Slim

There has to be a laptop that does it all and won’t break my back as I haul it around town. I’m sure every mobile-minded gamer has asked themselves that question and come away without a good answer. The one arena I keep coming back to is the 14-inch gaming laptop. Today’s tiny beasts have the performance necessary to keep up with 16- or 18-inch laptop without needing to lug around a huge chunk of aluminum. What’s not to like? Here’s the kicker: it’s only getting more expensive to achieve the perfect compact gaming laptop. The 2025 edition of the Razer Blade 14 is our latest and best example of how improved design is engendering ever-higher prices for already expensive products.

Today’s best compact gaming laptops now cost closer to what we used to spend for larger, hardier portable machines just a few years ago. Razer’s Blade 14 (2025) is the epitome of today’s tariffs-enabled price gouging. The laptop starts at $2,300 MSRP with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060. The model you want, with a GPU capable of maxing out some demanding games at the laptop’s peak resolution, demands $2,600. That’s $100 more than the starting price of the 2024 Blade 14. Currently, the Blade 14 (2025) is on sale through Razer’s website for closer to $2,300. It could stay at that price permanently, but I can only suspect that with Trump’s asinine tariff talk, gadgets can only ever get more expensive.

Razer Blade 14 (2025)

The Razer Blade 14 (2025) is so slim and still packs strong gaming/non-gaming performance. You’ll just have to get used to its odd trackpad first.

Pros

• Performance for what you need
• Slim body
• Great thermal design
• Nice I/O port selection
• Nice screen and audio
• Limited fan noise

Cons

• Odd and off-putting trackpad
• Screen isn’t the brightest
• Ever-more expensive
• Would love an option with better specs

The Razer Blade 14’s main competition is last year’s favorite, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop, now with Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs. Last year’s version asked for around $2,000 with a GeForce RTX 4070. Today’s latest Zephyrus model will demand the same price for a better RTX 5070 Ti GPU and an AMD Ryzen AI 9 270. The two 14-inch gaming laptops are neck and neck, but the Blade 14 (2025) muscles space for itself in a crowded market due to a few quality-of-life features and excellent thermal management. We can have nice things and the Blade 14 (2025) proves that. We’ll just have to spend more and more every year to cling onto our quality computers. If you’re looking for something that may cost less, you could search for an Asus TUF Gaming A14 that could clock in at less than $2,000.

Despite the recent controversy with buggy hardware and software on the Razer Blade 16, I experienced little of the claimed performance issues with the Blade 14 (2025). However, I had noticed crashes when exiting games before I made sure to download the latest firmware. After that, the laptop was smooth sailing save for all the regular issues I have with Windows 11. There’s a part of me that wishes Razer would step out of its comfort zone. The gaming brand refuses to make another Blade Stealth with that calming pink tone, so we’re left with the company’s usual black box and its big, glowing Razer logo stenciled on the lid. Past 14-inch models like the 2021 design could pack up to an RTX 3080-level GPU (and those cost less than today’s RTX 5070 model). For such a slim design, the performance you get with the modern $2,300 model is exactly what you need for a device of this size.

The Blade 14 takes some getting used to

You’ll want a mouse nearby to avoid using the Blade 14 (2025)’s annoying trackpad. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

The new Razer Blade 14 is smaller than last year’s model, but by such a minimal degree you’d have to squint to tell the difference. It’s 0.66 inches at its thickest point. Slipping this laptop into a backpack is likely one of my greatest pleasures despite the fact you’ll still need to haul around the hefty 200W power brick if you plan to play your favorite games. Though the Blade 14 (2025) weighs in at 3.59 pounds, it will feel slightly heavier than many other thin-and-light laptop designs. That’s to be expected, and it’s a tradeoff I’d take with a smile on my face. The new Blade 14 is the kind of device that offers the mobility you can only dream of when trying to haul a 16-inch beast around.

The Blade 14 (2025)is a more subtle notebook than either the Razer Blade 16 or Blade 18. Yes, the rear panel and the triple-snake logo glow nuclear green during use, but without any bottom RGB you can get away with keeping it next to you in a crowded college auditorium so long as you remember to turn off the bright, per-key RGB lights. Using the Blade 14 (2025) would be smooth sailing after that if only Razer would spend more time paying attention to the overall feel of its personal computers. Like all its other anodized aluminum matte black laptops, the new Blade 14 is a smudge magnet. The lid and palm rests will be first to look grody with enough manhandling. The keys will soon develop unsightly smears, whether or not you dip your digits into the odd Fritos bag. At the very least, the Blade 14 (2025) comes with a great selection of I/O ports. Besides the proprietary charging port and headphone jack, you’ll get a USB 4 Type-C and USB-A on either side of the device. There’s an additional HDMI 2.1 and microSD card slot, which came in handy for on-the-go video editing.

© Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

It took me longer to get used to the feel of both the keyboard and trackpad. I had to give the laptop some leeway after fawning so hard for the Alienware 16 Area-51 and its full mechanical keyboard, but after enough time I could start to appreciate the Razer laptop’s thin keys even though I’d prefer something with more clacky sounds and travel. There’s a good deal of separation between each key to avoid any misclicks and I never felt like my fingers had to reorient to find the right key without looking. The keyboard has a small amount of feedback response with every key press—better than the squishy feel that turned me off the HP Omen Max 16. It’s enough to make the Blade 14 (2025) worth typing on—more than your average Apple Magic Keyboard. Those who want a thin, mobile device can’t ask for much better, even if I may dream of something more.

Compared to the keyboard, the new Blade 14’s trackpad is a hate-hate design. The large panel is flat and does a good job at palm rejection (a problem I’ve had on previous Razer Blade models). The issue is the interior of the trackpad is sloped toward the end facing the user. That means if you try to click toward the top of the pad, you won’t be able to register any depth outside capacitive touch. Scrolling to the top of a webpage will result in the odd sensation where you press into the trackpad to click, but then get no response. If you’re like me, and you want haptic feedback on your clicks, you’re forced to press down toward the bottom of the trackpad.

With enough time, I could find a rhythm that would make the Razer Blade 14 (2025) my main PC for work and pleasure. It’s in that mold that the refreshed gaming laptop hits its home run. The notebook can do everything I want and look good while doing it.

So slim and still surprisingly powerful

It took way too much time to remove smudges on the Blade 14. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

My edition of the Razer Blade 14 (2025) came packed an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU along with 32GB of RAM (soldered to the device, so no upgrading, unfortunately). That processor is a 10-core, 20-thread CPU based on the chipmaker’s latest Strix Point Zen 5 microarchitecture. Suffice it to say, the Strix Point CPU series is built for smaller laptops with lower power demand. and it’s proved very effective in notebooks like last year’s Asus TUF Gaming A14 when paired with a discrete GPU. In the case of the Blade 14 (2025), that’s the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 running at 115W TGP, or total graphics power. This is a higher power draw than some laptops, such as the upcoming Framework Laptop 16, and it promises to eek out more performance than some competing designs.

After downloading the latest drivers and firmware through Razer Synapse (a must if you want to avoid any odd issues that would stall when exiting games), the Blade 14 (2025) performed as well as can be expected in synthetic benchmarks. It easily beats out the 2024 small frame competitors, especially in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 multi-core tests, but it can’t stand toe-to-toe with its larger cousins sporting higher-end gaming laptop CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra HX line. The Blade 14 (2025) didn’t even get into the same ballpark of a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 in these tests. In multiple 3DMark, the new Blade 14 will sit a few thousand points below laptops with an RTX 5080. Instead, it proved an incredibly balanced machine capable of hitting high frame rates in multiple games I tested, better than 2024’s best examples of 14-inchers.

The Blade 14 (2025) will meet its match when you try pushing ray tracing settings. Games like Black Myth: Wukong survive ray tracing with their automatic DLSS settings picking up the slack. The sweet spot in a game like Cyberpunk 2077 is to stick ray tracing on low settings with DLSS on auto, which can net around 65 fps in benchmarks and a little less in gameplay. Without DLSS, you’ll get slightly more than 40 fps in those same scenarios, the same as if you set it to DLSS Ultra settings. A game such as Marvel’s Spider-Man 2—already a difficult game to run on most PCs—will struggle to achieve playable frame rates at the Blade 14’s max resolution. Even when relying on DLSS, you may need to supress the inclination to dial up graphics and ray tracing settings to high if you even hope to play at a minimum 30 fps.

All of that, plus the laptop rarely felt more than slightly warm under my palms. With a laser thermometer, the Blade 14 (2025) surface temperature near the screen read around 103 degrees Fahrenheit but only 85 degrees on the palm rest. Even during play, the gaming laptop didn’t make my fingers toasty, and it kept the heat away from the sides where I’d use a mouse (better to avoid the trackpad issues altogether).

Though I have not tried the version with an RTX 5060, that GPU will necessarily limit how hard you can push your games on the Blade 14. Gamers have a one track mind. The first and last thing they care about is whether a device can run the latest titles with all the fixings—all settings on Ultra and ray tracing turned up—and still maintain a 60 fps or higher frame rate. Inevitably, the Blade 14 (2025) will find its limits.

