Razer Blade 14 2025 review - a portable gaming laptop powerhouse

The pursuit of trying to create a truly portable, slim, lightweight laptop that can deliver proper gaming performance is one that has been undertaken for years now, with only stuttering success along the way. The Razer Blade 14, though, is one of the best attempts we've yet seen. It's expensive, but it's really, really good, so long as battery life isn't your biggest priority.

Leaping straight onto our best gaming laptop guide as the best slim 14-inch model, it delivers solid gaming performance from its surprisingly elegant and light chassis. To find out just why this Razer laptop is so good - and where it still has a few shortcomings - just read on below.

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Specs

The Razer Blade 14 specs can't compete with much larger gaming laptops, but this machine can still be bought with either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 or RTX 5060 GPU. The latter is definitely more of an entry-level gaming GPU, but the RTX 5070 is a decently powerful chip with its 4,608 CUDA cores able to deliver reliable 1080p gaming performance in modern AAA games, and even stretch to 1440p gaming in some titles too.

All versions of this laptop also pack an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU, which is a 10-core chip that can process 20 threads at once, making it almost too powerful for a compact laptop such as this one, especially as all those cores aren't particularly useful for gaming. Still, for general use, you certainly won't be left wanting for multi-core processing power.

Opt for the RTX 5060 version, and you're limited to a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM, which is still enough for most uses. However, we do generally recommend that most people opt for 32GB of RAM when building a gaming PC these days, as games and other apps are getting ever more RAM-hungry.

Pick the RTX 5070 version, and you'll automatically be upgraded to a 2TB SSD and 64GB of RAM, which is actually again somewhat excessive. If you're looking to save a little cash, opting for the 32GB RAM version with a 1TB SSD is an ideal middle ground - you can always expand your game library by upgrading the SSD or plugging in an external SSD.

Speaking of upgrades, while the SSD can be switched out, the RAM can't, as it's soldered in place. These days, you have to step up to a larger gaming laptop, such as the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16, to get upgradable SODIMM RAM slots.

Elsewhere, this laptop packs in a 120Hz OLED display with a very high 2,880 x 1,800 resolution. That makes for an ultra-sharp image, and the fast response time of the OLED panel means you get really solid gaming performance as well.

In terms of connections, this laptop has a decent selection, with plenty of ports being full-size versions, despite the small size of this machine. On the left side is a proprietary power port, a USB-A port (USB 3.2 Gen 2), a USB-C port (USB 4), and a combi audio jack. Then, on the right is a microSD slot, another pair of USB-A and USB-C ports, and a Kensington lock slot.

Design

The Razer Blade 14 is one seriously slick gaming laptop. While its design hasn't changed much from last year's model, it remains a really premium-looking machine with a style that adds just the right amount of visual flair to an otherwise clean, sensible look.

Built all from aluminum, the exterior is available in either an anodized black or plain metal finish (called Mercury), the latter of which is every bit the MacBook Pro-mimicking look. The addition of a fairly large and green-backlit Razer logo on the lid is the only adornment, and while it does have a hint of a slightly cheesy "gamer" styling to it, the result is just subtle enough not to be garish.

On the inside, you get RGB backlighting on the keys, which is a bit kaleidoscopic and dazzling in its default mode, but you can tone down the brightness and color (or turn it off completely) via Razer's software. Otherwise, the inside is just as clean and tidy as the exterior.

For pure build quality, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 just takes the crown, as its metal chassis is just a bit thicker and sturdier-feeling, with more nicely rounded corners. Plus, its screen is flushly integrated with its surround, whereas the Blade 14 has a prominent bezel.

However, the Blade 14 is overall a better-looking machine that's slightly smaller, although surprisingly, it's around 100g heavier than the Asus model. Not that this is a heavy laptop, by any means. It weighs just 1.63kg (3.59lbs) and it measures just 16.2mm thick at its thickest point.

Getting inside this laptop is simple enough. You'll need some Torx screwdriver bits, but removing just ten screws gets you access to the entire underside of the machine, including the SSD, Wi-Fi card, and battery.

One negative to note is that the power plug is really stiff, requiring a lot of force to push in and remove. It's basically the opposite of Apple's old MagSafe tech that would ensure your laptop wouldn't be dragged to the ground if you snagged its cable. Here, your laptop will go flying.

Display and speakers

The 14-inch, 120Hz, OLED display in this laptop is fantastic. Its combination of a decently fast refresh rate with the effectively instant response time of its OLED panel means games feel really smooth and responsive. A higher refresh rate would allow for an even more competitive feel - like you get on the 240Hz+ screens on our best gaming monitor guide - but 120Hz is plenty fast enough for any single-player game and more casual multiplayer titles.

What's more, the ability of OLED panels to fully turn off each individual pixel means you get effectively infinite contrast, bringing an incredible amount of depth to whatever you're watching. Against this blackness, colors really pop, and this display can stretch all the way to providing HDR colors.

What's more, this panel produces accurate colors right out of the box. There are none of the oversaturated colors or strangely imbalanced colors you see on some displays.

