Review: Razer Blade 14 (2025)

A few years ago, gaming laptops hit their stride. The Razer Blade 14 was a big part of that. It was impossibly compact, considering the amount of gaming performance it contained, and it set a new standard for powerful, compact gaming laptops.

The Razer Blade 14 is no longer the only option in this regard, but Razer has continued to tweak its design over the years to keep ahead of the competition. With a new OLED panel, a thinner chassis, improved speakers, and the latest hardware, the Razer Blade 14 continues to be one of the most compact gaming laptops you can buy.

A Sleek Ride

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The Razer Blade 14 hasn’t changed much over the years. The main difference is thickness. It’s not as thin as the Razer Blade 16, but it’s now 0.62 inches thick, shrunken down from 0.70 inches in the previous generation. This reduction is mostly about looks, as only part of the chassis is thinner. The bottom has a thicker bump under the keyboard to house the PC components, which Razer calls the “thermal hood.” It requires having taller rubber feet to accommodate, which means it looks thicker on the table than it actually is.

Still, it remains impressively portable, and the design looks great. Razer has done a lot of work over the years to avoid dead giveaways that this is a gaming laptop—no gap between the display and the keyboard, no oversized or obvious vents, and no RGB-lit, jagged edges. Just clean, simple lines. If it weren't for the green snake logo on the lid and RGB-backlit keyboard, you'd never know this was a gaming machine. That's important, as the Blade 14 is meant to be a do-it-all laptop for work, school, and games. The fantastic keyboard and touchpad help in that regard. Unfortunately, the audio system still isn't great, even with the new six-speaker setup.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The Razer Blade 14 has a $1,800 MSRP, which gets you the RTX 5060, 16 GB of RAM, and a terabyte of storage. There are only a few other 14-inch gaming laptops out there for direct comparison: the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, HP Omen Transcend 14, and the Asus TUF Gaming A14. Of those, the RTX 5060 version of the ROG Zephyrus G14 is the cheapest, but the Blade 14 is currently on sale for $1,550 as of publication, so it's not far off. (Prices constantly fluctuate.)

Ports here are decent. It has two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, two USB 4 Type-C ports with both Power Delivery and Display Port 2.1, an HDMI 2.1 output, a microSD card reader, and a headphone jack. It doesn't have Thunderbolt 5 like the Razer Blade 16, but using the USB-C port and HDMI port, it can support two external 4K monitors at 144 Hz.

Not All OLED Is Equal

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The screen introduces OLED to the laptop for the first time. It's a worthwhile upgrade over the mini-LED panel in previous generations. It features a 2880 x 1800 resolution, which is higher than what you typically see on a gaming laptop. That’s especially true on a 14-inch computer, giving it a pixel density of 242 pixels per inch—nearly as sharp as the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

The OLED looks great, but one of the benefits of OLED is HDR in gaming, thanks to the incredible contrast from being able to turn off individual pixels. OLED isn’t known for being bright, but lately, that’s improved on laptops and external monitors. The OLED display on the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10, for example, can be cranked up to over 1,000 nits, creating an impressive HDR effect. The Razer Blade 14, however, only maxes out at 620 nits in HDR and 377 nits in SDR. Because of that, I could hardly tell HDR was even turned on. It’s still a pretty screen, and OLED has other benefits over IPS panels, including faster response times, less motion blur, and higher contrast.

Unfortunately, the Razer Blade 14's OLED panel is not as colorful as the one I tested on the Razer Blade 16, with a color accuracy of 1.3 and 86 percent coverage of the AdobeRGB color space. Also, the 120-Hz refresh rate is standard for OLED laptops, but you can get 240-Hz speeds on laptops that use IPS, like the Alienware 16X Aurora, which happens to be a much cheaper device.

The Razer Blade 14’s biggest competition is the ROG Zephyrus G14. I haven’t tested the latest model yet, but it's a laptop we’ve liked for years now, and it's on sale often enough for less than the Blade 14. The only real difference is that the Blade 14 uses a more powerful AMD processor, the Ryzen AI 9 365. Not only does it perform better in anything CPU-intensive, such as certain games and creative applications, but it’s also a more efficient chip.

That leads to some improved battery life—at least, better than your average gaming laptop. I got 10 hours and 19 minutes in a local video playback test, which is about the most you can expect to get from the device. On the other hand, Asus offers higher-powered configurations of the Zephyrus G14, including one that includes the more powerful Ryzen AI 9 HX.

The RTX 5070 Takes Charge

Photograph: Luke Larsen

Bad news: The RAM is no longer user-upgradeable on the Razer Blade 14, so you'll have to configure it up front with what you need. My review unit had 32 GB, but you can also choose either 16 GB or 64 GB. Because it's soldered, the memory speeds are faster. As for internal storage, you still get one open M.2 slot to expand space if you need it, supporting up to 4 TB.

Razer keeps it simple with the rest of the components. All configurations start with 1 TB of storage, as well as the aforementioned AMD Ryzen AI 9 365. From there, you can choose between the RTX 5060 and 5070. Razer does force you to add more storage or memory based on your graphics choice, so you can't configure the RTX 5070 with 16 GB of RAM, for example.

My review unit performed in line with my expectations for this type of gaming laptop. I found that playing at 2560 x 1600 tended to be a good happy medium between sharpness and smoothness, though I'm sure many will happily keep games at 1920 x 1200 to get the best frame rates.

Looking through the results, this performance might not seem too impressive on paper, especially for the RTX 5070, which sits in the middle of the RTX 50-series GPU lineup. And yes, you probably won't be playing many games at the laptop's native resolution. But these were all tested at max graphics presets without upscaling, frame generation, or ray tracing. So, you can absolutely get better frame rates by using a lower preset and adding a dash of Nvidia's DLSS. I easily got smooth frame rates in all of these games without needing to tank the image quality.

To put some things in perspective, the RTX 5070 in the Razer Blade 14 is around 14 percent faster than the RTX 5060 in the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10, but if you want the extra VRAM that comes with an RTX 5070 Ti, you'll need to upgrade to the larger Razer Blade 16 or one of the higher-powered ROG Zephyrus G14 models.

All things considered, the Razer Blade 14 doesn't blow me away this year, but standing on its pedigree, it remains one of the best gaming laptops you can buy.