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Synthetic Benchmarks
Comparison Products
The Blade we reviewed came with an Intel Core i7-8750H, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with Max-Q Design, 16GB of DDR4-2667 memory and a 512GB M.2 SSD.
For an apples-to-apples comparison, there’s the Digital Storm Equinox. Like our Blade, it comes equipped with an i7-8750H and a GTX 1070 Max-Q. Conversely, it has 16GB of DDR4-2400 memory and a 500GB M.2 SSD. It also has a 15.6-inch FHD IPS screen with a 144Hz refresh rate, but it doesn’t come with G-Sync.
The highest end system in our roundup is the Acer Predator Triton 700. It features a GTX 1080 Max-Q, a Core i7-7700HQ, 32GB of DDR4-2400 memory and a 512GB M.2 SSD. Its display is also a 15.6-inch FHD matte IPS screen with G-Sync. At $2,800, it’s not too far off from the Blade, but the Max-Q GTX 1080 will give it an edge in certain benchmarks.
Our lowest end laptop is another representative from Acer, the Predator Helios 300. It’s equipped with an i7-7700HQ, a GTX 1060, 16GB of DDR4-2400 memory and a 256GB M.2 SSD. We often use the Helios 300 in our comparisons because of its excellent value-to-performance ratio.
3DMark
3DMark features a handful of graphically demanding benchmarks. The Blade delivers great performance, rivaling the Equinox in graphics tests. However, the Equinox exhibits a slight lead over the Blade, while Razer’s laptop demonstrates slightly more GPU performance.
Cinebench R15
On the Cinebench R15 benchmark, the Equinox boasts an 8 percent improvement in multi-core rendering over the Blade. However, he Blade still outperforms the Kaby Lake laptops in multi-core rendering by about 33 percent on average.
CompuBench
Compubench has a platform-based Video Processing test and a GPU-bound Bitcoin Mining test.
In GPU-focused tests, the Blade loses its advantage. In particular, Acer Predator Triton 700 outscores it by about 34 percent.
IOMeter
We perform an IOmeter test on each laptop’s primary drive to measure basic random and sequential read and write speeds. The laptops contain the following storage solutions:
- Acer Predator Helios 300 - Micron 1100 256GB
- Acer Predator Triton 700 - SK Hynix Canvas S300 256GB x 2 RAID 0
- Digital Storm Equinox - Samsung 960 EVO 500GB
- Razer Blade - Samsung PM981 512GB
The Blade’s Samsung PM981 offers respectable 4K random and 128K sequential speeds. You can be sure that it will run small application-based tasks or launch large files with ease. However, it’s quickly overshadowed by the other options in this roundup. For one, the 960 EVO has slightly faster read and write speeds, while the Triton 700’s RAID configuration offers nearly double the read speed.
PCMark 8
We use PCMark 8’s Microsoft Office and Adobe creative tests to simulate a common workday workload. These tasks are platform-based, so systems with powerful CPUs and fast storage solutions perform best. Seeing as how the Blade and Equinox have the same processor and similar storage speeds, it comes as no surprise that their Adobe Creative and Microsoft Office scores fall within the same ballpark.
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