Of course, the resolution of 2,880 x 1,800 is far too high to view Windows at 100% most of the time on a 14-inch screen, so instead you'll need to use Windows scaling to increase the size of text and icons. This laptop had Windows recommend using 125% scaling, whereas the same size screen on the Asus G14 defaulted to 200%, which is the setting I used.

This effectively makes the usable desktop resolution the equivalent of 1,440 x 900. This makes some apps feel a bit cramped, and working with multiple windows open side-by-side is not an option, but it's fine for most uses. In particular, if you do find you need to zoom out to see more of an Excel document, for instance, the extra underlying resolution means all the details can be seen properly.

As for audio, this laptop manages to pack in four drivers, with pinhole grilles on the top surface providing direct audio from the tweeters and grilles on the underside letting the little sub drivers breathe. The quartet combines to provide loads of volume, plenty of clarity, and a little bit of bass, too.

Keyboard and trackpad

Given this is a small, 14-inch laptop, it's no surprise that it doesn't manage to pack in a numpad, and it also uses a compact cursor key arrangement. However, its keyboard is otherwise excellent. The key travel is light but defined, while the keyboard has almost no flex to it, making for an effortless, precise typing feel.

The RGB backlighting can look a little bit shimmery - a result, seemingly, of using dithering or pulsing to modulate the color and brightness - and does get pointlessly bright. However, it also dims to a very low level, which is great for just providing enough readability of the key legends in the dark without making for needless light pollution. The legend font is also really clear and easy to read.

The trackpad is equally excellent. It's impressively large, filling nearly every millimeter from the keyboard's edge to the front of the laptop. It also uses an etched glass surface for a smooth and hard-wearing glide and is very responsive.

Performance

I tested the Razer Blade 14 for several weeks, using it for daily tasks, such as writing and watching video, along with having plenty of gaming sessions. I also ran it through a range of benchmarks for both productivity and gaming.

I ran the gaming tests at three main settings. Firstly, games were run at the native 2,880 x 1,800 resolution of the screen, to see if gaming at this quite high resolution is feasible. Then, I dropped to 1600p (1,600 x 1,440), 1200p, and 1080p, to see how gaming at progressively lower resolutions fared. I ran tests at both 1200p and 1080p so you can see performance for gaming at a low resolution that matches this screen's 16:10 aspect ratio, as well as at the 16:9 ratio used by most gaming monitors, making for a more direct comparison to the benchmarks in our graphics card reviews.

I also tested using DLSS upscaling and frame generation to see if these technologies can allow you to game at the screen's native resolution while maintaining playable performance.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 was our first test, as it's still a challenge for any graphics card, and is packed with options for cranking up ray tracing and testing the latest upscaling and frame generation technologies.

Right out the gate, running Cyberpunk 2077 on this laptop with no ray tracing, but at the screen's full 1800p resolution, delivered a surprisingly playable frame rate. Its 47fps average and 35fps 1% low is plenty for playing with a controller and just about enough for playing with a keyboard and mouse. Turn on DLSS upscaling and you get a nice steady increase in frame rate with a fairly minimal impact on image quality, even with the DLSS Performance setting (which renders the game at 1,600 x 900).

Turn on 2x frame generation and we're hitting over 100fps, while 4x frame gen stretches to 163fps. However, given the added latency of frame generation and the already solid 79fps frame rate just using upscaling, I'd choose to play with no more than 2x frame gen in this instance.

Despite this solid showing so far, turning on ray tracing hits this laptop hard. At 1800p it's unplayable, while at 1600p it just averages 39fps. At 1080p it just passes 40fps, and, with upscaling and frame gen, it could just about reach a playable level, but that's a whole lot of compromise. The games still looks great without ray tracing, and in this instance, I'd recommend playing with it turned off.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is our next benchmark, and this game demands some level of ray tracing at all times. This makes it a good test to show how this laptop will cope with future AAA games, as more and more titles are now requiring ray tracing.

Sure enough, the ray tracing requirement of this game, along with this laptop's RTX 5070 only having 8GB of VRAM, means this laptop struggles at high resolutions when using ultra detail settings. At 1800p and 1600p, it could sometimes start out with a decent frame rate but would quickly fill up the VRAM and grind to a halt. Only at 1200p  and 1080p could it return a steady frame rate, and even then, it couldn't top 50fps.

Lowering the game's details settings to medium unlocks some more performance, with 1800p now becoming playable. Its average of 57fps may not sound all that impressive, but it is actually a playable rate in a slower-paced game like this, and the game still looks fantastic at these settings. Plus, upscaling and frame gen are on hand to bump that frame rate up to close to 100fps without much impact on image quality.

F1 24

F1 24 still makes for a demanding test of PC graphics, despite being superseded by the latest F1 25, thanks in part to including ray tracing support that can seriously test even the latest GPUs.

Sure enough, in our tests, this laptop simply couldn't cope with running the game maxed out at 1800p, with the VRAM again filling up and choking performance. Even engaging DLSS upscaling proved somewhat unreliable at providing consistent performance. With DLSS on the quality setting, performance was still very bad, and while our benchmark using balanced upscaling shows decent numbers, the game felt sluggish. As soon as we dropped to 1600p or lower, though, performance was reasonably smooth.

