Razer Blade 17 just got a lot more powerful with 11th-gen Core i9 CPU and Nvidia RTX 3080

Blade 17 has been suitably sharpened

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Razerhas revealed its new Blade 17, equipping thegaming laptopwith Intel’s 11th-gen CPUs and beefing things up on the GPU front with Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series graphics cards.

The refreshed Blade 17 provides the ability to haveIntel’s Core i9-11900H, which Razer notes is the beefiest processor ever to be offered with the machine, an 8-core (16-thread) chip capable of Turbo up to 4.9GHz. Alternatively, the Core i7-11800H can be specified instead.

Up to anNvidia RTX 3080can be chosen when it comes to the discrete graphics card, and Razer has also made the decision to introduce a fingerprint-resistive coating with the Blade 17. That means fingerprint smudges on the chassis should be a thing of the past (or at least a much-reduced phenomenon).

The 17.3-inch display can be specced up to a4Ktouchscreen, or lesser resolutions with faster refresh rates that gamers will most likely plump for: 1440p or 1080p, with the latter hitting 360Hz. Furthermore, there’s faster storage (a 1TB SSD) and RAM provided (with 16GB and 32GB options), along with Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.

Razer further notes the inclusion of a better 1080p webcam, with more mics (four, rather than two). There are also four (upward-firing) speakers with this laptop, again doubling things up to provide meatier sound.

Vapor caper

The gaming laptop’s touchpad has been graced with palm rejection improvements, and Razer’s vapor chamber cooling has been tweaked to be more efficient, and help to keep a lid on the temperatures of those powerful components.

Note that the existing Blade 15 Base model has also been updated so it can now be loaded with a Core i7-11800H CPU (and equipped with up to anRTX 3070GPU).

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The Blade 15 Base is priced from £1,699.99 or $1,799.99, and the new Razer Blade 17 starts at £2,399.99 or $2,399.99, with both now up for pre-order atRazer’s site.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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