Quite simply, the Razer Blade 14 is my favorite gaming laptop bar none. The 14-inch form factor is the one that makes the most sense for me in how I want my mobile gaming devices to be. Y’know, mobile. It’s only really just been released and already Razer has dropped its price by $400, making it $2,300 at Razer exclusively.
Okay, I know that’s still a lot of cash, and makes it pretty much the most expensive RTX 5070 laptop, but you are absolutely paying for the form factor. And if you want a truly svelte, truly mobile gaming laptop then you’ve got to pay for it.
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So many gaming laptops are hulking brutes that, while they might well deliver in terms of high-end gaming frame rates, aren’t the sort of thing you would want to carry around with you. And they also rarely have much in the way of either battery life or performance away from a plug socket.
Not so with the Blade 14, which matches its bigger sibling, the Blade 16 in terms of battery life, and beats every other RTX 50-series gaming laptop I’ve tested this year. And I’ve tested a lot of them. And with its Ryzen AI 9 365 APU and RTX 5070 GPU it can deliver good 1080p gaming performance whether plugged in or not, even if that modest Nvidia graphics silicon might struggle hitting the native resolution of the gorgeous 2880 x 1800 OLED screen.
Thankfully you get the twin might of DLSS 4 upscaling and Multi Frame Generation to help both boost those gaming frame rates and lighten the load on the battery, too.
It’s also impressively quiet. Which is one of the main reasons why I much prefer the Blade 14 over the new Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 which I reviewed side-by-side with the new Razer machine. Don’t get me wrong, both are great machines, but the experience of gaming on the Blade 14 is so much better.
I would have preferred Razer to use the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip instead of the lower-spec Ryzen AI 9 365, not because it’s got a few less Zen 5c cores, but because it’s integrated graphics core isn’t quite as good. It’s the same level as the likes of the Lenovo Legion Go S, so has decent 1080p gaming performance if you park the discrete Nvidia GPU entirely, which isn’t bad, but the full-fat Strix Point APU has a far more performant iGPU.
I would have also liked the improved keyboard Razer stuck in the Blade 16, but I can appreciate that, especially for the Blade 14, getting it down as thin as possible was the pitch.
I really didn’t love the last few generations of Blade 14 notebook, just because they were getting so chonky. The new chassis design, however, is delightfully slim, and I am here for it.
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