelming in dark rooms, and it produces vivid colors that rival the already stunning screen on the Blade 14.

The Blade 18 starts at $3,100, but the model I tested is $4,500. You get a lot of power for the price. It packs a 14th-generation Intel Core i9 14900HX processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (upgradable to the beastly RTX 4090, which is what I tested), 32 GB of RAM, and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. It’s the kind of power that can tear through even the most demanding games.

Smooth Screen

Razer outdid itself with the display on the Razer Blade 18. The Mini LED panel has a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel resolution, with 2,000 local dimming zones, delivering exceptional contrast between brighter and darker areas of the image. The Razer Blade 14 was already one of the most vibrant laptop screens I’d seen, but the Blade 18 makes it look dull by comparison.

But what sets it apart is the 300-Hz refresh rate. At their best, most gaming laptops only support 240 Hz, which is plenty for most games, but for fast-paced titles like Overwatch 2, you want all the frames you can get, and the Blade 18 is one of the few laptops I’ve tested that can crank out that many reliably.

Maintaining such a high frame rate is going to be a drain on the battery, but Razer's Synapse software has an option to automatically switch the display to 60 Hz when on battery power. This dramatically cuts down on how many frames your games have to render, conserving power, but will lead to less smooth gameplay. You can also press Fn+R to cycle between 60 Hz, 240 Hz, and 300 Hz while connected to a charger.

Synapse also has a color profile selector that lets you swap between DCI-P3, Adobe RGB, Rec.709, and other profiles to get precise, accurate colors. This is especially helpful for gamers who are also designers and photo or video editors—where color accuracy is incredibly vital to their workflow.

Powerful Performance

A great display doesn’t matter much if you don’t have the horsepower to back it up, but fortunately, the Razer Blade 18 rises to the task. The model I tested comes equipped with the GeForce RTX 4090 (you can also choose between the RTX 4070 or 4080), and it tore through most games. Starfield, a notably less-than-optimized game, was getting 60-plus frames per second in crowded areas like New Atlantis on Ultra graphics settings, and maintaining 80 to 90 fps on Medium.

Overwatch 2 is what blew me away, though. On Medium graphics settings, I maintained a full 300 fps (while the laptop was connected to power). This is a game where I’m constantly flying across the map in seconds, whipping out my pistol to land headshots on an enemy that wasn’t in my view a third of a second ago, before rushing back to heal my teammates. Three hundred frames per second is exactly what I need, and the Razer Blade 18 has the display and the power to give it to me.

When I wasn’t clicking heads, the laptop was solid for doing my regular work, though the battery life was lackluster. I got around five to six hours with typical web browsing tasks, researching, and writing. This is somewhat normal for high-powered gaming laptops, but it’s still a frustrating limitation.

Battery life while gaming was, naturally, much shorter—a little more than an hour and a half of Overwatch 2 (on a more limited 60 fps). That's slightly longer than a few other gaming laptops I've recently tested, and a little surprising given how much power the Blade 18 has behind it.

Comfy Basics

Razer has gotten the design for its Blade lineup almost down to a science. The Blade 18 has the same aluminum chassis as the Blade 14, a nearly identical keyboard, and a slightly larger trackpad. I'd like to remind you that at 6.8 pounds(!), this is a machine you probably don't want to carry around all that much. (You might even have trouble stuffing it in a backpack.)

The keys are a bit more spacious, but this didn't give me any typing trouble. (It is weird that despite all this space, Razer condensed the keyboard and didn't include a NumPad.) It has chiclet-style keys with RGB backlighting, making them easy to see in the dark. Unlike a lot of gaming laptops, Razer doesn’t have much else that lights up on this device. The green Razer logo on the lid is illuminated, but that’s about it. There’s nothing garish here, which is refreshing.

The large and smooth trackpad is particularly comfortable, and it takes up roughly a third of the section below the keyboard. The speakers to the left and right of the keyboard are tucked behind some generously sized grates, and they can get quite loud while maintaining crisp, clear audio.

In terms of ports, the Blade 18 has plenty to offer: two USB-A 3.2 ports on the left and one on the right, a USB-C 3.2 port on the left, a full-size HDMI port, an Ethernet connection, a headphone jack, and an SD card reader.

There’s another USB-C port on the right that supports the new Thunderbolt 5 specification. Thunderbolt 5 is capable of delivering up to 120 gigabits of bandwidth, which is three times the capacity of the already blisteringly fast Thunderbolt 4. This will eventually be useful for things like connecting to multiple 8K displays or powering through heavy media transfers. I say “eventually” because very few Thunderbolt 5 accessories have been released yet, and the Razer Blade 18 is the first laptop to ship with the port included. There just aren’t many devices that can take advantage of all that speed. The port will still work with any Thunderbolt 4 accessories though.

Between the Thunderbolt 5 port, the vivid, ultra-fast display, and the RTX 4090 GPU, the Razer Blade 18 is a beast of a laptop that’s built for the future. It’s already tearing through most modern games, and it’s hard to imagine there’s much you could throw at it for a while it can’t handle. Except, maybe, a 10-hour workday away from an outlet.