There’s buzz in the air about OLED laptops at CES 2019. Razer has joined in on the hype, stating its interest in the display technology. More than that, the company brought two future concepts for the 15-inch Razer Blade. One featured a 4K OLED screen, and the other a 240Hz refresh rate.
The success of both display technologies depends highly on the success of Nvidia’s mobile RTX GPUs. 240Hz might feel like overkill now, especially for a thin-and-light gaming laptop like the Razer Blade. The 4K OLED screen, on the other hand, seems tailored to content creators and those with more varied use cases other than just gaming. The first OLED laptops were shown off three years ago, only to have completely dropped off the map. But now, it seems as if the supply chain and demand might be ready for the advanced display technology to start popping up again.
Razer Blade Advanced Model introduces Nvidia RTX 20-series
While there’s plenty of excitement for these future Razer Blade laptops, the company is also updating its current lineup of devices with the Razer Blade “Advanced Model.” Based on the Nvidia RTX 20-series graphics cards, these new gaming laptops will show off advanced features like ray tracing and programmable shading. The Razer Blade Advanced Model can be configured with the RTX 2060, the RTX 2070 Max-Q, or the RTX 2080 Max-Q. These new cards sit alongside the six-core Core i7-8750H and are cooled by the company’s patented vapor chamber cooling.
More CES 2019 coverage
- Our CES 2019 Hub: The latest news, hands-on reviews, and more
- Razer Raptor 27 hands-on review
- Acer Swift 7 dazzles with near-borderless touch display, weighs under two pounds
- HP Omen 15 (2019) gaming laptop: Our hands-on review
The basic Razer Blade, which uses GTX 1060 graphics and an older thermal system, will still be available starting at $1,600. All models can be configured up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of PCIe NVMe SSD storage.
1080p 144Hz and 4K 60Hz models will still be offered, the latter of which is touchscreen and claims to achieve 100 percent in the Adobe RGB color space. The Advanced Model with either the RTX 2060 or 2070 will also be available in the Mercury White colorway.
Here’s the kicker: The Razer Blade Advanced Model starts at $2,300. Included in that is the RTX 2060, a 256GB SSD, 16GB of RAM, and a 1080p 60Hz display. For reference, that’s $400 more than the last year’s GTX 1060 configuration.
It will be available for sale starting on January 29 from Razer’s website.