Razer Blade 14 (2025) Review

Introduction

The 2025 Razer Blade 14 is not an entirely dynamic laptop in one sense. It’s primarily a generational refresh, here to make use of Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series graphics cards. 

It is a good job the existing Razer Blade 14 design is ageing beautifully. Far less attention-grabbing — and some might say less try-hard — than the Asus Zephyrus G14, it’s a simple, moody black (or much less moody silver) metal laptop with real confidence and restraint. 

The Razer Blade 14’s performance is excellent, and its keyboard and touchpad are on par with some of the Windows category’s best. As in previous generations, you get a blend of the best bits of lifestyle and gaming laptops. 

And, as ever, it doesn’t come cheap. My review spec with an Nvidia RTX 5070 will cost you around £2299. Razer is not out to court the budget buyer, but its pricing is not too far removed from similar top-tier slim and light designs. 

Design

• Slim metal casing
• Low weight for a gaming laptop
• Silver and black finish options

I have reviewed a bunch of Razer Blade laptops in my time, and they have always been black, just like the 2025 Razer Blade 14. 

It’s all-black, except for the light-up green Razer logo on the lid. And this style was one of the original PCs to give gaming laptops the sort of design attention to detail we only used to see in ultraportables.

There are more of these now, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. But the concept is still hard enough to pull off that the Razer Blade 14 stands out in the wider industry. 

It feels fantastic and uses metal panels throughout, even though this can introduce some heat conduction headaches. A Razer Blade 14 weighs 1.63kg and this is Razer’s “thinnest Razer Blade 14 ever” apparently, although at 16.2mm it’s not competing with the most svelte among the ultraportable crowd. My own sample weighs 1.61kg according to my scales. 

It’s around 3mm thicker and 300g lighter than the silver standard for non-gaming slim and light PCs. But when you consider what Razer has packed in here, those vital statistics are still undeniably impressive. 

I used the Razer Blade 14 as a portable PC for a couple of weeks, carrying it around in a rucksack. My main concern was not the weight — a non-issue — but that I might end up scraping the black anodised aluminium finish. 

The Mercury silver version would, I imagine, be more forgiving of the odd scrape, but it costs an eye-watering £400 more than the base Blade 14. Good news: it’s only that price because Mercury only comes in the higher spec version (reviewed here). You’re not actually paying more.  

Screen

• Rich OLED screen
• 120Hz refresh rate
• 613 nit peak brightness with HDR content

The Razer Blade 14 has a beautiful OLED screen, the kind I used to dream of laptops having when this series first appeared more than a decade ago. 

Pretty much every aspect is a hit. 1800p resolution provides excellent sharpness for general office work, and unlike early higher-res gaming laptops, it no longer feels wasted here thanks to technologies like DLSS and frame generation. 

The Razer Blade 14 has wide colour gamut coverage, effectively fulfilling the DCI P3 spectrum like just about all the top OLED laptops of today. And, typical of this display tech, contrast and black levels are excellent thanks to per-pixel light control. 

There are just a couple of potential sore spots to note. I’m starting to see a few new-wave OLED laptops appear with peak brightness far in excess of what the Razer Blade 14 provides. It can hit up to 417 nits with normal content or 613 nits with HDR video, according to my colorimeter. 

Normal brightness is, well, normal. And HDR brightness is good for this class. But we’re about to see more 1000-plus nit laptops appear. Perhaps we’ll get that in the 2026 Blade 14.

Razer has also used a clever technique to lower the laptop’s weight. Its screen’s top layer is plastic rather than glass. Apple does the same with its MacBook Air line, in order to reduce weight.

As much as I love a good glass screen, though, I can’t say I would likely have noticed much were I not reviewing this PC. Unlike some plastic-screened models, the Razer Blade 14 does not suffer from obvious image distortion caused by the screen surface not being properly flat. It’s more common than you might think. This is a glossy finish display, though, where the blueprint gaming laptop has a reflection-minimising matte finish. 

 This is not a touchscreen either, although gaming laptops typically do not have touch anyway. 

Keyboard and touchpad 

• Quality mechanical glass touchpad
• Standard depth keyboard
• Per-key RGB backlight

The Razer Blade 14’s lifestyle laptop DNA comes to the forefront again in its inputs, for good and (slightly) bad. 

Where some top-end gaming models have had among the most interesting laptop keyboards I’ve used — mechanical designs in particular — this one is a lot more conventional. It’s a lot like an Apple MacBook keyboard with a darker, perhaps a little faster, feel. 

As a fan of deeper keyboards, I tend to favour something a bit more substantial. But given how much I also work from a MacBook Air, I can’t really complain too much. 

The Razer Blade 14 does have a much more advanced keyboard backlight than any MacBook, though. Like all the top gaming laptops, this is a per-key lighting system. You could pick a different colour for each key if you like. And the control over the brightness level is far more fine-grained than the usual three-level toggle.

You can set animations too, if you want to amp up the gamer looks. 

