Is the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition actually worth four grand?
Best answer: The Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition is a niche tool that most laptop buyers simply don’t need. However, for the right buyer in the professional or creative space, the price is perfectly reasonable, with the GPU eating up most of the asking price. Most people would be alright with the regular Razer Blade 15.
For one, the Blade 15 Studio Edition comes with a 4K OLED touch display as standard, and to ensure its the best it can be for the target audience, it’s factory calibrated and supports 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut.
The big upgrade for the Studio Edition, though, is the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 GPU, which is also the most expensive bit of equipment inside. It’s not the same as the desktop version of the RTX Quadro 5000, but for context, that GPU alone for a desktop workstation costs in excess of $2,000, and its performance isn’t a massive amount higher than the mobile version.
Why so expensive? Well, it’s got quite the spec list. The Quadro RTX 5000 comes with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 3072 Cuda cores, a peak performance of 9TF, and 48 ray tracing cores. Despite the performance, power draw is low, and the Blade 15 Studio is powered by just a regular old 270W power brick.
NVIDIA has a good comparison chart detailing the key specs of the Quadro RTX 5000 compared to its other Quadro laptop GPUs. Essentially the RTX Quadro 5000 is tailored at complex applications and intensive workloads such as video rendering, delivering extraordinary performance to workflows that need this kind of power.
Compared to a MacBook Pro…
It’s not a simple apples to apples comparison, but creators and professional buyers have flocked to the expensive MacBook Pro for years, seemingly ignoring the number of dollars needed to be laid down.
However, if you put the $4,000 Blade 15 Studio Edition next to it, suddenly the price doesn’t look so astronomical. In fact, the only weaker point on a hardware front is the lack of a Core i9 option for the CPU on the Blade 15 Studio.
Just don’t get it for gaming
NVIDIA allows you to install the Geforce gaming drivers on Quadro GPUs like this, just as you can install Studio drivers on some Geforce gaming GPUs. Nevertheless, if gaming is the priority, the regular Blade 15 is a smarter choice.
There are a range of GPUs and display options to choose from, with the GTX 1660 Ti at the bottom end, a sweet spot RTX 2060 in the middle, and an RTX 2080 at the highest end, along with a 4K OLED display. Each of these is significantly less expensive than the Blade Studio.
Better for gamers
Razer Blade 15
The better choice for gamers
If you’re a gamer first then the regular Razer Blade 15 will be the smarter choice. It’s still extremely powerful and will cost you an awful lot less.