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The Blade 16 has been Razer’s flagship gaming laptop for years, but the thinner, sleeker design on 2025’s Blade 14

Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers.
The Blade 16 has been Razer’s flagship gaming laptop for years, but the thinner, sleeker design on 2025’s Blade 14
Sure, it’s not the powerful loadout you can get on a gaming laptop, but that isn’t really the point here. Razer scaled things back with the Blade 14 for a capable machine that errs on the side of battery efficiency, rather than trying to strongarm performance with heavy hardware.
For example, the Blade 14 supports 100W of total graphics power, going up to 115W with Dynamic Boost on, so technically this laptop has more than enough power to support a higher-end GPU like the RTX 5080. However, Razer likely opted for the 5070 to reign in heat and power consumption.
To compare, the 14-inch Asus Zephyrus G14 has the 5080, and that thing gets hot. Even with the fans cranking (which are not quiet), the reality of gaming on a 14-inch means accounting for these factors, of which the Blade 14 mitigates with this hardware.
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Gaming performance while plugged in is fantastic, with smooth, lag-free visuals in “Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered”, “Diablo IV”, and “Cyberpunk 2077”. The latter, at 3K resolution, pushes things to the top end, with an average right around 40 FPS and some light visual stuttering, but nothing that feels problematic. Swapping to a more manageable 1200p resolution drastically improved performance.
In terms of benchmarking, the Blade 14 holds its own against two powerful 16-inch gaming laptops we’ve tested this year, the MSI Stealth 16 AI, and the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, but shows a slight dip in raw power to the hardware in those (much larger) systems.
The Blade 14 has nice I/O coverage, as well. You’ve got two USB4 Type-C ports with Display Port 2.1 and power delivery support on either side, two USB-A ports on either side, an HDMI port (on the right side), and a MicroSD card reader.
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On the left side, you also have the proprietary charging port for the 200W power brick. This is the most efficient form of power delivery, but it will charge via USB-C as long as you have the appropriate wattage. Just don’t expect plugged-in performance if you’re gaming on this with a 65W charger.
The RGB lighting effects on the keyboard don’t disappoint, either. Razer does a great job at maximizing the intensity and punch of each individual key, with minimal light leakage from the corners of the keys for a dramatic effect.
Hopping into Balanced mode goes a long way toward maximizing battery life, however. Turning the refresh rate down to 60Hz and reducing brightness to half resulted in a little over nine hours of runtime during our battery testing — very good for a gaming laptop.
For sustained gaming on battery, you can expect two to three hours, which is more or less standard, although less demanding games will undoubtedly push that past that to four to five. The takeaway here is that the Blade 14 can stay alive in low-demand sessions or while idle much longer than most gaming laptops, which tend to be a lot thirstier.
The Razer Blade 14
Source : ZDNet