Epic Laptop Battle! Razer Blade 16 vs MacBook Pro 16
M2 MacBook Pro 16 versus Razer Blade 16 2023 fight internet Gordon with PC World here this is a showdown I've been looking forward to for a while it's basically Apple's brand new M2 MacBook Pro 16 versus razer's brand new Razer Blade 16 2023 model yes basically M2 versus Intel 13 gen and Nvidia RTX 40 series before we go too far down this Rabbit Hole though I do want to warn you this is not the top end MacBook Pro 16. I couldn't get my hands on that one but honestly um the CPU performance doesn't change much between the M2 Pro in this laptop and the M2 Maxes that are out there as well the GPU does though so that may make it a little weird on the GP side because it's probably unfair to do this fight I will say though uh the performance I'm seeing out of the GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU in there it doesn't make me think the M2 Max either 30 core or 38 GPU core is going to make a big difference but first let's get into the stuff that we can compare that isn't really going to change from the M2 Pro or the M2 Max and that is performance on the CPUs we'll kick this off with the familiar Maxon cinebench R23 it is a 3D rendering Benchmark it is nearly pure CPU there's a multi-core test there's a single core test it likes More chords when it can get them and in this case you're looking at an eight performance core plus four efficiency core for the new M2 Pro versus 24 cores or eight performance cores plus 16 efficiency cores in the Intel that's a lot more cores and that pays off as we see cinebench favoring the 13th gen core I9 13950hx by a whopping 79 you know because basically more cores are better in this Benchmark and when you're looking at uh you know 12 cores versus 24 cores it's just not going to be pretty The World Isn't only about um multi-core performance though a lot of the applications don't really use all the cores even if they're brand new oftentimes they really can't use all the cores in a laptop so let's also look at cinebex R23 default run using a single thread on each of these CPUs or a single CPU core for people who like to hear it that way you're looking at basically again a nice win for that 13 gen core I9 to the tune of 23 the 20 22 versus 1647. so uh pretty sizable win for Intel in cinebench R23 moving on to another 3D rendering Benchmark we're looking at blender benchmark 3.1 in this case I'm using the 3.40 engine to render the three scenes at this Benchmark uses to measure a performance of a CPU and as you can see we saw really big gains for the Intel CPU in the multi-core test and we're seeing it again in the monster CPU Focus we're looking at you know about 49 better samples per minute looking at junk shop CPU focused it's a very sizable 61 percent Improvement for the core I9 over the M2 Pro and looking at the classroom CPU Focus it's a 46 Improvement for samples per minute uh again for the Intel CPU over the Apple M2 moving on from 3D rendering onto something people are more likely to do I'm actually using the recently released handbrake 1.6.1 it is a free encoder go out and download it it's fantastic it's available on many platforms it's also native in fact all the tests you've seen so far are native to the Apple M architecture as a handbrake is as well for this first test I'm taking handbrake and I'm taking a 4K file and simply encoding it with x264 it is CPU focused I set both of the laptops to the same settings within handbrake and we see that the core I9 with the higher core count generally more cores handbrake runs faster although not to the tune that you're seeing the 3D rendering we're seeing it finish about 20 percent faster on the core I9 versus the M2 Pro not everybody encodes the same way so earlier we did x.264 using the CPU cores these chips actually have their own
video encoding engine so I use handbrake using Intel's quick sync which is built into the 13th gen CPU or apple video toolbox which is built into the M2 Pro basically doing an h.265 10-bit encode of that same 4K file again set the same way on the Mac as well as on the Razer and we see the PC with quick sync is about 16 percent faster than the MacBook Pro moving on to an encode that's definitely a little tougher we're actually going to use handbrake 1.6.1 again to do an SVT AV when in code using 10-bit this is actually built into handbrake on both the mac and the PC for this I'm actually using the av-1 preset that's built into the Mac I use that preset and then I set the PC version to the same settings for some reason there was no preset for the av-1 in code but I basically set it the same way we're again using that same 4K file and we see again with an all CPU in code this does not support any hardware acceleration so you can't do it on the media encoders you could do it potentially on the Nvidia GeForce card in the Razer Blade but um handbrake doesn't support it yet so this is a pure CPU encode versus a pure CPU encode and I do want to point out for people who need to know this SVT av1 apparently was built by Intel so there's a little bit of a home field advantage obviously but you see the Mac is actually not doing so great here I'm not really sure why it's it's doing so poorly because basically the Razer Blade finishes the encode 82 percent faster in about 635 seconds versus the 3 three thousand six hundred and eight seconds of the MacBook Pro 16. I don't really think uh this is the the final word on this I do think there's probably a problem with handbrake doing the av1 on the Mac but I I will again say the av1 preset is actually built in to the mac and that's actually what I set the PC to so I don't quite get it um I would say stay tuned but if you have to do av1 using CPU right now uh the 13th gen 209 pretty much whoops the M2 Pro I'll admit 3D rendering and video encoding is kind of nerdy stuff although if you're going to buy one of these laptops you're probably into the nerdy stuff if you want to know how these laptops feel and just kind of boring things I try to get a feel for that by running babcos Crossmark this is again a cross application Benchmark as his name implies it's actually compiled for the different platforms native on Mac it's also compiled on Linux and Android and iOS it tries to give you a performance in productivity creativity and responsiveness such things as document editing spreadsheets web browsing photo editing photo organization video editing and responsiveness would look at sort of application launches and file opening so again this is actually kind of the stuff A lot of people do care about they basically write right applications on the multiple platforms and then they compile them using native compilers to that platform so it's about as even as you can get overall the winner is the the core I9 and