I’m much more a fan of the touchpad, which I think outclasses those of plenty of style laptops. This is a massive slab of ultra-smooth, almost soft-touch textured glass, far larger than the gaming laptop norm. 

Razer does not use a haptic pad, which is the style ultraportable laptops are gradually moving to, following Apple’s lead. However, I’d much rather use a great mechanical pad clicker, like this one, than mess up a flagship laptop with a half-baked haptic model. 

In my experience, only Apple got the haptic pad right first time. The downside of a mechanical pad is that there’s a horizontal dead zone along the top of the pad. And the depth of the click is slightly greater at the bottom than at the top. I consider the clicker feel to be top-tier stuff, though, and it’s still an A-grade pad among its mechanical peers. 

Performance 

• Great gaming and general performance
• Predictably, it gets hot under pressure
• Noticeable fan noise

The Razer Blade 14 has performance-driven internal components. And as in previous generations, Razer has sided with AMD rather than Intel for the central processor. 

My test laptop has an AMD Ryzen 9 365 AI CPU with 32GB RAM, a 1TB SSD and the Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics card. 

This is not the most powerful hardware you can fit in a laptop, but it’s close. And it’s arguably the most powerful graphics card you want to fit into this size of laptop without having to compromise on the wattage a card can draw. 

Razer rates the RTX 5070 at 100W draw, plus 15W boost, which is the top end of this card’s official power limit. Always nice to feel like you’re getting the most out of your hardware’s spec, right?

This laptop can run any game you like at present, including Cyberpunk 2077, comfortably. 

Even after fiddling around with the Razer apps’ GPU overclocking features, I found the RTX 5070 draws 100W consistently when playing a demanding game. And it can briefly boost into the 110W range by borrowing power from the CPU, although it only seems to do this for short stints. 

With this sort of power, games like Returnal (124fps at 1080p) and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction (171fps at 1080p) are a cinch. Cyberpunk 2077 is a fairer test of its abilities. 

While it averages 95.9fps at 1080p with Ultra settings, this drops to a below 60fps average of 55.45fps at QHD. However, we’re still in a playable zone at native 1800p resolution with everything maxed bar path tracing (but including ray tracing), at 41fps, once we switch on DLSS. It’s unplayable without DLSS at such elevated settings.

I couldn’t get frame generation to turn on properly with full ray tracing enabled, but I did reach 155fps in the game’s benchmark without it turned on. 

These results show the benefit of sticking to a reasonable GPU ceiling for this design. We saw lower results from the Asus Zephyrus G16 with a higher-end RTX 5080 in some tests, which led us to assume the cooling/casing equation was causing some significant thermal throttling. 

In the Razer Blade 14, performance is much closer to what’s expected. 

There are still compromises to note, mind. The Razer Blade 14’s fans are fairly loud under strain. And despite their effective air-shifting, parts of the casing do get very warm swiftly. Razer does a decent job of keeping the heat away from the parts your fingers typically touch, though. 

Connections, speaker and webcam

• Fair six-driver speaker arrangement
• 1080p webcam
• HDMI 2.1

The Razer Blade 14 has a nicely diverse set of connections, but unlike some of the best mostly home-bound gaming laptops, they are all arranged along the sides. Rear ports allow for neater cable management, and we get none here. 

Alongside the proprietary power cable, there are two USB-As, two USB-Cs, a microSD, full-size HDMI and 3.5mm headset connector. Digging deeper into the specs, the HDMI is a v2.1 connector, and neither of the USB-Cs supports Thunderbolt, as this is an AMD CPU laptop. 

They are USB4 connectors, though, with 40Gbps bandwidth and good 100W Power Delivery, for USB charging should you not want to lug around the proprietary charger. 

The Razer Blade 14 speakers are above average for a gaming laptop, with a 6-speaker array that provides decent sound quality and at least some perception of bass. They aren’t close to a MacBook in terms of volume or power. But the same can be said for the vast majority of Windows PCs. 

The webcam is decent, but predictably does not push the envelope like some ultraportables do. This is a 1080p camera with decent detail and dynamic range for a webcam. For better or worse, the image looks less punched-up than that of the laptops that talk big about the AI optimisation of the picture. 

Battery life

• Brick type 200W power adapter
• Middling battery life by 2025 standards
• Supports USB-C charging

The Razer Blade 14 has a 72Wh battery, a typical capacity for an ultraportable. But Razer’s larger models get much closer to the 99Wh maximum for laptops you want to be able take on-board airplanes without issue. 

Battery life is solid for a gaming laptop, but not even close to the kind of stamina we see from the latest slim and light models, many of which can hold on for 15-20 hours of light work. The Razer Blade 14 will last just under eight hours, according to my testing with PC Mark 10. It’s roughly indicative of what you’ll get from fairly careful, light use. 

The Razer Blade 14 may also lose a few portability points for its adapter. While this 200W power supply is compact by gaming PC standards, it’s a lot bulkier than a standard 65W PSU. 

Good news: you can use USB-C to charge the Razer Blade 14 too, just at a lower rate. And you won’t, of course, get the full power when using such an adapter. 

Should you buy it?

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