Both Razer and Dell have new gaming laptops at CES 2023, and they are massive. Both feature enormous 18-inch displays. Eighteen inches. They're enormous. But that's what people want and need out of a gaming laptop — a decent-sized screen to see everything and the space for all the powerful components and requisite cooling to put good-looking stuff on that screen.
But still, 18 inches corner to corner. Okay, it's maybe not that bad. Even gaming laptops these days have thinner bezels around that screen, and these new laptops are both opting for taller aspect ratios like 16:10 that gives you more real estate without making the laptop stupid wide. Well, they're still going to be plenty wide, but not really much wider than the 17-inch laptops they're replacing.
Both the Razer Blade 18 and Dell Alienware M18 check all the boxes you'd expect from a brand-new high-end gaming laptop. They both have Intel's new 13th Generation Core i9 HX CPUs, both offer a selection of powerful GPUs including the mobile version of NVIDIA's beastly RTX 4090, plenty of space for the fastest DDR5 RAM and snappy NVMe M.2 storage. Both don't even mention battery life and both are sure to cost thousands of dollars. But that's what you get when you want the best of the best.
But laptop? These are portable gaming PCs, not laptop. They're not meant for "lap" use. Battery life isn't a priority here, and despite their best efforts to manage the temperature of these power-hungry components they'll almost certainly get too hot to comfortably keep on your lap for even a short while. These are slimmed-down gaming PCs with a portable power supply and attached display.
And that's okay.
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This is the best stuff we saw at CES 2023
CES is back, baby! The show's changed a lot over the years, but there was still a lot of exciting new tech to be found in Las Vegas — enough that we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge all the cool stuff with our own Best of CES 2023 awards!
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