Blade 17 Gaming Laptop: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti - 12th Gen Intel 14-Core i9 CPU - 17.3" 4K 144Hz - 32GB DDR5 RAM - 1TB PCIe SSD - Windows 11 - Chroma RGB - Thunderbolt 4 - SD Card Reader

So I debated for months about what laptop to get to replace my trusty surface book 2. I simply could not find something that hit all the points that it had but I narrowed my search down to the razer 17 (4k 3080ti), the MSI z17 (3080ti), and the Gigabyte AERO 17 (3080ti). The MSI and Gigabyte had the downside of only being 90w and 105w gpus respectively. The MSI brought touch screen that I desperately wanted but lost out because it only ran at 1440p and I did not want to step down in resolution. So that left the Gigabyte in the running and it is significantly less expensive but lost out because they dropped all the ports off the laptop like some fruity company I know of. So we had the winner of the Razer from the selection. I also knew that I would be upgrading the unit right out of the gate as the storage and ram would need to be bumped up to better cover my software needs. So I booted the laptop to make sure that everything was working and then popped the cover off to swap the ram for a 64GB kit from Kingston (KF548S38IBK2-64) and a 4TB ssd from sabrent. The cover had a bit of a learning curve as you needed to slide it to the front of the laptop to get it to lift off but otherwise was easy to get into. I was disappointed to find a tamper seal on the boot ssd but it did not say warranty void so I will not dock it too hard here. I had some difficulty with the OS clone so I did a clean install from the recovery media from razers webpage (only accessible after you register the laptop). Everything came up and worked no problems when working from the recovery media (I do not recommend a truly clean windows install as there is no page to pull razers software and drivers from). The laptop is a joy to work with as it has tons of power ontap and after the upgrades the ability to replace my desktop in a pinch.CPUThe new i9 cores are shockingly fast and chew through both lightly and heavily threaded workloads and under the right conditions outpace my old 1950x threadripper. An older cpu to be sure but it still blows my mind that a laptop could keep pace with a hedt processor.GPUWhere this laptop really sets itself apart is in the gpu department where its higher power limit lets it stretch its legs pushing some titles in 4k at decent settings. I have also given it a shake at 8k but found that the vram buffer is on the very edge of working even in older titles. An example would be skyrim working at stock maxed settings but running out of memory once I enabled an enb.Thermals/NoiseExperiments aside the laptop will get very loud if you select anything other then the quiet mode. The laptop keeps thermals under control though so I can't knock it much here.BatteryExpect to be married to the power cord for almost any task as the system sucks down power at an alarming rate. I think some of this is a combo of the high refresh rate screen and the fact that the dedicated gpu is not really disabled in optimus mode but just in a low power state. Do note that the power brick gets quite warm under normal loads and downright hot under stress loads. I strongly recommend keeping it well ventilated and off cloth surfaces.ScreenThe screen was a pleasant surprise for me as it was brighter than the reviews I read lead me to believe. Note it is not a photon cannon but it meets or exceeds the outgoing surface book 2. One thing that I wish it had here was an HDR rated panel. I would give up the high refresh rate for that in a heartbeat but I know that I am in the minority here. Colors are good and I feel that I can edit content on it without having to worry about being terribly inaccurate.KeyboardI have to give this a meh rating as it is just so so at best. The keys are mushy and the layout is somehow off a bit for me. I am guessing that I will get used to it but off the bat I find I am getting more errors than normal when typing. The chroma colors are fantastic though and I was able to setup a matching color scheme to my desktop. The colors are bright and vivid so A+ there.TrackpadThis one surprised me as everyone raves about this track pad but I found the surface book despite its smaller size was better. It has a wedge click that misses my input frequently and its palm rejection is mediocre as I frequently would have the cursor move while I was trying to type.Port selectionThis was a selling point for me and it does not disappoint. The usb A ports are plentiful and the thunderbolt ports are fast. The 2.5G Ethernet is a nice touch though I can't test this as my network is 1G or 10G with no ability to run the interim steps (I will update this if I get a different switch.). The HDMI is 2.1 so you get the full bandwidth to run all the way up to 8k 60hz. Wifi runs the new 6e standard and with a supported network pulls nearly gigabit speeds. Finally the sd card slot is on point reading at my cards rated speeds.Build qualityExceptional fit and finish here. Everything is sturdy and I was not found wanting here coming from the exceptional surface book.Final thoughtsI love this laptop for everything it is capable of doing. It is not a true workstation replacement but no laptop will be able to reach hedt levels. Where this laptop shines is in that space in-between where I can't haul my workstation but still need to edit a video or stitch some images together. I can render a h265 video without proxies on this and with the ram upgrade I can stitch raw files together with confidence. Also it can game and game well but don't expect miracles here as while it has the 3080ti name it is still a notebook gpu so it struggles at 4k in newer titles. The deep vram buffer is a massive boon for work but don't expect to make much use of it in games. If you are looking for a gaming laptop I would look at the 1440p units as it is a more obtainable resolution. For the "creative" that games on occasion I think you will be hard pressed to find a better laptop that combines all of these specs in this form factor.

Both USB-C Display ports do not work for Nvidia drivers > 512.15, Razer knows about this for more than 2 months and yet there is no fix. I used apps that require drivers in the 516.xx or greater range, so rolling back to 512.15 is not an option. I need more than 1 external monitor for my work, without the display ports working this is not possible. Customer support from Razer is terrible. I had the model with the 3080ti in it, I am returning it.