The first major wave of laptops with OLED displays is here, and the results are stunning. The Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition OLED ($3,299 as tested) marries the cutting-edge panel technology to the excellent design of Razer's flagship 2019 laptop to head-turning effect. The screen is a joy, shining with incredibly vibrant colors and deep blacks. You can consume beautiful 4K content, and the high-powered components enable gaming at maximum settings. It's pricey, but it's hard to find a gaming laptop sleeker, more portable, and more satisfying to use, with the OLED screen only elevating the experience. Like the non-OLED version of this line, it garners our Editors' Choice, and this machine feels like luxury. You can find better dollars-for-frame-rates values for performance, so don't break the bank just to get the screen. But if you can afford it, get it: You'll fall in love.
Don't Mess With a Winning Design
The physical features of this laptop, apart from the display, are identical to those of the Blade 15 Advanced Model we reviewed earlier this year. As such, I won't spend much time recapping the Blade 15's high points—head over to the previous review for details on the build and feature set.
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Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model (2019)
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A short summary, though? This is one of the best, if not the best, designed gaming laptops on the market. The metal body has an ultra-premium look and feel, while still being thin and relatively light. The 4K OLED version does weigh slightly more than the others, at 4.87 pounds, but it's not significant enough a weight boost to kick it up to a higher weight class. If you considered the Blade 15 Advanced to be portable enough for your needs before, it should be now too. All of the other physical features, like its port selection and per-key backlighting, remain intact.
Before I get to the new display, which will be the bulk of this review, let's touch on the internal changes. Unlike the overall design, the component offerings have been altered, namely the CPU. This mid-2019 refresh is bringing Intel's 9th Generation processors to the party, with the Core i7-9750H, specifically, used in all five units of the Advanced Model. (At this writing, a whole smorgasbord of 10th Generation Intel Core chips had just been announced, but no H-series ones.) This is up from the 8th Generation silicon, the Core i7-8750H, in the unit we reviewed last.
The CPU is the big change, but there are some other alterations. Our 4K OLED configuration also comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q graphics chip, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD for $3,299. Those parts were all options previously, but Razer's less-expensive Blade 15 Advanced Models are also based around a new screen.
While it's not a 4K OLED, all four other models use a full HD (1080p) display with a 240Hz maximum refresh rate, which is up from 144Hz. This blistering top refresh rate will only matter for some competitive multiplayer titles (and to really hit the limit, you may have to turn some settings down), but it's an added bonus for serious multiplayer buffs and esports enthusiasts. The 4K OLED display, in contrast, caps out at a pedestrian 60Hz, the typical rate for any mainstream laptop screen.
The models without the OLED screen have a GeForce RTX 2080 or 2070 Max-Q GPU, and 256GB or 512GB of storage, and all come with 16GB of memory. There's also a Mercury White color option in one SKU, which looks slick, but it will cost you a $50 premium over the black version with the same components. These other non-OLED-equipped models range from a starting price of $2,399 (with an RTX 2070 and a 256GB SSD) to $2,999 (the model just below ours, which is the only other unit with an RTX 2080).
Display Deep Dive: It's All About That Screen
The new display is the star of this show, and in short, it looks absolutely stellar. What was already a nice display has been transformed into among the best screens you can get on a laptop, thanks to this Samsung-developed OLED panel. The first OLED laptops were just becoming available for review around the time this review is being written, and it's worth noting that all of these manufacturers are using this same 15.6-inch Samsung panel—the various laptop vendors are not producing or sourcing their own, at least for the time being.
First, a little bit of screen-tech background. LED-lit LCD screens use a white backlight that's passed through a fast filter, which tints the light to provide the correct color. In somewhat simple terms, OLED screens (the acronym stands for "organic light-emitting diode") use a completely different display paradigm: a self-emissive organic compound, allowing each pixel in the panel to produce its own light when current is applied.
That's the main difference from LCD screens, and what enables them to produce extra-brilliant colors and deep blacks. To display black, that area of the screen stops producing any light, so it is truly displaying nothing, which in turn provides better contrast and "truer" blacks than simply filtering out an ever-present LED backlight. All of this also allows the panels to be more efficient, and thus thinner. That doesn't come into play with laptops as dramatically as with TVs; many OLED TVs are nearly razor-thin.
