I've been daily-driving the new Blade 18 (2025) for about three months now, and I feel the review undersells a few points. First of all: yes, it does support PCIe 5.0 — officially up to 4 TB per SSD. I'm running two Crucial T705 4 TB PCIe 5.0 drives, and they deliver their full spec with read speeds around 14,000 MB/s. No issues whatsoever. So performance on the storage side is anything but lacking.
As for thermals and acoustics: this thing is amazingly quiet, even under gaming load, even in turbo. It stays cool enough that you don't get the typical "gaming laptop jet engine" experience with a bonus of scalded digits.
The keyboard, yes, could use more travel — I'll give you that. It's not as punchy as an MSI Titan's mechanical keyboard's clickety-clack, the MSI keyboard is fun, but honestly? I'd never trade the Titan's brick-like bulk (again) for this. The Blade 18 feels like a business notebook on steroids: slim, elegant, surprisingly light, but still pushing RTX 5090 levels of performance.
The display is lovely, the colors are accurate, and I really like that the lighting can be dimmed or switched off with a simple hotkey (fn+F10) if you don't want the gamer glow.
So while the cooling bulge may not look "harmonious", I haven't ever noticed it in daily life. I think Razer nailed the balance of power, portability, and style. For me, this is the best mix of desktop-replacement performance without the punishment of carrying around a miniaturized mainframe.