Razer Blade 16 and 18 gaming laptop refreshes focus on enhancing displays over specs

Razer announced the refresh of two Razer Blade series gaming laptops, the Razer Blade 16 and 18, which will be fully unveiled during CES 2024.

According to Razer, the Razer Blade 16 is the first 16-inch OLED display with a 240Hz refresh rate and a 0.2ms response time. It’s also purported to be the world’s first VESA Certified ClearMR 11000 laptop which, combined with its 1M:1 contrast ratio and QHD+ (2560×1600) resolution, improves picture clarity and sharpness.

There’s also the Razer Blade 18, which Razer claims to be the world’s first 4K 165Hz 18-inch display, a pretty impressive feat considering the much higher resolution that display is outputting. It also features a 3ms response time and Nvidia G-Sync support, as well as a 100% DCI-P3 color gamut. The display offers a fluid gameplay experience and doubles as a solid screen for creatives, thanks to its high color accuracy.

At this time Razer hasn’t released any pricing, a release date, or availability, as it will most likely be revealed during CES 2024 itself. We can expect MSRP to be quite expensive, especially since these are the desktop replacement models that will most likely feature the current highest specs possible.

Razer is putting display first

Considering that we still don’t know what Nvidia will be offering in terms of graphics cards, other than the rumored RTX Super refreshes, the focus this time around for the new Razer Blade laptops is on display enhancements, rather than the more obvious improvements with raising the bar on specs and performance.

And if that turns out to be the case, we don’t know how much more performance can be squeezed out of the Super versions of the RTX 4070, 4070 Ti, and 4080, or any other factors that could interfere with Razer Blade production (if integration with the Super series could have delayed the Blade 16 and 18 refresh, etc.). So focusing on upgrading the displays to better handle the more advanced GPUs is a solid way to go.

It’s also most likely to fit in with the upcoming Intel Ultra Core CPUs, which would benefit from the display boost. But that hasn’t been mentioned by the manufacturer either, which is also interesting considering that Intel announced those back in December 2023.

It’ll be interesting to see the other Razer Blade laptops like the Razer Blade 14 and 15 once they’re revealed later in 2024. Also, if the 16 and 18 aren’t equipped with the Super series GPUs or the Ultra Core CPUs now, will there be other models released in 2024 that feature those specs?

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