it is mostly CPU this GPU is not doing much in this Benchmark the core I9 is about 12 faster than the M2 Pro in productivity it opens that up to a nice 27 percent for the core I9 over the M2 Pro interestingly when we get to creativity again we're look that's where you're looking at photo editing photo organization and video editing the MacBook Pro actually has an advantage to about 10 percent over the razor blade with its core I9 so you know hey that that's pretty fair and overall in responsiveness for opening files launching applications uh it actually favors the core I9 and the nvme Gen 4 drives in the Razer Blade to the tune of 45 our next test is primate Labs geekbench 5.51 it's a multi-discipline test that tests a whole bunch of different applications on the CPU multi-core and single core it's free you can download it it will upload the results of the internet if you don't pay for it but we can see the core I9 with more cores in multi-core performance coming in with about a 33 percent increase in advantage over the M2 Pro and in single core it actually closes up although you know core I9 is still ahead but I wouldn't say it's a big lead given that Intel chip about a five percent advantage over the M2 Pro uh one thing I want to note the brand new version just came out today I have not had time to fully test it for this hopefully we'll run that in the future take a look at it but 5.51 is a known quantity and it's been out there for quite a while okay a lot of that stuff before has been kind of theoretical I mean except for cinebench which is a real application and blender is real but most people aren't doing that handbrake also real but I mean how many people are really doing video encoding let's look at something everybody does and that is browsing the internet for that I'm going to use Google Chrome 1.10 and I'm actually going to run four different popular browser based benchmarks
the first ones from Principal Technologies it's web expert for the next three jet stream 2 motion marking speedometer are actually developed by the folks who did Apple Safari browser so they're a little bit of a home field advantage there in web expert all of these I want to note are very much lightly threaded single core maybe two at best if even it doesn't really matter so it's really about how fast these CPUs are under a single core it doesn't care if there's 24 cores or 12 cores frankly in web expert core I9 24 faster than M2 Pro jet stream two about eight percent faster motion Mark 1.2 85 percent faster however uh again I've seen some weird things on the Mac I haven't done a lot it's a lot of extensive Mac testing in quite a while but the performance on some arm parts can be a little weird this 85 percent faster makes zero sense to me in fact if you look at the actual sub scores of it like one is just simply stuck at one which really drags performance down so that means either Chrome is broken or the actual Benchmark motion Mark 1.2 is broken with this version of Chrome that I used uh so I really wouldn't say that 85 faster in motion Mark really means anything right now but I do have to report it because that's what I got so speedometer four percent faster basically dead even between the M2 Pro and the core I9 and actually I will say that's a that's actually a pretty good showing for the M2 as well as the core I9 actually here again is something very practical a lot of people edit photos Adobe Lightroom classic is the unsung hero of all photographers Photoshop gets all the glory but Lightroom classic really does all the work for working photographers unfortunately I would normally do this with push it bench but it doesn't quite work on the Arm based Max yet so I essentially loaded the Adobe Lightroom classic 12.1 it is native to the mac and then I I took 2854 Canon raw files that I've shot over
the years on the EOS 5D Mark 1 Mark II Mark III and Mark IV yes no no 1D I don't have a 1D just a 5D for this but that's 2854 raw files I take those from the laptop and then I export them all to jpeg at 50 with the simplified copyright Watermark I also apply a light sharpening for screens as it does the export so it is uh you know the CPU that matters here some of it is the GPU and also some of it is the SSD that's here because honestly you are reading and writing a lot of data but honestly this is these in both these laptops are stupendously fast so that might not be the bottleneck you'll see three results here which is a little different because we see the blue bar which is a Lightroom writing default on the Razer Blade if you're running on default Lightroom on Windows does not support more than one graphics card so there is actually a portion where where it will do GPU exports by default on auto it will use the integrated Graphics of the 13th gen chip and using the integrated graphics and the CPU to do that export the Razer Blade actually comes out last at 357 seconds that's basically 24 slower than the MacBook Pro 16 with the M2 Pro which is a 270 seconds so of course the question is well what happens if I switch over the razor blade to the GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU and I did that because people are going to wonder so when it does the export if you change it in the preferences under Adobe Lightroom classic it says GPU is now fully enabled and by the way on the Mac because it has an integrated graphics with integrated memory it's all one there is no secondary Graphics discrete graphics in the Mac it basically fully enabled for the GPU encode so the Mac is giving you some GPU some CPU when you enable that GeForce RTX 4090 though the Razer Blade comes out on top at 167 seconds that's basically 38 faster than the MacBook Pro 16 and for comparison the Razer Blade defaulted to the integrated Graphics versus the GeForce it gives the GeForce the g-force is a 53 faster export so big win for the g-force but you know honestly if you're going to be running only on integrated Graphics the the magic of the M2 actually has a nice lead over those Intel parts our next test fortunately does run on the Mac that is Puget systems Puget bench 0.956 running Adobe Premiere Pro 23.1.0 this is the standard run and notice the bars are a little differently colored previously all the bars were blue because they were pretty much all CPU bound tests on this test it's really hard to say where the Benchmark uses the GPU green for NVIDIA or the CPU blue for Intel so I colored them both both of them added up though give a pretty good beat down to the Mac we're looking at a 29 Advantage for the razor blade overall in actually the the sub score Standard Export score is about 21 standard live playback score which does actually use that Intel integrated Graphics 30 percent faster for the Razer Blade the effects score 40 faster