The Razer Blade 14 is a beast of a laptop, but you'd never know it from just looking at it. These days, Razer slaps its names on everything from gaming chairs to face masks, and its ever-expanding catalog covers just about every accessory a gamer would need, but it's always been Razer's gaming laptops that feel like the marquee products. The Razer Blade series has seen many, many entries come and go, and they've garnered praise from the press and gamers alike. The Razer Blade 14 is no different — well, it's a little bit different, but in a good way.
The smallest of the primary Blade lineup — only the Blade Stealth 13 and Razer Book are technically smaller — opting for a Blade 14 over the larger 15- and 17-inch models might sound like a compromise, but that's really not the case. The 14-inch notebooks come with RTX 30 Series GPUs, and Razer is quick to point out that it's the only 14-inch laptop available with an optional RTX 3070 or greater. The review model provided by Razer was equipped with an RTX 3080 and a 165Hz QHD display that supports AMD FreeSync Premium. Other available options include a 144Hz FHD display, an RTX 3060 GPU by default, or the aforementioned RTX 3070. All of the 14-inch models are required with AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processors.
Looking at the specs alone, it's clear that the Blade 14 is prepared for pretty much anything, and the prices reflect that. The top-of-the-line review model is priced at $2,799.99 via Razer's website. The QHD/3070 model will set you back a more modest $2,199.99, while the FHD/3060 variant is priced at an even more reasonable $1,799.99. None of these are what could be considered "cheap," but if you're in the market for a high-end gaming laptop, you've already made peace with the fact that you're going to have to make a bit of an investment to get something that will perform the way you want.
Speaking of performance, the best way to describe my experience with the Blade 14 is simply to say that it easily handled everything I threw at it. It didn't break a sweat with productivity or imaging apps, as you'd expect, and even some of the highest-end games didn't make much of a dent in the silky smooth 165Hz refresh rate. Games like Escape From Tarkov, which is not only taxing on both the GPU and CPU but is also not yet fully optimized (due to its beta state), are often the kinds of titles that can pose serious problems for even higher-end systems. In this case, the games I tested (which also included Rust, CS:GO, and Destiny 2) performed as well or better than on my much more expensive desktop rig. I had no problem maxing out graphical options and maintaining high frame rates in the 70 to 90fps range, and sometimes much higher. The addition of AMD Freesync means that even momentary dips in framerate don't make the action feel bogged down, which is perfect for titles that see large fluctuations in FPS.
On the design side of things, well, it's a Razer Blade. That's not a bad thing, mind you, but you know what you're getting when you buy one of these machines. The Blade 14 is understated and industrial in its looks, and the edge-to-edge display is a massive improvement over Blades of earlier generations. Adult gamers that want to play games in their offices — on lunch breaks, of course — but still carry their computer to the conference room won't have to worry about getting weird looks from their MacBook-toting coworkers. If this sounds like you, my only recommendation is to temporarily tweak the full RGB Razer Chroma keyboard to something other than a pulsing rainbow, as it may distract your peers.
I've owned a couple of Razer Blades as personal machines and reviewed several more, and one area of concern is always heat. Yes, the laptop gets warm. Any gaming laptop with this kind of power is going to get a little bit toasty if you're embarking on a marathon gaming session, and there's really no way around that. I will say, however, that Razer's new fan design with its latest laptops is far superior to the old layout. There are still two powerful fans situated on the underside of the machine, but they seem to be much more efficient and quieter. It wasn't that long ago that I owned a 15-inch Blade (several iterations ago) that sounded like a Harrier jet taking off. When I had my headphones on it didn't really matter, but my wife wasn't a huge fan, no pun intended.
The Blade 14 is a very solid machine with some available world-beater specs and a price tag to match. It gets so many things right that it's hard to even see the price as a drawback, and anyone that's been playing PC games for a while knows that you tend to get what you pay for. If you pay for one of these, you're going to get one heck of a portable gaming rig. Chef's kiss.
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