07 Jul
Blog

Razer Blade 14 Review: The Gaming Laptop Usurper Has Arrived

Razor blade 14 review 03

Razer blade 14

RRP $ 2,200.00

"The Razer Blade 14 is stealing the crown as the best gaming laptop you can buy right now."

advantages

  • The gaming performance is excellent

  • Colorful 1440p display

  • Surprisingly small

  • Cheaper than Razer Blade 15

  • Great battery life

disadvantage

  • Warm surface temperatures

  • Thick bezels

The Razer Blade 15 was already the smallest gaming laptop in the world. Building an even smaller version of the Razer Blade 14 is, on the one hand, exciting. On the other hand, I had serious concerns about how Razer could possibly keep these components cool enough.

Add in an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and up to an Nvidia RTX 3080 – and you have the potential for a hot mess. Fortunately, the Razer Blade 14 is anything but.

Razer did the impossible and delivers an amazing gaming experience in a tiny form factor. With a lower starting price of $ 1,800, there's little reason to pick the Razer Blade 15 as its smaller brother stole the crown from the best gaming laptop. A new king has arrived.

design

Play Fortnite on the Razer Blade 14.

Despite its smaller size and asking price, it looks almost identical to the Razer Blade 15. It has the same completely black aluminum housing, the green snake logo on the lid and few large ventilation openings or gaudy design elements. It's the same kind of minimalist gaming laptop with amazing build quality that the Razer Blade line has always delivered. There's a reason people call these laptops the MacBooks of the gaming laptops.

The most important change in the Razer Blade 14 is of course the size of the screen. The 14-inch gaming laptop is a new trend led by popular options like the ROG Zephyrus G14 and the Predator Triton 300 SE. This isn't actually the first 14-inch Razer Blade – there was a model back in 2013. But apart from the screen size, this new version has little to do with the 2013 model. The processor, graphics, and cooling technology have finally caught up with the demand for smaller gaming laptops – and the 2021 Razer Blade 14 is the answer to that desire.

The Razer Blade 14 is the thinnest 14-inch gaming notebook and the smallest overall in terms of volume.

However, a smaller screen also means a smaller footprint overall, which is why I am a little unsure about the ability of this laptop to keep the components cool enough in this test. The Razer Blade 14 is the thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop and the smallest overall by volume – just 0.66 inches thick and 3.9 pounds. That makes it an insanely portable gaming laptop, especially considering how powerful this thing is.

Because of its size, it's also a great regular laptop. It's only 0.08 inches thicker than the Dell XPS 13 and only 0.03 inches thicker than the MacBook Air. It's an incredible feat of engineering.

The Razer Blade 14 offers excellent image quality.

Of course, Razer already makes the Razer Blade Stealth 13 and Razer Book 13 – if you really just want the Razer stylings with no power. But the Razer Blade 14 feels like the laptop that can do it all without sacrificing portability or design – or performance – too much.

That has been the promise since this laptop was announced. I was thrilled that the Razer Blade 14 kept that promise. Mainly.

As can be seen in many photos, the Razer Blade 14 is an absolute fingerprint magnet. That was always the case with these black Razer Blades, which is why I wish the Mercury White option would be offered for the 14-inch model. The latest update to the Razer Blade 15 tried to fix this issue with a fingerprint-resistant coating, but the Razer Blade 14 didn't.

Ports

The Razer Blade has a great port selection including HDMI 2.1.

The Razer Blade 14 has a healthy range of ports available. On the left you'll find USB-C, USB-A, a headphone jack, and the proprietary Razer charging port. On the right side you get a USB-A, another USB-C and even HDMI 2.1. HDMI will likely be your primary method of docking the Razer Blade 14 to a monitor, although both USB-C ports also have DisplayPort 1.4 and power.

However, when gaming, consider using Razer's own power adapter, which has a nicely braided cord that plugs into a 230 watt power adapter. It's big for this size of laptop, but when you're juicing performance-hungry components like this one, it's inevitable.

I would have liked the Razer to have a full-size SD card slot like the Blade 15, which is extremely convenient for photographers and videographers.

The Razer Blade 14 also offers Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 for the latest in wireless connectivity.

display

The Razer Blade 14 shows off some impressive graphics with its 1440p screen.

In terms of screen quality, the Razer Blade 14 is on par with what the 15-inch model offers. It is a 16: 9 1440p IPS display with a refresh rate of 165Hz. That's both high resolution and high refresh rate that is the best of both worlds. That's no surprise as it's becoming the norm for gaming laptops.

The picture quality is the real surprise. The Razer Blade 14 offers fantastic color saturation and reaches 90% of the AdobeRGB and 100% of the sRGB color space, which is basically unknown for gaming laptops. The color accuracy is also pinpoint accurate and the maximum brightness is 315 nits. That's nowhere near as bright as the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, the brightest gaming laptop I've ever tested.

Would I wish it looked more like the Razer Book 13 with its 16:10 screen and tiny bottom bezel? Absolutely. A larger screen would have allowed a smaller bottom frame and more screen space without having to shrink the overall area. For now, Razer seems to be sticking to 16: 9 for its gaming laptops. Despite my affinity for thin bezels, it's hard to complain about a screen that looks this good.

performance

I never doubted that the Razer Blade 14 would be a beautiful, well-constructed laptop. Performance and thermals worried me. But once I started using the Razer Blade 14, many of those worries were aside.