and then when you look at the GPU effects which I'm going to assume run on the mighty GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU 164 faster than the 19 core GPU in the M2 Pro so really big Advantage for um the rtex 4090 and the 13 gen core I9 of course we're with the M2 Max fault I don't know but you can imagine it would pick up some performance because it simply has you know 30 or 38 cores depending on which one you buy so it could pick up some GPU score I'm not sure it's going to beat it in the export score or the live playback score but it could get closer for today though a big win for the razor blade before we move on too far though I do say video editing especially on these laptops is very important and Puget bench actually produces a lot more data so I'm going to throw up this score it's a big headache list to look at but it actually kind of it tells you where the strengths of the different laptops are because when you are editing and something as big and wide as Adobe it's not really clear where you're going to get a performance Advantage there are frankly some things where the Mac has an advantage over the razor blade even with the 4090 and the 13 gen in there and there's definitely some things where the 13 jnn and 40 90 laptop have a big lead as well I would say the advantage if you're going to work with a lot of prores goes to the MacBook Pro definitely a lot of the h.264 some of the h.265 and the red Advantage generally goes to Intel and Nvidia of course you're wondering well why does the Mac have such an advantage with prores and I will say that that is the home field advantage prores is a codec created and owned by Apple I think they're the only ones in fact that can actually make accelerators for prores so that is very much a you know home field advantage um some people on the PC may want to cry well that's not fair I would say whatever if I edit with prores I don't care what you say I just need it done faster but if clearly looking at these results if you're going to edit a lot of red coverage the 13 gen with the 4090 has a nice advantage over the the MacBook with the M2 Pro as well so don't just simply see the score above and go like oh my gosh I need to buy this you need to look at what's better for the Codex that you work in future bench actually has a standard run as well as an extended run I know we're doing a lot on Adobe Premiere but I will say Adobe Premiere is the 800 pound gorilla of video editors it is extremely important it's something that these kind of laptops are kind of made to run so we actually run the extended run which actually includes 8K media and as you can see the score is uh 13 gen core I9 with RTX 490 to the tune of 32 percent over the M2 Pro and the MacBook Pro 16.
it also has a nice lead in extended export scores of 47 over the MacBook Pro extended live playback score is actually kind of dead even and because we did the sub score breakdown previously let's also look at the subscore breakdown here again for the extended run and you could see you know a lot of the leads for the PC come from an 8K 8.26500 megabit export overall the winds are enough that the Razer Blade gets the nod by Puget bench upper score but again if you look at the details there are some things you might kind of want the Mac for but generally it looks like the Razer Blade with 13 gen and the 4090 laptop GPU have the edge so you know early on I gave you the warning that this is uh the M2 Pro it's not the M2 Max 30 it's not the M2 Max 38 and I do want to admit that that is uh that's a problem because honestly I really want to see the M2 Max especially the 38 I've heard amazing things about it the previous uh M1 Max the M1 Ultra so obviously people are going to say this is unfair I will admit this but it is worth looking at it and I will say after running this though I'm I'm not con completely convinced that the M2 Max 30 and I'm calling that the 30 because there's a 30 core version or the M2 Max 38 are going to really even the scales here with the RTX 4090 laptop GPU first up is again the blender Benchmark you saw earlier in blue but now we are running it on the graphics card the GPU on the Razer Blade that RTX 4090 laptop GPU at 175 tgps in the blender 3.40 version and it's just simply a crushing crushing uh defeat for the M2 Pro and I don't think the M2 Max is going to change this whether it's a 38 or 30 because uh you're when you're looking at 4101 samples versus 382 samples that's 974 faster for the RTX 40 90 laptop GPU so yeah I I admit the max is going to be better I don't think it's going to make it that much better though so we'll have to see if I can get my hands on a Max 30 or a Max of 38 but I don't think it's going to change and I will say this is open source free software this could potentially be by the way the people who work on blender really really optimize for NVIDIA this Benchmark you don't get to pick whether it's Optics or whatever or metal manually The Benchmark itself picks what to run it on so I don't really know what it's doing um but I will say if today you need to do gpu-based blenders you're going to want the razor blade and the RTX 4090 laptop over the pro and probably over the max 30 and the max 38. earlier you saw geekbench running the CPU single core multi-core geekbench also has a compute Benchmark I ran this on both the graphics Parts on both of these laptops I will say a geekbench lets you run either in Cuda on the Cuda API which is NVIDIA sync or Apple's metal API and I also ran an opencl which is on both platforms and you can see again very very big wins for that RTX 4090 laptop uh 250 847 versus 52 777 that's 375 performance Advantage for the RTX 4090 over the M2 Pro with its uh 19 core GPU and again when you're looking at opencl 375 Advantage for the g-force over the M2 part so uh with that M2 Max 30 or Max 38 change it's um score yes is it enough to defeat the g-force I don't think so in fact I actually saw some scores for uh the M2 Max published by our sister publication Mac world and I think they were about 80 or 90 000 for metal for geekbench 5.51 uh 80 000 is not more than 250 000 last time I checked so mighty GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU it really is mighty this next test I really love because it eases the hot word of today and that's AI it's topaz Labs video AI 3.31 it literally came out like about a week and a half ago for the test I take a 720p flip cam style grainy low res shaky cam video of my kids from 10 years ago and I use AI to up sample it to 1080p I'm actually using the Thea model for video AI as well as motion D blur using themus and that's using AI for this test I elected only to use the gpus because you can use the CPU on this but I didn't want to wait the five or six hours just to run it once