Razer Blade 15 Advanced (2022) Gaming Laptop Review

1. Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing
2. Notebook Overview
3. BIOS/UEFI and Software
4. System/CPU Benchmarks
5. Graphics, System I/O, Battery and Gaming
6. Thermals and Final Thoughts

TweakTown's Rating: 90%

The Bottom Line

Razer continues to improve the Blade with new OLED panels alongside the performance boost from Intel Alder Lake and DDR5.

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

With every new CPU generation, the Blade from Razer is one laptop we cannot wait to get our hands-on, as it is a benchmark for the gaming notebook market.

This year, we have a few more firsts for the Blade 15, the big upgrade coming from DDR5 memory and Alder Lake CPUs, but these new platforms also feature high refresh panels with OLED technology.

Specifications

Our sample of the Blade 15 Adv is the middle unit above. It retails for $2999, while consumers can go to a higher-end SKU or lower if they choose. We are working with the Core i7-12800H, a 6P8E design, with total threads at 20 and hyper-threading enabled. DDR5 is paired with this new platform, our unit has 16GB of 4800MHz installed, and storage is 1TB for all available platforms.

Additional specification includes a 15" 240Hz 1440p panel at 100% DCI-P3 color supporting NVIDIA GSync, and with that GSync support comes the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti laptop GPU with 8GB of GDDR6. I/O includes Killer AX1690 Wi-Fi, Intel's newest 2x2 solution that supports Double Connect. We also have the standard USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, five in total, two USB-C power support 15w power delivery alongside a single Thunderbolt 4 port.

The Razer Blade 15 Advanced warranty comes in at one year for the laptop and two years for the battery.

Razer Blade 15 Gaming Laptop: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$2999.99	$2999.99	$2999.99	$2999.99	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 8/19/2022 at 2:19 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Notebook Overview

Razer Blade 15 Adv (2022) Overview

Packaging for the Blade keeps with the iconic snake theme.

The Blade itself is double boxed, the second box housing the laptop itself with the power adapter separate.

The power adapter is a 230w unit offering 19.5v at 11.8amps.

Opening the box, the Blade is firmly packed in by a retainer. The top of the notebook houses the infamous Razer logo.

Pulling the Blade out of the box, we have a 15" platform with what feels like an aluminum exterior smooth finish.

The underside offers two vents for the cooling fans to pull in air along with a few others below. We have four rubber feet to plant the Blade on your desk and keep it from sliding around.

Getting on to the ports, the left side houses the power input along with two USB 3.2 ports, Thunderbolt 4 with type-C, and the 3.5mm headphone jack.

On the right side, things are similar though an HDMI port starts things off, and the USB 3.2 and Thunderbolt ports finish things off.

With the notebook open, the keyboard is recessed into the chassis, while the trackpad with its glass-like finish takes up a good amount of real estate and is centered in the chassis.

Opening up the Blade, we have memory access right in front of us, the battery taking up most of the bottom half of the chassis. Wi-Fi is off to the left, and m.2 storage is to the right. Above, we have two good-sized cooling stacks mingling with a heat pipe.

In this image, we get a good look at the Blades lighting, per key on the keyboard itself.

BIOS/UEFI and Software

UEFI

The BIOS on this Blade is very simple, with five tabs across the top. The first menu is the main menu that gives information about the hardware in the laptop. Advanced allows you to configure the CPU and power settings. Additionally, you can manage the Thunderbolt and NVMe storage here as well.

The chipset menu enables Intel VMD for those wanting to run multiple drives in RAID or changing the GPU mode between dynamic and discrete only.

Software

Included software is Synapse 3.0.

Customization options in Synapse include support for Gaming mode, fn, and multimedia keys, along with the ability to switch off lighting and effects.

Performance modes include balanced and custom for the fans. GPU mode can be switched down below between Optimus and dedicated GPU mode.

Chroma Studio is software that allows you to customize the per-key lighting of the keyboard and additional accessories. In our case, we have a mouse setup too.

System/CPU Benchmarks

Cinebench

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to highlight their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests, a single-core workload that will utilize one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU

With the Blade 15 Adv being just our second notebook, our comparison field is the MSI Raider we reviewed back in January and last year's Blade 15 Adv. In single thread, the Blade 15 pulled in 1800 points, about 350 over last year's model. Multi-thread, we saw 9839 from the Blade 15.

AIDA64 Memory

Memory bandwidth gets a sizable bump with the move to DDR5, with the new Blade grabbing 57K read, 58K write, and 52K copy.

BAPCo CrossMark

CrossMark™ is an easy-to-run native cross-platform benchmark that measures the overall system performance and system responsiveness using models of real-world applications. CrossMark™ supports devices running Windows, iOS, and macOS platforms.

CrossMark showed a decent performance increase over last year's Blade 15 Adv. We scored 1578 in this scenario, which was a little over 100 points better.

UL Procyon

With Procyon, our only comparison is the MSI, as we were not testing with this benchmark when the 2021 Blade was in house. That said, the 12800H was not far behind, pulling in 7475 in Photo, 5435 in Video, and 6979 in Office.

Graphics, System I/O, Battery and Gaming

System I/O Performance

3DMark

CPU Profile showed similar performance between 11th and 12th Gen H series CPUs. The 12800H is about 1000 points better at max thread than 11th gen and single thread about 15 points better.

Timespy again showed increased performance. Overall, the score difference is a touch over 1100 points.

Running 3DMark storage, we see a pretty impactful difference in the drives these notebooks come with. The Blade enjoys Samsung drives which gave us a score of 504.

Battery life, while not a huge issue for a notebook that will be on mains most of its life, did see decent numbers, including 83 minutes of gaming and 286 minutes of office work.

Last, we have our gaming test with Cyberpunk 2077, high settings. At 1440p, the Blade 15 produced 52.7 FPS. Moving the system to 1080p, we see a small bump to 76.5 FPS.

Thermals and Final Thoughts

Thermals

With our Seek thermal camera, we got some good images of the Blade 15 Adv during testing. This showed a definite hotspot at the crease, temperatures peaking around 48c. You can also see two cold zones on the keyboard where the fans pull in air.

Final Thoughts

With the new 2022 Blade 15 Advanced using the same chassis as last year's platform, build quality remains superb with an all-metal chassis design. Further adding to this is a smooth matte black chassis design and large touchpad with a glass surface. Last, we have per-key RGB to dress up the notebook with Chroma Studio, and the Razer logo on the lid also lights up.

Year over year, there is a performance bump to be noted. With the Blade 15 Adv, we consumed a 400-point jump in single thread operations in R23 and 1500 points in multi-thread. Memory took a sizable bump with the move to DDR5. Across the board, we saw around 13,000 MB/s more memory bandwidth on the 12th gen platform.

CrossMark did show a sizeable bump, up 100 points from last year, and diving into Procyon, we saw solid performance top to bottom. CPU Profile showed gains from single thread to 16 threads, the new Blade 15 Adv pulling about 100 points at 16-threads. Storage performance was fantastic. With the Samsung being the go-to drive, we scored 504 MB/s in testing with 3DMark Storage Benchmark.

Synapse worked great during our testing of the Blade 15 Adv and provided a solid software platform for us to manage the Blade during testing. We were able to customize the per-key lighting along with our mouse in Chrome Studio and even tune the laptop on-the-fly for our gaming scenarios.

Overall, I find this a well-built platform with ample connectivity on the outside while keeping an upgrade path open by using socketed memory and PCIe 4.0 storage.