Review: Razer Blade 14

I don’t usually preorder games, but I was so eager to play Starfield that I made an exception. I shelled out extra cash to play the game a meager five days early. There was just one problem. I would be out of town at a nerd con for those exact same five days. Fortunately, the Razer Blade 14 laptop made it possible for me to do both.

Razer’s latest gaming laptop packs AMD’s beefy new Ryzen 9 7940HS processor, Nvidia’s RTX 40-Series GPU, and up to 32 GB of RAM. It’s an absolute sledgehammer of specs that’s capable of tearing through the most demanding games you can play. That's great! My plan to play Starfield in a hotel while I was on vacation meant I needed all the power I could get.

Nearly every aspect of the 14-inch Razer Blade feels premium in a way that few laptops without an Apple logo on them pull off. The aluminum chassis is sturdy and sleek, with a smooth and spacious trackpad. There’s a USB-A and USB-C port on both the left and ride side of the device, making it convenient to plug in peripherals no matter where you set it up.

While the Blade can charge via USB-C, all that horsepower under the hood requires a bit more energy than your typical charging block can provide. The laptop comes with its own proprietary charging cable that plugs into the left side, as well as a substantial power block—the size of brick that you’d expect to see next to a console like the PS5. If you’re planning to play on this thing while it’s charging, you’ll probably need that hefty block. That can be a damper on its portability, but for charging while it’s idle, USB-C can suffice.

Yet, in my testing, I only occasionally needed to worry about the charging situation. The Blade 14 holds a 68.1 watt-hour battery which Razer claims will give the laptop up to 10 hours of battery life for a “full day of work or play.” That’s obviously going to be cut down quite a bit if you run that 4070 graphics card at full throttle on a game like Starfield, but I still managed to play for several hours without even thinking about battery life.

If I were a less disciplined writer, I could spend this entire review talking about the display on this laptop. The Razer Blade 14 features a 16:10 IPS display with a dense 2,560 x 1,600 resolution. The slightly-taller-than-usual aspect ratio has a subtle but real effect on how games feel. It’s kind of like when movies switch to Imax for action scenes, but all the time.

The screen goes almost all the way to the edge with barely any bezel, and it’s almost agonizingly bright. I kept it at around 30 to 40 percent brightness most of the time, and even then it often felt too bright. Its stellar contrast ratio contributed to this feeling quite a bit. For a screen that can put out nearly 500 nits of light, the black levels are so deep that on darker parts of an image, the screen feels like it disappears in a dark room.

The color reproduction on the screen is similarly impressive. Razer says that the display reproduces 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color space, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s capable of displaying some ridiculously rich colors. In fact, colors looked so good on this screen that it took me a lot longer than it should have to notice that Starfield’s color grading is kind of awful.

After I got back, I moved Starfield play over to another PC, but even while playing on bigger displays and more powerful machines, I found myself missing the Blade. A 14-inch screen might be a little small by gaming laptop standards, but it’s such a luxurious display that it makes some of my favorite monitors in my house feel subpar.

Oh, yes, and as if that weren’t enough, it also reaches a 240-Hz screen refresh rate. Not that this mattered much while playing Starfield, but when playing a few rounds of Overwatch 2, I’d never experienced anything smoother.

The Razer Blade 14's keyboard complements the luxurious feel of the display as well. Its low-profile, chiclet-style keys are soft and nearly silent, while having enough height and spacing to easily feel your way around. The trackpad is rather large and smooth as butter. It's even more spacious than the trackpad on my Macbook Air, but the palm rejection was so effective I never had any issues while typing.

The Razer Blade 14 may be a gorgeous powerhouse, but it’s not without its minor annoyances. The fans necessary to keep this thing from becoming a portable oven are far from silent. The noise didn’t quite rise to the point of being unbearable, and plenty of other gaming laptops are louder, but you’ll definitely hear it while playing games that tax the GPU.

Speaking of heat, if you plan to carry this laptop around in a bag, you might want to consider adjusting your power settings during transport. At one point during my travels, I was playing for a bit but then had to relocate. I closed the laptop and put it in my bag. When I pulled it out a little while later, it was hot to the touch—not so hot that it would cause burns or anything, but hot enough that I recoiled as soon as I touched it.

To be perfectly clear, this was a bit of a user error problem. Gaming laptops tend to get hot, especially if you put them into a bag shortly after using them. But it does illustrate that it’s important to be careful with all that power.

The final major nuisance is probably the one that will be the sticking point for most people: the price. Starting at $2,400 for the model with the Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card and 16 GB of RAM, and jumping to $2,800 for the 4070 with 32 GB of RAM, the sticker shock is strong with this one. The similarly-specced Asus Rog Zephyrus G14 starts at $1,850. Though there are a few differences, like a lower-refresh-rate screen and no 4070 option, no one would blame you for waiting for a sale.

Yet despite the heat, the noise, and a price you'd have to pole vault over, the Blade 14 is one of the nicest laptops I’ve ever used. I’ve been building my own PC for two decades and usually do most of my gaming on the custom rig I’ve made. But if anything could convince me to become a laptop gamer, it’s this thing.