it's just not worth it because I have to run it multiple times to get her an actual accurate result and I'm not going to do that on the CPU if you're going to use video AI don't even bother to screwing around the CPU run it on the GPU so again the results are measured in seconds the faster is done the faster you can do something else and you can see the Razer Blade 16 with that GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU took about 376 seconds versus the MacBook Pro M2 Pro at 2008 seconds that's about 81 percent less time for the GeForce RTX 4090 would this change with the M2 Max yes it would definitely get better you might cut it in half probably not quite in half but it definitely will get better uh let's look at a little bit of gaming and I will say I did do a little bit of gaming on the Mac I think it's unfair because I like to rely on gaming benchmarks that have built-in benchmarks they're just simply more reliable it's of course you're it's this weird non-parity because you have Windows developed by one developer for the PC and then you have somebody porting that to the mac and we also have a problem on the Macintosh where a lot of the games are still actually made for Intel base Max using x86 and many of them are not actually native to the Mac so it's it's really kind of unfair in a way but you know I did run one game because honestly people are still running it because they still want to see what it looks like the first game is Rise of the Tomb Raider I'm running this at 1900 by 1200 resolution highest quality setting a lot of the Mac reviews actually run that at like medium or low I don't quite get it because it's actually pretty decent at highest quality but you can see the um this again is actually very impressive I'm I'm really kind of Blown Away that it can run rise of the 2 Tomb Raider which is made for x86 base Intel Max and it's it's cranking out 58 frames a second sent to its highest I mean God that is really impressive I will say arm on PC not impressive at all armor on Mac is very impressive and the fact that Apple's arm chips can push out um 58 frames a second at 19 by 12 at highest quality settings is very impressive I'm Blown Away by that I do want to say I would not want to play a game like rise of the Tomb Raider at 1900 by 1200 especially if I have a super beautiful high resolution screen the Mac monitor is 34 56 by 2234 the Razer Blade is 3840 by 2400. why would you want to play at low
resolutions this game is not an Esports game you really don't need 400 frames a second or 200 frames a second so here's what it actually looks like on these laptops running at their native resolutions uh the MacBook Pro with the M2 Pro is pushing about 21 frames a second the Razer Blade 16 is about 140 frames a second again I do have dlss on and set the balance but that's about a 567 percent Advantage for the Razer Blade with the GeForce RTX 4090 laptop and that 13 gen I turn off dlss but here's what you get you see the Razer Blade now kicking it down to about 9 92 frames a second the MacBook of course is still 21 frames a second because you can't turn dlss on or off because Apple doesn't offer that on this laptop that's about a 338 Advantage for the razor blade so yeah you're talking 4K Plus at 92 frames a second with dlss off on the razor blade I'm still stupidly impressed that it runs as fast as it does on the Mac because it's essentially being translated in real time using the Rosetta on the Mac so you got to give it to Apple but no if you want to play games primarily play games do not buy a Macbook it just does not make any sense the PC is the new Superior gaming platform this proves it even if we're not dealing with all the other stuff of having a translation stuff all right so I I actually tried a couple games that were Mac native to the M1 uh I really again I felt kind of weird because you're there's no Benchmark that you can simply run through and get reliable you have to rely on making sure you have not screwed something up doing a run through in a game and I just didn't trust myself to do it with the amount of time I had to do here um so I but I do want to get a feel like how much is that translation layer killing Mac graphics performance from we saw that on Tomb Raider how it wasn't looking so hot so for that I'm actually going to use base Mark it's actually a free Benchmark that's out there we'll upload the results folks it's a cross-platform runs on iOS Android Windows and Mac this is a base mark Sacred Heart the official run which runs at 2560 by 1440 resolution I run on DirectX 12 on the Razer Blade I'm running it on metal on the MacBook and as you can see the score for the MacBook Pro with the with the M2 Pro it's about about six thousand three hundred and thirty the the GeForce RTX 4090 laptop is twenty five thousand six hundred and eighty nine that's a 306 percent Improvement for the GeForce RTX 4090 again that is uh native to M silicon you know M2 and it's also native to x86 it's also running on Apple's own metal API and again yeah I I say M1 Max 30 M1 Max 38 definitely going to improved performance I mean 38 basically doubles the the GPU cores you also increase the memory bandwidth to 400 gigs from 200 gigs let's give you say 15 000 for the MacBook Pro 16 with an M2 Max 38 in it um that's not better than 25 600. so the GeForce RTX 1490 laptop GPU is all kinds of incredibly fast and I don't think Max is gonna beat it I would love to see it and honestly prove myself wrong but I don't see it beating the uh the GeForce RTX 4090 anytime immediately and this next one of course is just simply the actual scores in fps the same percentage you're looking at 256 frames a second at 1440 for the GeForce RTX 490 versus that M2 Pro so all of that is is all of the performance stuff and I'm going to tell you if I were a Mac fan and I know they're all doing this every single Mac fan in this world is sitting on their hands and biting their insides of their cheeks and just fighting on their fingernails and they're hammering the desk saying this is ridiculous you are comparing a laptop that uses way more power to one that uses way less I mean they're basically about the same size although that one's heavier okay I get it more power consumption so let's actually look at a little bit at power consumption I'm going to do this probably in a way you don't normally see I think it's an easy way to do it especially given the amount of time I had to do this I basically hook up logging watt meters to both of these laptops this baby by the way has a 330 watt Gan power brick it's actually really small but it's 330 Watts the MacBook Pro 16 has a 140 watt USBC power brick so considerably less power for the Mac I basically set the screen brightness to the same brightness about 450 nits and then I