The keyboard has gotten a few noteworthy changes. The keys have a 1.5 mm travel distance, giving them a tactile and mechanical feel. The actuation feels heavy, though I like the precision it adds. Razer has also added five macro keys on the right underneath the power button and “dual-LED” RGB backlighting. That means pressing and holding the Function or Shift keys will light up the secondary function of each key that has one. It’s superfluous, yes, but I have to admit it’s neat. The expansive, glass touchpad is great as well. I’ve had problems in the past with misclicks and palm rejection, but that’s all been ironed out.
Razer used to offer two display options, one of which was a 4K panel, but now there’s just one option: an OLED 240-Hz screen with a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel resolution. Interestingly, with the RTX 5090 onboard, this feels like the first display that could produce better frame rates at that high resolution.
The OLED panel is fantastic in terms of image quality. It’s impressive in terms of color saturation (100 percent sRGB, 94 percent AdobeRGB) and color accuracy (Delta-E of 0.42). At a max of 381 nits, it’s not the brightest display in the world, but that’s what you get with OLED. The mini-LED displays Razer formerly offered were considerably brighter both in SDR and HDR, but the high contrast and fast response times of OLED make it unbeatable. I haven’t tested it myself, but the 2025 version of the ROG Zephyrus G16 claims to hit 500 nits with its OLED panel.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
My only complaint with the Blade 16’s screen is it’s extremely glossy. I often found myself increasing the brightness to overcome my own reflection. It can be distracting in the wrong lighting.
The six-speaker audio system is decent. It bests most other gaming laptops on the market, even providing some bass to the mix, good enough for watching YouTube videos or even a movie. It’s still not competitive with Apple’s MacBook Pro. And the 1080p webcam suffices for video calls, but it won’t impress your coworkers. Even in decent lighting, I found the image pretty noisy.
Multi-Frame Generation
My configuration of the Razer Blade 16 has an RTX 5090 Laptop GPU inside, paired with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. That’ll cost you a cool $4,500. You read that right. Part of that sky-high price comes from being forced to opt for 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage. Razer isn’t selling a 16 GB model at all anymore. The starting configuration starts at $3,000, with the Ryzen AI 9 365, RTX 5070 Ti, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. The Blade series has never been cheap, but that price is tough to swallow. You can still buy older models, but even those start at $2,400.
This is also the first time Razer has exclusively offered only AMD for the CPU on the Blade 16. That feels like a big deal. No one can argue anymore that Intel is the more premium option. It’s not as beefy as the “desktop replacement” chip used in last year’s Intel model, but there’s plenty of power here for your gaming needs.