The real small all-rounder

The Blade 14 (2025) would make many graphics tasks easier at the cost of battery life. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

We’ve had enough months to settle in with Nvidia’s GPU lineup. Long gone is any talk that the desktop RTX 5070 would somehow be more powerful than the RTX 4090, the previous-gen flagship. The laptop variant of this GPU is designed for smaller devices such as the Blade 14 (2025) with its limited resolution and refresh rate. Even if you push a game to hit double-digit frame rates with 50-series exclusive multi-frame gen—which inserts AI generated frames between rendered frames to artificially increase performance—the Blade 14 (2025) isn’t going to represent them on-screen with a mere 120Hz display. Instead, Nvidia has tried to showcase other uses for its RTX 50-series GPUs beyond downloading yet another game from your overstuffed Steam library centering on the new Blade 14.

I normally run a Blender test with my laptops, where I guage how long it takes the program to render a scene with a car on both the CPU and GPU. Despite the strength of AMD’s Strix Point, the Blade 14 (2025) will still not be as fast as the M4 in a 14-inch MacBook Pro. A discrete GPU will render such scenes three times as fast as the latest MacBook’s GPU, though that’s a difference of 17 seconds versus 55. Nvidia’s latest GPU’s also support improved video encoding features on top of the normal rendering enhancements from a discrete GPU. All that sounds well and good for specific workflows, but you’ll have to wrestle with the battery issues common to all gaming laptops of this caliber. Relying on the Blade 14’s Strix Point integrated GPU to save on battery will leave you dissapointed. In our Blender test, the Blade 14 (2025) was barely a minute faster on the AMD Radeon 880 graphics than running directly on the CPU.

Past Razer Blade 14 models could support screens with higher refresh rates up to 165Hz. Compared to that, the Blade 14 (2025) may seem more humdrum. The new laptop packs an OLED display with 2,880 x 1,800 resolution and a max of 120Hz refresh rate. Some may look at the price and wonder why we couldn’t have better refresh rates, but the display manages to strike a balance between speeds and pretty visuals.

The Blade 14 (2025)’s OLED display is the kind of pretty that’s so standard now among higher-end devices. It’s a good thing then, that the display is so especially nice to look at. The added bonus is Razer pushed the side and top screen bezels farther to the edge, maximizing the space I use to bask in those deep blacks promised by organic light-emitting diode displays.

This screen type offers better blacks and contrast than other competing displays. The main drawback is they are normally dimmer than other screens with a backlight, like mini LED. I never had a situation where I couldn’t see the screen in a dark room or where a bright light drowned out what was happening. Instead, the screen is a little too reflective. When you load dark colors onto the screen, the Blade 14 (2025) is so mirror-like I could read my own shirt. The reflectivity never proved so bad it distracted me from work or gaming, but it could be a major hassle if your attention tends to stray.

This laptop is also a great machine for most of your streaming content. The Blade 14 (2025) has a six speakers with support for THX spatial audio. Sound from the laptop came through clear and accurate. I wasn’t left grabbing for the nearest pair of high-quality headphones even when watching YouTube videos or loading up a game with my favorite soundtrack. Listening to in-game sound is even better thanks to its very minimal fan noise. The new Blade 14’s secret weapon is not necessarily its components, but the fact that everything runs so smoothly without any obtrusive noise to distract you.

You’ll still need a plug nearby

The Blade 14 (2025) sports a lovely keyboard attached to a rage-enducing trackpad. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

Gaming laptops continue to have severe battery life issues. Even if you eschew any more hardcore programs and only use this laptop to browse the web, you’ll never achieve anything close to a full-day of battery life. The Blade 14 (2025) doesn’t break that trend, but it does better than most.

In practice, the laptop can maintain itself on the default balanced power settings off-plug for a little more than four hours. After that, the it was begging for a charger. That number was consistent over weeks using the new Blade 14. The laptop would much rather you work with a plug nearby. With the 200W power brick connected to the its proprietary charging port, I could go from near 20% to almost full in under 40 minutes. I prefer to travel light, in which case I sometimes left the charger at work just so I didn’t have to carry it around with me.

In the end, even the most mobile gaming laptops will still be limited in just how easy it is to bring them around. The Blade 14 (2025) is simply slightly better than most, and in that way it’s one of my favorite laptops of the year. Despite all my hangups with its trackpad and keyboard, it’s the kind of device I wish I could keep close by, though perhaps out of a sense of entitlement after paying well over $2,000 for it.

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