did some testing of this pure CPU pure GPU to see how much power it would consume with the my theory and this should work out right is if the battery is full none of the power is going into the battery so any of the power that the laptops are using are directly going into the Silicon the GPU the CPU as well as a panel but that's pretty constant so we basically see how much power these laptops will consume when they are plugged in well running the particular benchmarks and because I'm doing externally there's no observer effect I'm not actually slowing down the benchmarks because I'm trying to record what things are doing so I'm doing this completely independent of the laptop it has no idea that I'm recording what's going on so you're seeing Max on cinebench R23 it's a familiar benchmark it is the default 10 minute Loop that blue line on top because this is a CPU Benchmark is Center bench running that razor blade up from you can see the idle with cinebench open is about maybe 30 32 watts 33 Watts it kicks all the way up uh until about 190 watts and you can see it kind of climbs up for a little bit drops a little bit climbs up a little bit and then drops and then is constant the Mac meanwhile with Center bench open it's idling in about 16 to 18 Watts it's actually a very low idle pretty amazing right so very low idle you fire off cinebench R23 it basically tops out at about 60 63 Watts maybe 65 watts and basically sits there the whole time so the razor blade to get its performance while running Center bench is roughly you can look at most of the time consuming in about 175 Watts whereas the uh the MacBook Pro 16 is about 60 watts so considerably less power for the MacBook Pro so you know if you want to conserve energy that MacBook Pro 16 is going to conserve quite a bit of energy I do want to point out though if you're wondering what those little squiggly lines are the way cinebench R23 runs is it renders a frame when it's done it goes back to the beginning and renders it again it does this for 10 minutes once the 10 minute timer hits it finishes the last frame so every time you see one of those squigglies drop or rise is when the clock when The Benchmark is done and it resets everything so you can see that in the time that this Benchmark is run the Razer Blade 16 renders 20 frames because there's 20 little squiggly drops for the razor blade with the core I9 3950 HX the MacBook Pro 16 with the M2 Pro renders about 11 frames so if you're a 3D rendering artist and you're rendering a lot of Art in you know Cinema 4D you're basically getting almost twice the amount of frames rendered on the razor blade than you are on the MacBook or the M2 Pro chip in it so that is something to consider so significantly more power consumed by that core I9 and also significantly more more performance here it all kind of depends on what you're really looking for so that previous test was looking at power consumption of the core I9 that 24 core CPU under and all CPU core load this next one I kind of want to look at the GPU so I use base mark running Sacred Heart and I'm looping it 10 times unlike some other benchmarks the way a Sacred Heart base mark works is it basically jams through the The Benchmark as fast as can if it's hitting 100 frames a second it does 100 frames a second say if you're running that 10 times it's going to render you know a thousand frames and then it's done so basically fire it off as soon as you're done you're finished and you're seeing that here where the green line is again that razor blade you can see where idle has changed a little bit because with the base mark uh looks like we're maybe about 35 40 40 Watts we climb all the way up to the GPU by the way uses more power than CPU just under 250 Watts so that GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU when plugged in will run it all the way up to about 250 Watts it's so close let's call it 250 Watts the M2 Pro with its 19 GPU cores however is you know similar we're looking at about 50 what 55 looks like maybe 60 65 Watts overall so you know 250 Watts for the 19 core M2 Pro versus the 250 Watts so significant less power for the M2 Pro and you can imagine I would really love to see the Max on this because an M2 Max 30 or M2 Max 38 I do wonder if they would actually get up to you know closer to 100 Watts on the M2 Max 38 it'd be pretty cool to see and I also do want to point out the same thing you saw earlier with cinebench you're seeing here the Razer Blade basically fires up that Benchmark does 10 Loops of it at 250 watts and then is just done Kickback reading the paper meanwhile the M2 Pro with its 19 GPU cores is running and running and running and running it takes considerably longer to finish the exact same uh workload because it is considerably slower it also does save considerably more power too so again significantly more performance versus significantly less power used moving on to something a lot lighter we previously saw something Hammer the GPU or Hammer the CPU those are sort of worst case scenarios for these laptops what does it look like on these laptops if you're doing something really really kind of boring kind of normal browsing the web for example so for that I'm again recording the power consumption of these laptops uh using Google Chrome version 1.10 we're going to run principal Technologies web expert for and you can see that actually the Razer Blade the power consumption with chrome just fired up is just under about 40 Watts and you can see this Behavior I've seen this similarly on other Intel laptops looking at sort of battery consumption Intel laptops are very spiky they they like to really get on that clock boost the clocks up as high as they can and then let it drop off it's like getting on the gas as fast as you can you can see all those kind of boosts as something really needs the CPU to clock up it clocks up uses power drops down you can see all those boosts where you're seeing up to 60 watts up to 80 Watts even up to 100 Watts during this Benchmark where it basically says we need more crank those clocks up maybe it's using two cores Crank It Up will get up to 100 Watts um you know but actually overall if you actually run a razor blade like this in browsing it's actually not as bad so you're not going to consume the power you would under an all CPU core and all GPU core so you know honestly the browsing performance is not going to be horrible but the thing that really should floor you though is that black line because that is the MacBook Pro 16 running the M2 Pro using the same load again Chrome 1.10 we are browsing the internet and you can see just having Chrome open doing nothing it's idling at about 20 watts and that damn thing never leaves 20 watts it's actually incredible well that Intel chip is like hey I