The Razer Blade 14 Is a Powerful Gaming Laptop That Feels Like a MacBook
A lot of horsepower paired with a beautiful display, at exactly the price you’d expect.
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The Razer Blade 14 is an improvement in almost every way over the previous generation and, remarkably, makes few sacrifices to get there. While it’s playing catchup in some way, in others, it’s a leap forward. And everything is done with Razer’s typical panache.
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Razer has developed a reputation as a gamers-first manufacturer, largely on the strength of its RGB-adorned laptops and accessories, plus the powerful GPUs it packs into its machines. The latest iteration of the Razer Blade 14 is no exception, lit up like a psychedelic Christmas tree at a December rave and sporting some mighty hardware. Unlike previous generations of Razer laptops, however, this latest Blade lives up to its name, with a lighter, thinner design. Perhaps most remarkably, it manages to squeeze all that horsepower into a smaller chassis without generating the heat of a thousand suns or spinning up too much fan noise.
Good things, meet small packages
At a mere 0.62 x 8.83 x 12.23 inches, the new Blade is not only slimmer than the previous generation, but rivals many GPU-less productivity ultraportables, like the MacBook Air. Razer has also shaved the weight down to an impressive 3.59 lbs (from 4.05 lbs) this time around. While that half a pound may not sound like much, in practice, it’s the difference between this laptop feeling like a hefty aluminum burden and an airy, tech-y slate.
Credit: Alan Bradley
I’ve never been a fan of the Razer logo (the visually-jarring, neon green triangle made up of snakes), and it still sits obtrusively in the center of this laptop lid. That said, the rest of the design is reasonably sleek and inoffensive. It uses CNC-milled aluminum with an anodized finish meant to resist greasy fingerprints; the review unit I got was black, though I prefer the look of the “mercury” silver model.
Being a Razer product, you can choose to light the Blade 14 in an array of rainbow colors through its included Synapse software utility. However, as someone who’s never been a fan of RGB lighting, I was happy to find it disabled by default, a remarkable display of restraint on Razer’s part (that is, until you load Synapse and it “installs” the Blade 14). Synapse does include a handful of genuinely useful features, like “gamer mode,” which disables the Windows key and (optionally) alt-f4 and alt-tab, so you’re not accidentally ejecting yourself back to the desktop mid-match.
The Blade 14 is furnished with a healthy selection of ports: two USB-C, two USB-A, an HDMI output, and a Micro-SD card reader. The power adapter is a chonky 200W DC brick.
Credit: Alan Bradley
The keyboard is relatively unremarkable, but delivers solid tactile feedback (for a chiclet style laptop keyboard). Sadly, the 14 didn’t inherit the improved keyboard that this generation’s Blade 16 benefits from, with its improved travel distance. That said, the glass touchpad is a nice addition. It represents an attention to detail present throughout the design that leaves you with the impression that you’re using a premium device.
A marriage of performance and presentation
A laptop aimed at the gamers needs to hit two crucial targets: killer performance and a pretty display. I’m happy to report the Blade 14 nails both.
The display is a gorgeous 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED and delivers the rich color, deep blacks and vibrant whites you’d expect. While its 120Hz refresh rate is half of the previous model’s, when you get into the post-100Hz range, you’re splitting hairs. Plus, only older, less-visually-impressive games are going to yield frame rates higher than the 120 mark, anyway. It’s not much of a trade off, and one I’m happy to make for the clarity and richness of OLED (the previous generation used LCD panels).
On the performance front, the Blade can be specced to include either an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 or 5070 (my review unit had a 5070). That’s Nvidia’s latest generation of GPUs, and even the laptop versions have demonstrated impressive performance. In my benchmarks, the Blade delivered an outstanding 130 FPS in Black Myth: Wukong at native resolution and very high settings, even with full ray tracing enabled at medium settings. Even in the highly demanding Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, the latest in Ubisoft’s historical murderfest franchise, the Blade managed an average of 60 FPS at native resolution and medium settings.
Credit: Alan Bradley
Both games looked fluid and extremely sharp on the Blade’s OLED, and running them at a 2.8K resolution looks really great on a 14-inch display. The one letdown on the presentation side is the brightness, a continuing problem for OLED adoption. The Blade’s panel tops out at 400 nits; while it’s not dim, exactly, you’ll likely want to keep the brightness maxed, and it doesn’t play well in really brightly lit spaces or outside.
