Playing Starfield on a midrange Razer Blade 15 laptop

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I’ve been making my way through the galaxy mission by mission, playing Starfield, the big new franchise from Microsoft’s Bethesda Game Studios division.

It’s been fun exploring the vast galaxy and I’ve got a long way to go to see the 1,000 planets among the stars in Bethesda’s first new universe in 25 years. And I’ve played the game on the go while I could on a Razer Blade 15 laptop, a midrange gaming portable. Playing it on a midrange gaming laptop isn’t all that sexy, but I figure it reflects the gaming reality for many fans waiting for this game.

This machine sells for at least $2,000 and it has a real hum to it as it has a fan to deal with a slightly aging 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900H central processing unit (CPU) running at 2.5 GHz. It also has an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics processing unit (GPU) with 8GB of GDDR6 graphics memory.

I’ve enjoyed playing full-scale triple-A games on this laptop, like Starfield, which hasn’t crashed yet on the machine. There are plenty of moments where you have to wait for loading screens, but that’s a central part of the game’s design, as opposed to a fault of the hardware.

In addition to Starfield, I’ve also used it to play games like Call of Duty: Warzone, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, The Great War: Western Front and Oxenfree II: Lost Signals. All of them performed pretty admirably.

It has a 15.6-inch 240 Hz QHD display with a 2.5 millisecond