need 80 Watts I need 60 watts of boost it's just I need a hundred watts of boost it's just simply running it up that M2 Pro is almost 20 watts the entire time I will say that's incredible there are a few spikes where it'll push it up to 30 Watts but look at that thing it's just basically browsing the web humming along never using any power this performance is shockingly amazing and it is something that I as a PC fan and I I think things all PC this is very very impressive it's something the PC should strive for um so hey hooray yeah it loses honestly in the actual performance we'll look at that later but it's just amazing that the Mac can do the mundane stuff and this is why people say when they can get on their MacBook and just sit there all day and brow the web the battery lasts forever that's the kind of thing is going to make you think it's going to last forever all right our last actual practical performance test where we only look at Power is something again something important I think Adobe Premiere is something everybody really does care about because the world is about internet somebody's going to edit this on a computer although it'll be da Vinci but they're going to edit on a computer they're going to put on the internet so if you're doing this on a laptop on battery what does it look like so again I basically recorded the power consumption of these laptops the same way I did before running Puget bench Premiere Pro this is just the standard run I didn't do the extended run again you could see uh the razor blade and I colored it blue and green because it is a combination of Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU you can see we're spiking up to 150 watts 200 Watts 250 Watts the reserve in times were pushing 300 watts and an occasional amazing to me we're pushing the absolute Max wattage of the power supply it is a it has a 330 watt power supply on the Razer Blade you see it actually spikes above 300 watts probably running into basically oh there's no more power to come from that power brick so it's just actually amazing to me that the power the amount of power that the Razer Blade is is using here um and again look at the look at that black line for the the MacBook Pro it's it's like it's it's under 50 Watts it's actually truly amazing if you're gonna edit all day in Premiere or the MacBook Pro 16 is going to clean the clock of that razor blade probably if you're going to be running it on battery and I do want to point out though there I pointed out on this chart there's a section where it says GPU heavy effect section and a part where it says GPU heavy effect section for the Mac that's the same thing we saw previously basically the future bench is running the GPU effects section and then it's done and we can clearly see the advantage that's where you're running GPU heavy effect section on a GeForce RTX 4090 laptop it's done really fast it's done in a quarter less than a quarter of the time of the MacBook that takes considerably more so it's very interesting to look at because uh the performance that you're getting there on the Razer Blade is amazing but it comes at a huge price cost and of course you've seen how much power the Razer Blade consumes running on AC when you're in a thin laptop like that that also means fans fans mean noise thin laptops with fans mean more noise so I did want to try to find out how much noise it makes because you know MacBook MacBook Pro people like to get in our face about how quiet the MacBook Pro is it would be flatly unfair to not also look at the noise levels of the MacBook Pro 16. so um I again I'm doing the same
test as previously in a way because the purple line represents the power consumption of the Razer Blade we are pushing on that CPU you know up over 150 watts we actually pushed up to about 180 Watts until it burns off the Boost squigglies for the how fast it is yay how fast it is but I also at the same time measured the sound level of the fans I did this in my garage I do not have an anechoic chamber that would be the ideal way to do it and the noise floor in my garage is about 33 DBA you can see if you're looking at the on the left is Watts on the right is the audio levels and you can see we're basically at about 33 DBA and that red line on the left we start running cinebench there's a delay as the laptop heats up it then tells hey by the way I need more cooling yay fans turn on so the noise actually comes on after the performance is going and you can see actually the way the core I9 13 gen runs is it runs it really hard and then it realizes oh I'm running really hot it comes back down the fans actually kick up to a higher level we're actually pushing about 52 to 53 DBA with the fans going Full Tilt but because the CPU in the Razer Blade has now said you know what I'm not going to run the rest of this load at that higher boost because it's too much for us we're going to run it at a lower lower uh clock speed lower TDP so now the actual fans two down so most of the run is actually about 51 DBA versus 53 to 54 DBA so most of the time 51 DBA for the razor blade I will say I've heard far more offensive laptops especially when you get that thin especially with previous gen Hardware in it that is not bad 51 db8 though is still considerably louder than no noise so I just want to mention that that's how I recorded it for the Razer Blade so let's do this for the Mac now so we're going to reset the graph you're going to see the same thing we just did for the Razer Blade 16 with the MacBook Pro 16 and it looks quite a bit different because again that purple line is the power we're actually pushing over 50 Watts for cinebench for this all CPU run the squigglies are for all the times that it resets and runs again okay you see that it's considerably shy of that you know 150 or some odd watts of the Intel CPU definitely better you know in power consumption of the red line again just like we saw with the razor blade is the sound level remember I said my rods in the daytime the floor level is about 33 DBA well if you're living in a metropolitan area and you're in your garage there's going to be other sounds so the red line is basically the sound 33 DBA that Spike you see I've labeled that's the sound of a crow in the street there's some sound of a car going down the street there's that Crow again and then at some point my wife started to wash the dishes upstairs every time you turn every time there's that weird Spike she turned on the water to get water in the sink and then at the end there's Street traffic basically the MacBook Pro 16 M2 Pro the fan never comes on and that is under a very heavy all CPU load that has a razor blade kicking it up to you know 54 DBA 51 DBA it's I mean it's basically dead silent whereas the razor blade is making quite a