Shubham Sawarkar
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Razer has made major updates to its Blade line of gaming laptops with the release of the Blade 16 and Blade 18. These new models feature taller screens with a 16:10 aspect ratio, which provides more screen real estate, as well as a smaller display “chin” near the bezel. The Blade 16 and Blade 18 both come with Intel‘s 13th Generation Core i9-13950HX 65W CPU and can be upgraded to Nvidia‘s GeForce RTX 4090 mobile graphics.
Prices for the Blade 16 start at $2,699.99, while the Blade 18 starts at $2,899.99. Both models will be available in the first quarter of the year. Some high-end configurations of the Blade 16 also offer a Mini LED screen that can switch between 4K (3840 x 2400) and 1080p (1920 x 1200) resolutions, with different refresh rates for each resolution. This screen can reach peak brightness levels of up to 1,000 nits for HDR content or 600 nits for SDR content.
Even if you don’t opt for the Mini LED upgrade, the Blade 16 and 18 come with impressive displays. Both feature QHD (2560 x 1600) resolution IPS panels with a 240Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 500 nits. These displays support Nvidia G-Sync, have a 3ms response time, and cover 100% of the DCI-P3 color spectrum.
The Blade 16 and 18 have a sleek, understated design with large trackpads and thin bezels. In terms of specs, both laptops come with 16GB of DDR5-5600MHz RAM and 1TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD storage, which can be upgraded by the user. The Blade 16 supports up to 4TB of storage with two slots, while the Blade 18 can hold up to 8TB. Both laptops also have two slots for RAM, allowing for upgrades of up to 64GB of memory.
Both the Blade 16 and 18 feature Windows Hello webcams, with the Blade 18 also including a QHD 5MP webcam. The Blade 16 has a physical privacy shutter, while the Blade 18 does not.
In terms of ports, both laptops have a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, a Thunderbolt 4 port with 100W charging support, three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, a headphone jack, and a UHS-II SD card reader. Both of the USB-C ports can carry a video-out signal to external monitors, but only the Thunderbolt 4 port can output through the discrete Nvidia GPU, while the USB-C port can output through the integrated graphics. The Blade 18 also has a 2.5Gbps ethernet port.
The Blade 16 and 18 have longer chassis designs than the Blade 15 and 17, which allowed Razer to include larger batteries. The Blade 16 has a 95.2Wh battery, while the Blade 18 has a 91.7Wh battery. These models may have good battery life due to the power-efficient Nvidia RTX 40-series GPUs.
