Razer refreshes Blade 15 Advanced line at CES, teases 240Hz and AMOLED variants

Tonight NVIDIA unveiled its much anticipated mobile variant of the RTX 20 series, opening up the floodgates for new RTX 2080 laptop announcements. To little surprise, this includes Razer who has now formally announced its refreshed Blade 15 Advanced line.

We had the opportunity to get hands-on time with the Razer Blade 15 Advanced, as well as check out a few other new products on the horizon.

Blade 15 Advanced gets an important GPU upgrade

The Razer Blade 15 Advanced lineup are now offered in RTX 2060, RTX 2070 with Max-Q, and RTX 2080 with Max-Q configurations. The new RTX 20 family brings several improvements over older NVIDIA GPUs including real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, and programmable shading.

The most obvious improvement for the Blade 15 Advanced is support for the RTX 20 series, though there are at least a few other changes as well.

The Blade 15 Advanced lineup are powered by the Intel Core i7-8750H6, feature 16GB of dual-channel system memory (upgradeable to 64GB), and up to 512 GB of SSD storage. The Blade 15 Advanced feature a 15.6-inch Full HD display with a 144Hz refresh rate, though 4K variants of each GTX 20 model will also be offered.

Aesthetically the Blade 15 Advanced refresh hasn’t changed much. It’s still quite attractive, very thin at .7-inches, and has a relatively slim 4.9mm bezel around its display. There is a newly updated Windows Hello-capable IR camera at the top of the screen, alongside an HD Webcam with a dual-array microphone setup. Chrome fans will also love the keyboard, which is customizable through the Razer Synapse 3 software.

The Blade 15 Advanced isn’t expected to offer noticeably better battery life than the prior generation, though it does include some new power management options such as a mode that boost graphics performance or tunes down some things to help extend battery life.

Laptops tend to have a lot fewer ports these days, though the Razer Blade 15 Advanced is relatively solid here. You get a display port with support for up to three external monitors, an HDMI port, Thunderbolt 3, three USB 3.1 ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The Razer Blade 15 start at $2,299 and will be available from January 9th via Razer and select retailers in the US, Canada, France, UK, Germany, and China. The base model Razer Blade 15 won’t be making any changes this time, offering the same GTX 1060GPU with Max-Q at a price of $1,599.

Razer Blade 15 could see variants a 240Hz refresh and 4k OLED touch display in the future

In addition to the upcoming Razer Blade 15 models, we could also see two other variants in the future. The first is a Blade 15 with a 15.6-inch Full HD display capable of 240Hz refresh rates. The second is a Blade 15 with a 4K OLED touch display.

Razer was quick to point out these are basically prototypes, as the company is still evaluating these models for possible commercial production. In other words, they may arrive in 2019 but it’s certainly not definite.

Razer also shows us its new eSports ready display

We also took a peek at the new Razer Raptor, an esports ready monitor with AMD Radeon FreeSync technology, 1 ms Motion BLur, a 144Hz refresh rate, and a WQHD (2560×1440) resolution.

It’s a pretty nice looking display and is especially designed with cable management in mind, featuring easy access to I/O ports by tilting backward up to 90 degrees. The display offers a variety of ports including one HDMI, one DisplayPort, one USB-c with power delivery, and two USB-A 3.1 ports. There are also handy features like a picture-in-picture mode that lets you view multiple inputs at once.

The Razer Raptor gaming monitor will go on sale later in 2019 for $699.99 in the US and Canada.