bit more racket I mean obviously 50 1 DBA versus no noise is a huge win for the Mac if you care about noise macbook's got a big Advantage all right home stretch folks if you stuck with us we got a couple good things I think you want to care about and this is something again Mac fans have been like hey I want to know about performance on battery if you unplug the razor blade there's no way that sucker is going to give you all that performance running on battery that it does running on its 330 watt power brick and I will say yeah that makes sense I agree one thing you need to note though is that's not the same for everybody every laptop vendor Tunes how their laptop will run on battery life if they've decided on the Razer Blade to only give you balance CPU and GPU performance kick on whisper mode that's different than what Dell or Lenovo or HP or Asus or MSI may do some laptop vendors may say hey we will give you control if you want to crank that sucker up you can do it I will say the Razer Blade does not it gives you basically balanced and no options to increase the power under AC I think that's kind of a bummer some other vendors may do that but when we're looking at Razer Blade 16 versus MacBook Pro 16 unplugged performance still actually matters so first up you're seeing the results of the Razer Blade 16 and the MacBook Pro 16 running Max on cinebench R23 I know there's a lot of cinebench but the reason I like to use it is everybody's familiar with it it's very predictable this obviously would be similar to other benchmarks um you see we got that amazing score of 26 424 running when it's plugged into the wall unplug that razor blade though and you have no control over it at least right now they may change that later because if they hear some belly aching from people who want Max performance on battery you unplug it and you drop down to 12 631 that is a 52 decrease for the core I9 13 950 HX and again let me remind you that is decision by Razer some other laptops may say like go for it either more power less power or do as you will to your battery so considerably less and actually at 12 631 we're actually below the performance of the M2 Pro which does not change in fact it's almost going up a little bit but honestly that's just simply run to run variances it's basically no different MacBook Pro 16 plugged in unplugged same thing uh very amazing because you're seeing a 52 percent drop for that core I9 let's do the same thing for the GPU though that green bar we saw that incredible 25 689 you unplug that GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU by the way with a 175 Watt tgp and performance falls back by 75 to 6483. so 75 power Nerf going to battery um I will say though that's actually the same score as that M2 Pro uh basically it's actually a little bit faster 6483 is still faster than 63.33 but basically the the M2 Pro and the MacBook Pro 16 just don't change so yeah you will if you're going to run on battery life you will lose considerable amount of performance but I will note the core I9 is actually pretty close in performance to the M2 Pro and that GeForce RTX 4090 even with this unplugged power Nerf it's actually still faster than the M2 Pro so that's something worth noting as well and I also want to point this out uh that's because you're running all cores or all CPU all GPU if you're actually running very light loads the performance isn't as bad in fact here I'm going to run cinebench R23 using a single thread on the Razer Blade and you see we only see about a 3.3 percent difference it's basically almost within the margin of error so so on single threaded performance the razor blade is not going to change so a lot of lightly light editing office Chrome even Photoshop very lightly threaded a lot of things in in Lightroom when you're just editing things not going to change when you do those exports though you hit all the cores or you hit that GPU hard you're going to take a big Power Nerf and also looking at browsing you're looking at a 7.7 percent decrease for the razor blade and web expert on battery versus plugged in and its score of 300 is still better than the MacBook Pro 16 score of 266 on battery so it's actually still slightly outperforming that MacBook even on DC so there is Nuance you just simply can't say oh it takes a big hit yeah it takes a big hit on their CPU heavy and all GPU core heavy loads but if you didn't get to light loads it can get a little closer okay I'm going to close this off with actually the thing that kind of surprised me and again this is part one this is all performance stuff I'm going to get to hopefully some battery testing at the end this is one battery test that I had time to do late last night I basically said you know what so let's take these laptops charge them up to 100 percent set the screen brightness to the same about 245 nits and I set the screen so they could not change based on the environment turn off the keyboard backlight put them in airplane mode and then I basically set both of them to Loop cinebench R23 for 9999 minutes so basically in all CPU core load all the time until the battery died you hear a lot of talk about the MacBook Pro 16 and the MacBook Pro having amazing battery life I'm not seeing that here especially under an all all core load I will say it still did win but you know look you're looking at uh you know about 7 000 797 seconds before the battery Tapped Out versus a 6863 it's about 13.6 percent Improvement for the MacBook Pro 16 over the Razer Blade but I you know 13.6 percent is
that really that's kind of like you know life-changing kind of experience I'm not so sure it's there and I will also point out the MacBook Pro has a you know 99.9 watt hour battery the largest you can have and still bring it on a plane the razor blade has a 95 watt hour battery so it's about you know five percent smaller so that 13 Improvement earn under an all-core load I don't think that's a huge Advantage for the MacBook but I I will say I think if you're sitting there browsing if you're sitting there doing very light loads MacBook probably gonna look pretty good if you're actually going to sit there and basically Hammer this thing in in encodes 3D rendering you know all core all GPU rendering all things that really really load up that M2 Pro is impressive as it is it's still only a 100 watt hour battery and you know the best you can get you know you might get you know a couple hours you might get a couple hours that depending on what you're doing so I think the misconception people think that the the Macs have this huge advantage over PC laptops over you know in battery life from what I'm seeing from this test and what I've kind of seen previously I don't really think that's true I think people are seeing certain things and running with