2015 or 2016 14 inch Razer Blade?

The 2015 & 2016 Razer blade models you mentioned differ in three major areas:

1). The 2015 model is a non-touch matte 1080p IPS display. The 2016 model is a glossy touch-enabled 1800p IGZO display.

The difference in screens mostly comes down to preference of glossy vs matte. Image quality , color accuracy, brightness, battery life, etc are close enough between the two screen types that it won't matter to non-professionals. You're going to be gaming at 1080p, so there isn't much of a difference in screen resolution. The 1800p touchscreen model does give you added sharpness in Windows applications, at the expense of using DPI scaling.

2). The 2016 model is an Intel Skylake platform, which brings DDR4 RAM, M.2 NVMe, and Thunderbolt 3 to the table.

Out of that, the only thing that matters is thunderbolt 3. Ddr4 and NVMe support ate nice-to-have, but don't yield any real-world performance differences.

3). Minor differences, such as slightly reduced weight, and newly designed cooling / heatsink system on the 2016 model.

I wouldn't worry about the difference between 8GB / 16GB RAM. Unless you're running some very specific workloads (VMs, databases, professional video / photo editing), the extra RAM won't make any difference. You're not going to even use a full 8GB, so going out of your way to specifically buy 16GB won't matter.

The point of a Razer Blade 14 is that it is a very capable gaming machine on its own, with a Geforce 970M GPU in it. If you're planning on using an eGPU, I'd actually recommend you consider two points.

First, what are you hoping to get from an eGPU that the onboard Geforce 970M won't give you? Second, if you're relying on the eGPU to provide gaming horsepower, then do you even need the 970M at all? Would you be better-served with a different laptop, than going out of your way to spend $1000+ premium for a Razer Blade 14 2016 model, Razer Core eGPU dock, and a video card? A $2000 Razer Blade 14 is a lot of cash to drop on a laptop that you're just going to hook up to an eGPU anyway.

Having said all of that, I'd personally go with the 2015 FHD model. I'd consider the screen to be superior over the 1800p touchscreen model because of its matte finish (though this comes down to personal preference). It looks like Razer will be discontinuing 1080p variants of the Razer Blade moving forward. And the $1600 price tag is an absolute steal for what you are getting.

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

Let's block ads! (Why?)

2015 or 2016 14 inch Razer Blade?