But back to how great it looks. I can describe it, but OLED is the kind of thing that you really have to experience for yourself, in person. Trying to approximate it here through a non-OLED panel in images or videos is fruitless. The colors seem to pop off the screen, looking almost impossibly vibrant, and more realistic than if you just cranked up the saturation. The blacks are deep and true, looking like you can fall into their depths if you're not careful. The quality of black areas creates a stunning contrast with the brightness of the colors. It makes you want to stare at it just to soak it in.
On this laptop, the 4K resolution definitely helps matters, as everything is super-sharp. (Indeed, you'll want to make sure that text scaling is turned up, or all text will appear way too small.) The screen also features touch technology, which proves useful at times, though I find myself hesitant to smudge up such a pretty display with my fingertips. Given the touch capability, this panel has the expected glossy glass finish, which isn't everyone's favorite. But, boy, with its help, does that picture ever pop.
As for the specific claims about this screen, Razer says it boasts 100 percent coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, and 100 percent of the DCI-P3 spectrum. Big claims, certainly, and while it looks great to the eye, we need some objective data.
So, I gathered the following results using the same Klein K10-A meter and CalMAN Ultimate software we use for testing monitors. First up, its coverage of the widely used sRGB color space...
Since the sRGB spectrum is the common gamut for internet content, it's important to be able to color-match accurately for the many screens out there. A 98 percent coverage is strong, even if it doesn't quite hit the 100 percent claim, but coming that close is still a good result.
On to the next gamut...
The Blade 15 OLED came through with 98.1 percent Adobe RGB coverage, as shown in the chart above. That's not quite the 100 percent claimed, but it's realistically extremely difficult to hit such heights on this wide gamut. High-end gaming monitors like the Acer Predator XB3 (which came in at 90.1 percent) don't even usually hit that mark, so know that this is one of the most color-accurate screens available, especially on a laptop.
Finally, I tested Razer's claim of 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage:
DCI-P3 is most useful for film and video professionals, so a solid 94.5 percent result should be pleasing to those users. It's not full coverage, however, so depending on how precise your work needs to be, that may not be quite enough.
As for color accuracy, Razer claims the screen's "DeltaE" or "dE" score—the value that represents color accuracy—is a mere 0.39. The closer the score is to zero, the more color accurate the screen is, since it's a measure of variation between what's being displayed on the screen and the "true" color. We're still developing our color-accuracy-testing methodology to be as precise as possible with OLED displays in particular, and will update you with our own dE score for this laptop when we have one. For now, Razer's claimed score is incredibly good, if true, and should be music to the ears of creatives who need super-accurate displays for image and photo work.
Finally, the display demonstrated high luminance, at 447 nits. That matches the eye test of it being quite a bright screen, and on paper betters even the Asus ProArt PA34VC Professional Curved Monitor, a creative professional display that pushed 322 nits.
The main takeaway is that this is a plenty viable display for creative professionals. It looks fantastic, and generally has high color gamut coverage. Coverage is not quite at 100 percent by our measurements, so it may not be the best fit for every last creative professional out there, if that applies to you. For now, we can't make our own claims about the color accuracy, but the claimed capability is quite high.
Testing the Blade: Still a Top Performer
For performance comparisons, I've put together a list of gaming laptops that share power and/or price tiers with the Blade 15 OLED. Our unit is maxed out, so these are, generally, also pricey laptops. Still, it's worth noting that the OLED version of the Blade 15 is the most expensive laptop on this list, between the display and the top-tier GPU. Below you can see their names and core components...
The standout inclusion is the MSI GS65 Stealth, because it's not quite as powerful. This system is our Editors' Choice for midrange gaming laptops, priced at just $1,699 as tested, but it's useful here to demonstrate the power gap, as well as its bang for buck. The rest of the table includes the early 2019 version of the Blade 15 ($2,599.99 as tested), with its 8th Generation processor and step-down GPU, as well as the competitive Acer Predator Triton 500 ($2,499.99 as tested), which gave the Blade 15 a run for its money for the Editors' Choice honor. Finally, there's the Alienware m15 OLED ($2,779.99 as tested), the only other gaming laptop with an OLED screen we've reviewed so far.