it I think there's a lot more Nuance to it because clearly you know having 13 better battery life with the five percent bigger battery is really not a big deal so that's it for the testing I'm hoping to do more battery rundown tests that takes quite a bit of time because you got to charge them up run them down hours and hours and hours of work hopefully that comes later but let's do a quick overview of the laptops what I think of them what you should buy basically based on this first let's go over the the shocking thing uh the price the more expensive laptop here Macs have traditionally been Sky High in pricing razor blade 16 would like to tell you something about price because with a 13 gen core I9 13950hx GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU 4K Plus panel by the way that's neat because it does 120 hertz mode and a 240 hertz mode at a lower resolution and also mini LED 32 gigs of ddr5 two terabytes of Gen 4 storage that baby is going to set you back four thousand and three hundred dollars yeah that is a that is a premium priced laptop uh of course you are getting all kinds of ass kicking performance when plugged into the wall that is no doubt but I mean compare that to the MacBook this uh MacBook Pro 16 with M2 Pro 32 gigs of RAM two terabytes of storage the high resolution screen mini LED they're the same on all of them that's going to take you back 3 500 so the Razer Blade is 800 more than the uh MacBook Pro 16 and what's even crazier if you go for the the MacBook Pro 16 with the M2 Max say if you go for 32 gigs of RAM 2 terabytes of storage it's still 400 less at 3 900 than the Razer Blade you can really jam up the razor blade of the the Mac 2 by if you wanted to go up to 96 gigs of RAM because of that unified memory design and go to eight terabytes of storage you can get a real Apple price of sixty five hundred dollars but that's with eight terabytes of storage in 96 Megs 96 gigs of RAM so uh clearly the razor blade is not for the faint of heart in price uh other specs that I think are actually worth calling out I love this uh again the laptop power bricks matter this is very nice it's a USBC power brick 140 watts to be respected because it's just basically a very Advanced USB PD charger very tiny the laptop barely I've never saw this thing use over 80 Watts but I also have to give it to Razer because this is a 330 watt Gan power brick and typically those are maybe twice the size of those this is actually an extremely tiny power brick considering that it is 330 Watts look this is 140 versus this 330 it's considerably smaller than what you would expect because it is using very Advanced Gan technology you got to give that to Razer also the Razer gives you more type A ports it actually gives you three type A I just want to mention that only one Thunderbolt and one USBC the other one is not Thunderbolt the Mac however gives you three Thunderbolt fours and that's it there's a headphone jack so in Jack in the Jack Department it's losing I also should mention it's in the weight this matters too the Mac is considerably lighter the MacBook itself comes in at about four pounds 12 ounces I just weighed it with its power brick you're pushing about five pounds seven and a half ounces the razor blade 16 however is pushing five pounds eight ounces by itself you throw in that 330 watt power brick and you are now pushing seven pounds and nine ounces so I think if you really for if you're thinking about portability the macbook's gonna win it's just simply lighter it is thinner which I don't think really matters as much but it is lighter overall especially when you're considering the total weight of the package in your bag I think also um one here's the answer if you're looking for a laptop to use Final Cut to use uh applications that only run on Mac OS by the way buy a Mac because you have no choice if you are looking for a an album Macintosh laptop by the Mac that is actually the biggest reason to buy this uh there are other reasons though that a little bit of crossover if you're going to run video editing mostly disconnected if you're going to be say like in the field and your ability to get to a a charger is going to be very difficult I would definitely recommend the MacBook Pro 16 over the Razer Blade if you're gonna however the Razer Blade is going to just give you all kinds of incredible performance in gaming for one thing yes you can play games sort of on the Mac the performance is especially much better than I would expect on a Mac but if you are buying a MacBook to be a 90 gamer you are simply doing it wrong it makes zero sense if you want a gaming experience you buy the Razer Blade there's just simply no comparison it doesn't make any sense to buy a MacBook to play games the Razer Blade simply cleans the clock in performance in library and everything in mods that you can do on PC gaming that runs on the Razer Blade so clearly the razor blade better for gaming it's also simply better for all-out performance you saw those benchmarks if you're doing you know uh 3D rendering on the GPU you're doing rendering on this CPU you're doing a topaz Labs video AI there's just so many things that the Razer Blade gives you in all out performance that the the M2 Pro in the MacBook Pro 16 simply really can't get close enough to to Really justify I just don't understand why I mean yes the M2 Max will help it but you just simply saw the benchmarks it's just going to be hard for it to compete when plugged into the wall because you know they're taking that power and they're giving the performance a lot of Mac fans will say well look performance really suffers when you unplug that razor blade and if I are a razor blade fan and said hey when I plug in my razor blade I get more performance significantly more performance I plug in my Mac and I'm no longer power limited why am I not getting more performance and you're just simply not getting it on the MacBook Pro 16 with the M2 Pro in it so and that's very fair it just depends on what angle you're coming from so for gaming razor blade and if you actually just want a laptop that gives you you know stupendous battery life where you're just kind of doing light tasks I I think actually the the MacBook Pro 16 is a good choice as well and of course it is simply the bitter Mac OS based laptop so that's my feeling right now based on the performance I hope you think this was fair I know some mac fans are going to say oh you should have the M2 Max X you saw those numbers somebody get me an M2 Max 38 I don't think it's going to be that razor blade but hopefully we can find out in the meantime come back to PC world's channel for more awesome PC coverage and of course go to pcworld.com for news of the day 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2023-03-13 11:46
