• 3 hours ago
Transcript
00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here. So Razer recently announced the Razer Blade 15 and
00:08the Razer Core X. So the Razer Blade 15 unit that I have here is kind of like an early
00:12unit. I haven't spent a lot of time with it, so I'm not going to do a full review on this,
00:16but my early impressions of this thing are quite positive. Razer basically took all the
00:20issues and kind of things that people didn't like about the Razer Blade 14 and tweaked
00:24it, adjusted it, and made this. It's a brand new design, and I think it's a good look.
00:29Not that the old one was ugly or anything, but I do like this design more than the old
00:32one. So the screen has been upgraded to a 15.6-inch screen instead of the 14-inch screen,
00:37so no more thick bezels. It's got these thin side bezels, and the panel's now 144Hz, so
00:41you're going to get a significantly smoother gaming experience. You've got upgradeable
00:45SSD, upgradeable RAM. There's just so much stuff in here that has been improved. It now
00:50has a vapor chamber for thermal solution, and it's running the 8th Gen 6-core Intel
00:54CPUs, along with a GTX 1060 or a GTX 1070 configuration. The trackpad up here is also
01:00significantly bigger, and they've gotten rid of the hardware buttons. They used to
01:03have these dedicated buttons for the Blade 14, but now it looks like the buttons are
01:06located underneath the trackpad surface. It's thin, it's light, and seriously, this laptop
01:11looks ripe. Okay, I will be doing a dedicated video on this in the relatively near future.
01:17The Razer Core X, this is an external GPU, and for the people that are unfamiliar with
01:22external GPUs, they're basically devices that you can connect up to your laptop to
01:25boost graphical performance. So this works with Mac and Windows. It's incredibly easy
01:30to install. It's tool-less. You open up the back, slot in your card, connect up the power
01:34cables, and then you're done. If you plug in your laptop to this box, your laptop can
01:37now go ham. Now, the performance that you get from this is obviously going to depend
01:41on the card that you put into this device, so I have a GTX 1080 in here. I tried a few
01:45different cards, and you can expect around 75-80% of the performance of a desktop-installed
01:50GPU, and there's a lot of laptops out there right now that don't have particularly strong
01:54graphics cards, like the Ultrabooks and stuff like that. Plug up one of these things, and
01:58you can play games readily. Now, it's not just for games. If you're doing video editing,
02:013D work, basically anything that's GPU-intensive can take advantage of this connection. Now,
02:06these benchmarks were done with the Razer Blade Stealth, but any kind of four-lane,
02:09Thunderbolt 3-equipped laptop should be able to get very similar performance, as long as
02:13it's cooled properly. Now, the one other thing to keep in mind is that you want to have your
02:17external monitor plugged up to the box. That's basically how you get the best performance.
02:21You can use laptop screens, but it's just a significant performance hit. When you send
02:25the signal back, it's not the end of the world. It's still going to be way better than running
02:28a device without an external GPU, but for best performance, you want to use an external
02:32monitor if you can. Fan noise is not too bad. It depends on how far away you place it and
02:37what GPU you're using, but it's a quiet fan in there. It uses a 650-watt power supply.
02:42It'll feed a full 100 watts to whatever laptop you have connected to it, and then it's got
02:46500 watts for the GPU, so you can fit some really powerful stuff in there. It can take
02:49Titans. It can take basically any card that I've ever used in my desktops can fit in here,
02:54including three-slot ones. That's one of the big advantages. This is a big box that can
02:58house some really big and powerful GPUs. If you're a MacBook user, keep in mind that you
03:03need to use an AMD card. macOS only supports AMD officially right now. There are workarounds
03:08for Nvidia cards, but if you want official support as a MacBook user, you got to go with
03:12AMD. So the pricing on this thing is what's most impressive. This thing goes for $299.
03:17The very first external GPU that I ever purchased, like the first Thunderbolt 3 equipped external
03:21GPU, was $500. Also made by Razer, the original Razer Core. This is $299. It's a much more
03:27price competitive product when you compare it to their regular Razer Core. I think for
03:31a lot of people that are using ultrabooks or just laptops that aren't very powerful,
03:35if it has a Thunderbolt 3 port, this is now a viable option for if you want to play games
03:39and stuff like that. Now it is missing two big things that other devices have, like the
03:43Razer Core and other external GPUs. It doesn't have RGB lighting, which I think for a lot
03:47of people, they don't care about that stuff. It is missing that, and it is also missing
03:51ports. So this has no extra ports, so if you have any peripherals, you have to connect
03:54it to the laptop directly. And that basically wraps it up. The Razer Core X and the Razer
03:59Blade 15. Obviously, this wasn't a review of this device. I'll be doing a full review
04:03of it very soon, so stay tuned. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you
04:06liked it, subs if you loved it. I'll see you guys next time.