In reality, though, we'd recommend dialing back the ray tracing and detail settings to better balance performance and image quality. Smooth gameplay at 1800p (with a bit of upscaling) with great visuals will definitely be achievable on this laptop.

Cinebench

Cinebench is a stalwart of the CPU-benchmarking industry that provides a great indication of the overall power of any modern CPU. It tests both the speed of a single core - useful as an indication of likely gaming performance - as well as when loading up all 10 cores.

In our benchmark runs, this laptop's AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU came out comfortably behind many competing laptops, in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. However, the margin is small, and this is still a very capable laptop. Its CPU is fast enough to achieve high frame rates in games, and has enough multi-thread processing power for demanding desktop workloads, such as video editing.

Cooling and noise

One area where this laptop really excels is dealing with the heat generated by its powerful components. Its twin fans do get loud when under sustained load, but they do so while managing to keep the base and top of the laptop from getting too hot.

Specifically, I measured the noise level of the fans as being 50dB from a distance of 20cm from the keyboard, while the temperature of the surface of the laptop hit 40°C / 104°F and the underside hit 44°C / 111°F. That compares to a similar noise level for the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, but that laptop got ridiculously hot just above the keyboard, hitting 54°C / 129°F. Meanwhile, even in more general desktop use, that laptop would regularly spin up its fans and sustain a top surface temperature of 47°C / 117°F. With the Blade 14, just a minute or two after running intensive benchmarks, it had already dropped to 32°C / 89.6°F.

Battery

I tested the battery life of the Razer Blade 14 (2025) using two different runs of the PCMark 10 battery tests. The first is the office test, which simulates general desktop usage, including video calls, browsing spreadsheets, and other light tasks that use the integrated Radeon 880M GPU in the AMD Ryzen 9 AI 265 CPU. The other test is the gaming test, which uses the full power of the RTX 5070 for maximum gaming performance.

In that gaming test, this laptop did ok, managing to deliver 98 minutes of game time. Even the very best laptops we've tested have only delivered 10 minutes more (even if gaming handhelds such as the Xbox Ally X can last more than double this time). Also, you can get longer battery life by tweaking your laptop's settings - reducing the desktop resolution, setting an FPS limit, reducing in-game settings, etc - but by default, that's the figure you're looking at.

More disappointingly, this laptop also delivered a poor run time in the office test. It lasted just 244 minutes, which is just over four hours. This is actually slightly more than the Asus Zephyrus G14 but falls well behind the larger Razer Blade 16. Again, there are ways to extend this, but a full day of work or a long-haul flight watching video isn't going to be an option with this laptop.

Price

The Razer Blade 14 (2025) price starts at $2,199.99 for the RTX 5060 / 1TB version of this laptop, although Razer has been listing all models with a $600 discount for several weeks now, so it's just $1,799.99 at the moment. Meanwhile, the RTX 5070 model starts at $2,699.99 (currently $2,099.99) and rises to $2,999.99 ($2,499.99) for the 64GB /2TB option. With those discounts, this is a fantastic-value gaming laptop right now, even despite its meager battery life.

Alternatives

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2025

If you want a similar slim and sleek 14-inch laptop to the Blade 14, but want an even fancier build and even more power, the Asus Zephyrus G14 is the one. It can house an RTX 5080 for a decent step up in peak gaming power compared to the Blade 14. It's also slightly cheaper for any given spec at MSRP, although not consistently so with the current discounts on the Blade 14. However, its battery life is a touch behind the Blade 14, and its small chassis struggles to handle the heat of the RTX 5080.

Read our full Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2024 review for the full picture.

Razer Blade 16 2025

If you just want a slightly bigger screen, the option of even more graphics power (up to an RTX 5090), or really long battery life, the Razer Blade 16 delivers all these upgrades over the Blade 14. Its bigger and heavier (though still impressively slim) chassis allows for a bigger battery and more processing power. You pay a high price for peak specs, though, with the RTX 5090 version costing nearly $4,500.

Read our full Razer Blade 16 review.

Verdict

The Razer Blade 14 (2025) is almost a slam dunk of a gaming laptop. It delivers nearly everything you could want from a sleek and portable gaming machine. It's small and light, it has an amazing screen, its keyboard and trackpad are fantastic, and its gaming performance is solid.

Credit is due to the wonders of DLSS upscaling and frame generation that come with the RTX 5000 series GPUs available in this laptop, too. While both technologies have their limitations, they really excel when used in a machine like this, where you have a high pixel density screen and enough raw performance that just a little helping hand is needed from upscaling and frame gen to get you playable frame rates at the screen's native resolution, all with minimal impact on image quality.

However, the big downside of this laptop is its battery life. Four hours of general use is terrible for a slim and light laptop, even if it's not out of the ordinary for a laptop of this size. In my opinion, Razer should have added a bigger battery to at least get this to six hours, even at the cost of 200g of extra weight.

For more portable gaming ideas, check out our guide to the best laptop games, as well as our guide to buying the best gaming handheld, where we take you through all our recommendations at a range of prices.