With its recent announcement of the Blade 16 and Blade 18, you might have assumed Razer was ready to sunset its older Blade 15 laptop. Not so: the company is keeping the Blade 15 around for at least another year while updating it with the latest components from Intel and NVIDIA. On Wednesday, Razer announced two new 2023 variants of the Blade 15.
Both feature 16GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 5,200 MHz, 1TB SSDs and Intel i7-13800H processors. The 13800H is a 14-core, 20-thread chip with a maximum boost clock of 5.2GHz. For reference, all models of the Blade 16 come with Intel’s flagship 24-core i9-13950HX. That means the Blade 15 won’t offer as much performance as the Blade 16, but it also won’t be a slouch. Part of that is thanks to the fact both new Blade 15 models come with RTX 40 series GPUs. With today’s announcement, you can configure the Blade 15 with either an RTX 4060 or RTX 4070 GPU. There’s no 4090 option like Razer offers with the Blade 16, likely due to the internal space and thermal constraints present with the smaller chassis.
You also won’t find the mini LED display option that’s one of the highlights of the Blade 16. The Blade 15 limits you to a 16:9 QHD IPS panel with 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage and a 240Hz refresh rate. That’s a shame as 16:10 displays are often better suited for productivity tasks, but to be expected since Razer did not redesign the Blade 15.
The 2023 Blade 15 is available to order starting today. Pricing starts at $2,500 for the RTX 4060 model. The RTX 4070 variant will set you back $2,800. In other words, the latter is $100 more than the base model Blade 16, which starts at $2,700 and features an RTX 4060 video card. So the Blade 15 is not exactly a meaningfully cheaper option than the Blade 16. That said, the Blade 15 is about a pound lighter than its newer sibling and 5mm thinner. It should also offer slightly better battery life thanks to its more modest CPU. All things to keep in mind if you plan to buy a new gaming laptop this year.
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