Game testing did highlight one of the most impressive details with this latest Blade 14 iteration. Despite shrinking the chassis and reducing its weight, Razer has managed to keep the Blade’s thermals in check without cranking out an aggressive helping of fan noise. Even under the heaviest sustained loads, the Blade remained, if not whisper quiet, relatively polite, and never approached the decibel levels of the vast majority of its rivals in the gaming laptop space.
AMD, meet Nvidia
In a Romeo and Juliet-style union, the Blade pairs its Nvidia GPU with a CPU from Nvidia’s graphics card rivals at AMD. Luckily, there’s no tragic end in this story, and the chips get along just fine. The Blade delivers excellent productivity performance, as you’d expect from the Ryzen AI 9 365 at its core and its 32 GB of RAM (you can jump up to 64 GB or down to 16 GB to add or subtract $300 from the laptop’s price, respectively). The AI 9 365 is one of AMD’s Strix Point chips, designed in large part to accelerate AI workloads, but it’s also extremely capable in productivity workloads.
In Cinebench, which loads the CPU to simulate real-world 3D rendering, the Blade racked up a single-core score of 114 and a multi-core score of 1,054. That multi-core score is especially impressive, easily surpassing the M4-powered MacBook Air (854) and rivaling the Asus ROG Flow Z13‘s mighty Ryzen Al Max+ 395 (1,136), which is a step up in the AMD CPU hierarchy from the Blade’s chip.
Credit: Alan Bradley
Scores in Geekbench 6 showed similar productivity performance compared to its rivals, and outstanding GPU performance. It racked up a monster score of 127,776 in the OpenCL (general purpose graphics rendering) GPU test, and a similarly stellar 43,128 in the Vulcan test (which focuses on high-performance tasks like gaming). For context, the gaming focused Asus ROG Flow Z13 only managed 48,224 in the OpenCL test, though it did outperform the Blade in Vulcan, pulling in a score of 64,780.
In the Geekbench CPU test, the Blade again showed excellent multi-core potential, earning a score of 14,389, with a single-core score of 2,885. This suggests the Blade 14 is getting just about as much performance as it can extract from that Strix Point CPU, given that the Acer Swift 14 AI I reviewed, which also packs the Ryzen AI 9 365, delivered nearly identical scores.
I also ran a standard transcoding test on the Blade 14, and it managed to transcode a 12-minute 4K video to 1080p (which puts a heavy, sustained load on the CPU) in just three minutes and 39 seconds. That’s actually significantly faster than the Swift 14 AI (4:19), as well as well-regarded processors like the M4 in the MacBook Air (5 minutes flat).
Battery life
Glance at the dimensions and weight of the Blade 14 and you may mistake it for an office laptop; test its battery and you’ll be quickly disabused of that notion.
In our standard battery rundown test, which streams a Youtube video continuously with the display at 50% brightness, the Razer only managed a hair above six hours of uptime. While that’s not surprising for a machine sporting a 5070, don’t expect to get a full day of work out of the Blade without having to plug it in.
On the other hand, battery performance in gaming was fairly competitive. I was able to get in well over two hours of Black Myth: Wukong before the battery gave out. One oddity of note: while all three of Window’s power profiles are available in either plugged in or on battery mode, Synapse, which offers four power options while plugged in, only offers the Balanced option when running on battery power.
Premium power at a premium price
While the Razer Blade 14 looks a lot like an ultraportable, glancing at the price tag will quickly remind you that this is a premium gaming laptop. The model I was provided with retails for $2,299.99. To be fair, you can opt for the 5060 model to shave $300 off the cost, or save another $300 by reducing the included RAM to 16 GB. Alternately, the deep-pocketed can upgrade to 64 GB of RAM for an extra $300, or double the storage to 2 TB for an additional $300.
That’s not cheap, but it is reasonable for what the Blade 14 offers. Consider that you get an OLED display, a powerful discrete GPU, and competitive helpings of RAM (32 GB) and storage (a 1 TB SSD) in this mid-tier configuration, and a $2,300 MSRP is exactly what I’d expect to spend. When you throw in the svelte design and remarkably efficient cooling, the Blade 14 actually starts to look like a bargain.
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Jake Peterson
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The Download Newsletter Never miss a tech story. Get the latest tech news, reviews, and advice from Jake and the team.
Alan Bradley
Alan is an experienced culture and tech writer/editor with a background in newspaper reporting. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Paste Magazine, The Escapist, ESPN, PC Gamer, and a multitude of other outlets. He has over twenty years of experience as a journalist, author, and editor. His debut novel, The Sixth Borough, is available now.
