The best gaming laptops have been getting thinner and lighter every year but the new Razer Blade 14 takes that to a whole new level. This gaming laptop isn’t much bigger than the MacBook Pro 14-inch, but yet it’s packed with an extremely powerful CPU and paired with the Nvidia RTX 4070, making it a powerhouse in the best PC games.
However, with its high price tag of $2,399 to start, this is a luxury gaming laptop that might not be worth it for anyone that just wants to play their favorite games on the go – especially in the wake of the Steam Deck or Asus ROG Ally.
Razer Blade 14 Design and Features
The Razer Blade 14, much like its bigger sibling earlier this year, is a looker. It has an all-black unibody design that’s evocative of a MacBook Pro, just without the annoying notch Apple has deigned to include recently.
This laptop weighs just 4lb, and measures just 0.7 inches thick, putting it on the same playing field as the MacBook Pro 14. Unlike Apple’s flagship laptop, however, the Razer Blade 14 can actually play the best PC games without running WINE.
The keyboard deck is abbreviated by speaker grilles on each side, which house some of the best laptop speakers I’ve heard in a long time. And right below the keyboard is one of the best trackpads in a Windows laptop, and it’s absolutely gigantic for the size of this laptop. What takes that trackpad to the next level is that despite its massive size, it has excellent palm rejection, so you don’t get distracted by misclicks whenever you’re trying to type on it.
The trackpad itself is also extremely accurate, and all the Windows 11 gestures work like a charm. You’re going to want to use one of the best gaming mice when you use the Razer Blade 14 to play games, but when you whip this laptop out to do office work, you won’t really feel the need to break out a discrete mouse.
The keyboard is also a dream come true for a laptop of this size. Ultrabooks are going to come up a lot when talking about the Razer Blade 14, due to its size, but the keyboard genuinely doesn’t suck to type or game on, so at least you won’t have to shell out another wad of cash for a dedicated keyboard. The Razer Blade 14 is comfortable to type on, and even with so many of the keys being tiny, I didn’t find myself unable to type quickly on it. And, of course, the keyboard is backed up by bright and colorful RGB lighting.
Each key is backlit, and you can customize the lighting on per-key basis, so your imagination is the only limit. Out of the box, however, it simply cycles through a number of solid colors. But, trust me, you can make this keyboard into a veritable rainbow of bright colors.
It’s only fitting, then, that the Razer Blade 14 has one of the best displays on the market. This is a 14-inch IPS display with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600, which is slightly higher than other QHD panels out there. Razer has opted for a 16:10 aspect ratio here, which is something that’s becoming more common in laptops, but moreso those that are used for work, rather than gaming.
In games, it means you get a slightly taller image, which might be off-putting if you’re used to playing games at 16:9. I was able to get used to it, but your mileage will obviously vary. Either way, though, the aspect ratio is worth it because the display is absolutely gorgeous. This is an HDR-capable display with that covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color space and a brightness of 500 nits.
The Blade 14 also proves once and for all that a laptop of this class does not need to sacrifice ports to shave off a fraction of an inch here and there. This laptop is packed with an HDMI port, two USB-A, two USB-C, a dedicated charging port (more on thatlater) and a headphone jack. Tbat means you don’t have to worry about your existing peripherals not working here, and you don’t even need to worry about carrying around an awkward little dongle just to plug your mouse or headset in.
As for the charger, the Razer Blade 14 comes with a massive charging brick, as the RTX 4070 in here requires a bit more juice than a standard Ultrabook. You can still charge via USB-C, just like any other modern laptop, but it’s going to be much slower, especially if you’re trying to play games while connected to the wall.
The Razer Blade 14 also has a physical shutter over its webcam. The webcam itself is fine, but the ability to physically cover it means you don’t have to worry about it when you don’t actually want to be on screen.
Software
One of the best things about Razer laptops, including the Blade 14, is there isn’t much in the way of preinstalled software you have to worry about. Pretty much the only software here is Razer Synapse, which you’ll use to customize lighting and fiddle with performance profiles. Synapse itself has improved a lot over the years and the current iteration is extremely easy to use and is actually useful – more than can be said of many included software suites in other gaming laptops.
Performance and Gaming
There’s just something about going to your local coffee shop with a laptop that looks just like every other work laptop out there, pulling it out and playing Cyberpunk 2077 over a cup of cold brew. The Razer Blade 14 enables this in style thanks to the RTX 4070 and the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS.
Despite its size, the Razer Blade 14 is a performance powerhouse, able to play pretty much any game on high settings at its native resolution of 2,560 x 1,600. Even in Cyberpunk 2077, I was able to play at the Ray Tracing: Ultra preset, usually sitting around 50 fps. In the benchmark, the average sits at 49 fps, but I found that in-game it would typically sit around 50 fps without frame generation enabled.
However, with DLSS frame generation that number gets a lot higher. With DLSS 3.0, the Razer Blade 14 gets around 74 fps in the benchmark and between 60-70 fps in the actual game. That’s not enough to match the 240Hz refresh rate, but it’s definitely powerful enough to play any game you throw at it without lowering resolution – at least beyond DLSS itself, which works by rendering the game at a lower resolution and using machine learning to upscale it back up.
In less demanding games like Forza Horizon 5, however, the Razer Blade 14 is an absolute treat, easily able to manage 88 fps at 1600p, and over 100 fps at 1080p. And, in the CPU-heavy Total War: Warhammer 3, the Razer Blade 14 is able to get a respectable 56 fps at 1600p, which is high for a mobile chip like the Ryzen 9 7940HS.
All of this is more or less expected of a gaming laptop of this caliber, but what was really surprising was how long it lasts on battery. In the PCMark10 battery test, the Razer Blade 14 managed to stay alive for 9 hours and 19 minutes, nearly double what other gaming laptops with comparable hardware can m0anage. So, while the charging brick is a pain to carry around, you don’t have to worry about carrying it with you all the time.
Razer Blade 14: The Competition
There aren’t really that many 14-inch gaming laptops out there, especially not with a GPU this powerful. The closest thing right now is the MSI Stealth 14, which is equipped with an RTX 4060 and an Intel Core i7 processor for $1,699. There’s also the Alienware x14, though that little laptop has yet to be updated with a current-generation graphics card. This all makes the Razer Blade 14 the best gaming laptop in its class, if you’re willing to pay the high price of admission.
The Razer Blade 14 is easily the best gaming laptop in its size class, as it shoves an Nvidia RTX 4070 into a 14-inch shell. However its high price tag of $2,399 is its biggest hurdle. Once you get past that, though, the gorgeous display and excellent performance will make this laptop feel at home in your backpack, because there’s nothing quite like being able to play the best PC games while sitting at your coffee shop with a stylish laptop.
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