Productivity and Storage Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet use, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a specialized Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the PC's boot drive.
The speedy new processor didn't have a ton of room to stretch its legs (and cores) on PCMark 10, but it posted a good result nonetheless. The previous-generation version on the non-OLED Blade 15 edged it very slightly, as did the GS65's matching CPU, but it's nothing to worry about. All of these scores represent a quick processor that will be able to handle daily home and office tasks with ease. The same goes for the PCMark 8 Storage results, though the OLED Blade 15 did top the charts on this one (tied, unsurprisingly, with the other Blade system). This group of SSDs will have your games loading quickly, and your PC booting within a few seconds.
Media Processing and Creation Tests
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time. This stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters. (Systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.)
The Blade 15 OLED also did well on these tests, even if it didn't stand out from the pack. (There's a lot of CPU parity among these systems.) Its Cinebench score did show some improvement over some 8th Generation CPUs, but the Alienware m15 still won out. The Photoshop results were even more clustered. There isn't much variation among these laptops in general on the media tests: All are faster than your average laptop, capable of crunching through these tasks moderately well, but short of a true workstation. The 9th Generation processor, overall, doesn't make a marked difference for these tests.
Synthetic Graphics Tests
Next up: UL's 3DMark suite. 3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
The following chart is another synthetic graphics test, this one from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's done in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, whose different 3D workload scenario presents a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
Unlike the generational CPU uptick, the GPU upgrade made a big difference. The Blade 15 OLED and its RTX 2080 Max-Q powered past the competition on these synthetic tests. The Triton 500 and its matching GPU were much closer than the rest but still couldn't quite match the Blade 15 OLED. There's a clear bump up over the RTX 2070 Max-Q, but it's not a wholly different performance tier if you have a limited budget. Does the same hold true for the real game benchmarks? On to the next results.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it's hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern AAA titles with built-in benchmark schemes. These tests are run at 1080p on both the moderate and maximum graphics-quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5; Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider) to judge performance for a given laptop. Far Cry 5 is DirectX 11-based, while Rise of the Tomb Raider can be flipped to DX12, which we do for that benchmark.
This laptop's native resolution is 4K, but the above were all tested in full HD for level comparisons with the other laptops here. The Blade 15 OLED and its RTX 2080 Max-Q top the charts on these tests, by a slim margin over the Triton 500 with the same GPU. With the non-Max-Q versions of these GPUs, I'd expect more of a gap between the RTX 2080 and 2070, but the limited thermal space means the potential is capped. You can see, as a result, that the Alienware's RTX 2070 Max-Q is hot on the Blade 15 OLED's tail. In most cases, we've found the extra cost of the RTX 2080 over the RTX 2070 in laptops doesn't quite scale with the benefit it brings, but it does eke you out a few extra frames.
Either way, you're getting strong frame rates—way over 60fps—in big-budget games with this laptop. Yes, the screen caps out at 60Hz, so you don't get the benefit of sustained frame rates greater than 60fps, but the added headroom lets you lock in at 60fps without many dips.
Obviously, changing the resolution to native 4K was much more demanding. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider drop to 39fps and 41fps, respectively, when running at maximum settings in 4K. Sub-60fps isn't too appealing, so you'll likely want to crank the resolution down to at least 1440p for smoother frame rates.
Battery Rundown Test, Part One
Finally, the battery-life testing. After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video-rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in Airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
Despite the 4K resolution, OLED technology, and powerful GPU, the Blade 15 OLED lasted a respectable amount of time. Nearly seven hours is a solid result for desktop-replacement laptops, and even more so for a gaming system. It lasted even longer than the non-OLED Blade 15, despite the more demanding resolution.
