It certainly appears to us that Razer has continued to improve the Blade since our first review and eliminated various weaknesses in the process. What remains unchanged is the outstanding chassis, which - as far as the build quality and the finish is concerned - could almost serve as a reference in the Windows world. Only fingerprints (which accumulate rapidly) remain an issue.

The keyboard is quite decent and we happen to really like the touchpad, which responds readily and allows the fingers to glide easily. The pointing device features two dedicated mouse buttons as well - a rarity these days. Given the compact dimensions, the Blade offers all the connections we could ask for - but while we might not care too much about the omission of the Ethernet port, we do think that the lack of an SD card reader is rather disappointing.

The Full-HD display complements the rest of the hardware, especially since the Geforce GTX 1060 is able to handle most current games at the native resolution and at high settings. Users interested in the creative side of things might want to consider the optional QHD+ display (see our review here), which not only has a higher resolution, but also better coverage of the professional color spaces and it's is easier to calibrate as well.



As far as the performance is concerned, the combination of the Intel quad-core CPU and GeForce GTX 1060 is undoubtedly a very powerful one. Although the compact notebook trails similarly-equipped gaming rigs slightly, the system consistently performs at a very high level even during prolonged periods of load.

This brings us to one of the few, but glaring disadvantages: the Razer Blade might remain utterly quite during idle or while websurfing, but during gaming, the system can get obnoxiously loud. We definitely recommend headphones when playing games.

Last but not least, the battery life is solid as well: the Blade ran for 9 hours during our WLAN test, so the laptop also earns the title as the "longest-lasting gaming notebook".



There are faster gaming laptops as well as less expensive ones out there - but not one of them manages to look as sexy as the Razer Blade.

But what is the Razer Blade exactly? A highly mobile gaming laptop or a powerful multimedia allrounder with gaming ambitions? Our automated rating system would assign the Blade an outstanding score of 89 % ("Very Good") if we classified it as a multimedia notebook. Classified as a gaming rig, however, the notebook "only" scores 87 %, which is still quite excellent. The discrepancy is caused by how the individual subscores (see our explanation here) are calculated. Given these facts, we decided to classify the Razer Blade as a multimedia notebook. Rest assured that the Blade is a decent gaming laptop as well, but all things considered, the notebook is a better suited as a highly mobile companion for creative users with high performance needs.