Razer Blade 15 2022 vs. Blade 15 2018: Four years of accumulating improvements

The current Blade 15 design launched in 2018 with Intel 8th gen CPUs and Nvidia Pascal GPUs. Though there have been minor physical changes year-over-year, the overall visual design has remained essentially identical since its original 2018 debut. Internally, however, the performance upgrades have been dramatic without needing to change anything significant about the chassis to accommodate.

Our benchmarks below compare 2018 model with the Core i7-8750H CPU and GTX 1070 Max-Q GPU to the 2022 model with Core i7-12800H CPU and RTX 3080 Ti GPU the show 2x to 2.5x faster multi-thread performance, 1.5x faster single-thread performance, 2x to 2.5x faster graphics performance, 2x to 2.5x faster WLAN performance, and 2x faster SSD performance. The IPS display sees huge upgrades across the board as well in terms of resolution, response times, refresh rate, and colors for a noticeably better visual experience.

The best part about the upgrades above is that they don't come at the cost of warmer core temperatures or louder fans. In other words, the 2022 model doesn't need to run any hotter or louder than the original model four years ago despite the performance benefits.

There is one characteristic in particular that has actually gotten worse year-over-year, however. Power consumption has been steadily increasing to the point where gaming on the 2022 model will demand about 20 percent more power than on the original 2018 model. In fact, Razer had to up the size and capacity of the power brick from 200 W to 230 W over the years to accommodate the increasingly power-hungry internals. Battery capacity remains fixed at 80 Wh between the two models which, when coupled with the overall higher power consumption, means slightly shorter runtimes on the 2022 model.

The performance benefits are nonetheless significant relative to the small uptick in power consumption. If you're in the market for a Blade 15, then it may be worth considering the later models instead of an older one even though they may all look very similar.