This may have to do with a particular aspect of OLED, which is generally a positive. When an OLED screen is displaying black on some or all of the screen, the pixels on those portions of the display are turned completely off. Because of that, the screen should use less power when showing black-dominant images, or videos with more black segments. This also holds true even if the scene or image is not completely black, just dark, because the pixels are still using less power.
To leverage this OLED trait, Razer even ships the system with Windows 10's Dark mode turned on, so no more juice than necessary is spent displaying your windows, folders, and taskbar. Note that our particular video file has numerous dark scenes (in addition to cinematic black bars along the top and bottom), but to my eye, no more than most. These should simply add up to greater power savings through the course of any average movie or video.
Battery Rundown Test, Part Two: Some Further Experiments
To further examine the effect of this phenomenon on battery life, I added a few different layers to our battery test, running multiple permutations of the standard settings.
OLED screens look best at full brightness, so, to start, I ran our same battery test at 100 percent brightness, versus our usual 50 percent. This dropped the battery life from 8:32 to 7:30, chopping about an hour off its lifespan. That's surprisingly good, frankly, and means you still get a fairly long runtime off the charger if you choose to enjoy the beautiful screen at maximum brightness.
My other battery runs got a bit more granular. In one run, I kept our base test settings, but split the screen 50/50 with the video playing on one side and the Windows 10 File Explorer opened to My Documents on the other. I did this with Dark mode on and Dark mode off, so we could see the effects of powering (or not powering) lots of bright white pixels, and ran each of those tests at 50 percent and 100 percent brightness.
The impact on the battery life was easily observable—and played out exactly how I theorized it might. Here are all of the results for comparison...
There are a bunch of takeaways here, but they tell an easily understandable story. It takes more power to run at full brightness, of course, but the drop on the standard test wasn't too drastic, at just one hour. From there, things get interesting. Splitting the screen down the middle—with half showing the video and half showing My Documents in light mode—made a fairly big impact on battery life, dropping almost two hours from the baseline. That was only exacerbated when pumped up to 100 percent brightness, taking lots more juice to power the white portion of the screen at full luminance. It ran for just 4:42, significantly cutting into your off-charger time.
As you can see, the battery fared much better on the same 50/50 split but with Dark mode, proving that the white areas and colored lighting really eat up more battery life than lots of black. My Documents in Dark mode is not fully black, but with the grey-black background color and black window bars, the pixels are using much less power. Interestingly, ramping up the brightness with this setup didn't degrade the battery much. The battery life only dropped by 12 minutes when going from 50 percent to 100 percent brightness at a 50/50 split. In light mode, though, that drop was big: from 6:41 to 4:42. This makes sense, because the black pixels are essentially off, and the others showing dark colors aren't using much energy. Making them "brighter" when they are already showing a dark color has very little effect.
Razer shipping the system in Dark mode makes a measurable difference to how long your system can last. It may feel a little stressful to think you need to monitor how much black or dark space is being displayed on your screen at any one time, but I wouldn't obsess over it. Generally, keeping Dark mode on (or switching to it when you're going to be using your system off the charger) should make enough of a difference. But you may want to keep that desktop wallpaper dark!
A Screen Gem
We already knew the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model was an excellent laptop. Adding newer internals and one of the best screens you can buy only improves that proposition. The screen makes you want to find something graphically engaging to do on it, just to keep looking at it—it really is that nice.
Now, of course, a 4K native resolution isn't the best fit for gaming on a laptop, given the muscle it demands. But you have other, lesser resolution options to switch to while playing, and you can enjoy and create content in 4K when you're not. For those creators, the screen offers largely strong color coverage, and only the most discerning users should mind the just-shy-of-100-percent coverage. If you're not a user who needs the utmost precision, the screen will greatly enhance your enjoyment of this laptop.
I wouldn't tell everyone to get the OLED Blade 15 over the non-OLED one, simply because it's so expensive and most users don't need 4K. But if it's within your means, you have our—and our eyes'—strongest recommendation.
Razer's Blade 15 Advanced Model was always envy-inducing, and the OLED-screen version makes it even more so. It's pricey, even for a gaming laptop, but if you can afford it, you'll find it sleek, satisfying, and powerful.
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