The latest model Razer Blade 15 Base has been heavily discounted on Amazon, dropping from £2049 to £1499 in a matter of weeks. Today saw another drop of £100, with the laptop now costing just £1399 – an outstanding price for a svelte RTX 3070 laptop with a 2560×1440 165Hz display, 10th-gen Core i7 processor and 512GB of NVMe SSD storage.
The Razer Blade 15 has long been one of the most desirable gaming laptops, thanks to its slim chassis and high-end components, so today’s discount on the 2021 Base model to a historic low is newsworthy indeed. The same specification is being sold at the Razer Store for its original price of £2049 too, making this some £650 cheaper.
Beyond the size of the discount, is the Blade 15 Base actually worth buying? The reviews I’ve read have been universally positive, with most outlets praising the upgraded 1440p 165Hz as a big step forward over the usual 1080p resolution we see at this screen size.
With an RTX 3070 on board, rated for a TGP of 95W, you’ll also have enough power to run games at that resolution too. Of course, the RTX 3070 mobile isn’t going to be as powerful as a full-fat desktop graphics card, which has the advantage of more than twice the power and a much bigger cooler, but you can still take advantage of second-gen RT cores and third-gen Tensor cores for excellent performance in RT and DLSS titles.
Elsewhere, the spec here is pretty strong. The 10th-gen Core i7 remains a potent processor, even if not quite as exciting as the AMD Ryzen 5000 chips in the Blade 14, and 16GB of dual-channel RAM and 512GB of NVMe SSD storage means you won’t run into any limitations there. There’s even a free NVMe M.2 slot in the Blade 15 Base, so you could upgrade the total storage easily down the line.
Beyond just gaming, the high-end specs mean this is a great performer in demanding tasks like 3D rendering and video transcoding, while still being quite compact at just 2 kilograms and 14mm thick. That means you can easily pop this laptop into a bag for working on the go, or taking over to a friend’s house, which is something you won’t want to do as often with an inch-thick desktop replacement laptop (I speak from experience here!).
The RGB-backlit keyboard and roomy glass trackpad are highly rated, and the port selection is reasonable too – two USB-C (one Thunderbolt 3), two full-size USB-A, gigabit ethernet, 3.5mm and HDMI 2.1. The only thing you’re really missing here is an SD card reader, but that’s easily added back in with a dongle if you need it.
So yeah – portable, powerful, stylish, and – for today only! – awesome value too. If you’re in the market for this kind of ultralight gaming laptop, I’d say that I haven’t seen many better deals than this Blade 15 at £600 off!