In some ways, the Razer Blade 14 is actually more powerful than its bigger brother. This is thanks to the processor inside, which is the 8-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX. In terms of sheer performance alone, this is the king of gaming laptop processors right now. The fact that it finally has a home in the Razer range feels like an important moment for AMD.

The back of the Razer Blade 14 shows the redesigned fans.

I know Cinebench isn't the be-all and end-all of processor performance, but it's overwhelming that installing this Ryzen chip in the Razer Blade 14 beats the Razer Blade 15 out of the water in this benchmark. It's a similar result in a video encoding test in Handbrake, where the Razer Blade 15 with its Intel processor was 25% slower.

Add an RTX 30 series graphics card to the mix and you will be very happy with the content creation performance.

Speaking of graphics, my configuration came with the RTX 3070. It's still hard to grasp that you can put an RTX 3080in here as well if you want to. The 3060 is the base model option, which will still be pretty impressive, but on other laptops I've tested there's a big leap in performance between the 3060 and the 3070. Either way, you get a full 100 watts of power to the GPU, which is why I was so worried about the temperatures too.

In terms of cooling, Razer has achieved the impossible.

But I'll just say this – Razer did it. You get really good gaming performance, even at 1440p, and I've never seen GPU temperatures rise above 87 degrees Celsius. Well, that's not exactly what I would call "cool", but for a laptop this size and with so much power, I'm impressed. Here is a massive steam chamber that covers almost all of the built-in components and is supposedly even larger than the 15-inch model.

There are also some new fans inside, each with 88 0.1 mm fan blades. Of course, the huge vapor chamber means you can't swap out the memory, but it protects the performance and thermals that actually make the Razer Blade 14 such a great gaming laptop. Fortunately, all configurations of the Razer Blade 14 come with 16 GB of dual-channel RAM and a full terabyte SSD.

Gaming performance

Benchmark Assassin's Creed Valhalla on the Razer Blade 14.

How good is the gambling? Well, most of the games I've tested hit at least 60 frames per second (fps) on max 1440p settings, including Fortnite, Battlefield V, and Civilization VI. The Battlefield V performance was particularly noteworthy at 78 fps, which even beats the much clunkier Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, a thick 16-inch laptop that we also tested with the RTX 3070.

On the whole, this Lenovo laptop averages better frame rates, especially in Fortnite where it was up to 18% faster. Better airflow in a thicker case always means better temperatures and ultimately better performance – but the Razer Blade 14 isn't as far behind as you might think. It really makes you wonder why we don't see high-end graphics options in laptops like the Zephyrus G14.

The table below shows 1080p performance for a comparable comparison to cheaper 1080p laptops like the ROG Strix G15. Here you can see how closely the Blade 14 can often keep up with much larger and bulkier laptops like the 16-inch Lenovo Legion 5 Pro or the 15-inch MSI GS66 Stealth.

Laptop 3DMark time spy 3DMark fire strike Assassin's Creed Valhalla (1080p Ultra High) Battlefield V (1080p Ultra) Fortnite (1080p Epic) Civilization VI (1080p Ultra)
Razer Blade 14 (RTX 3070) 8605 19673 60 fps 96 fps 96 fps 84 fps
Asus ROG Strix G15 (Radeon RX 6800M) 10504 26800 77 fps 109 fps 108 fps 91 fps
Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (RTX 3070) 9175 21033 61 fps 73 fps 101 fps 101 fps
MSI GS66 Stealth (RTX 3080) 9097 19175 70 fps 97 fps 140 fps 140 fps

There have been a couple of heavier titles I've tested that put the Razer Blade 14 in a fight for its money. Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk 2077 both couldn't quite reach 60 fps in 1440p. They arrive in 1080p, however, and Cyberpunk plays well enough if you turn up the DLSS settings.

Surface temperatures are a different story. The Razer gaming laptops are notorious for being hot, largely because there just isn't a lot of ventilation here. They have a few vents along the hinge for the vapor chamber as well as two above the fans in the back, but Razer sacrifices a lot of airflow by not drilling holes throughout the case. And the Razer Blade 14 is no different from previous blades in this regard.

The palm rests of the Razer Blade 14 tend to get nice and warm, which can be uncomfortable.

It can get really hot at certain key points, for example in the space between the keyboard and the display. But that's normal. However, the palm rests bothered me the most and set it apart from other gaming laptops that I have tested. The palm rests of the Razer Blade 14 tend to get nice and warm, which can be uncomfortable. If you're at home and have a long gaming session ahead of you, you'll likely want to dock it and use an external keyboard.

Even when not playing, the Razer Blade 14's palm rests stay warmer than other laptops. The fans spin even if you're just using a web browser, and the case never feels cold to the touch. It's unfair to compare the Razer Blade 14 to an ultra-efficient laptop like the M1 MacBook Pro, but surface temperatures are a compromise for being able to play modern 3D games anytime.

Keyboard and touchpad

The Razer Blade 14 keyboard and touchpad.

Everything else is what you would expect from a Razer laptop. The keyboard and touchpad are both great, and the RGB backlighting per key is as customizable as it gets with an insane 15-level brightness control. It sounds over the top, but compared to the three or four tiers that many gaming laptops have, I can't fault it.

Razer even adds some nice touches like the above-screen Windows Hello IR camera and some decent speakers. They're upward facing and THX certified, which basically just means THX helped test them to make sure they weren't causing any distortion at high volume levels. The result is decent speakers for watching videos or listening to music. Unfortunately, the fan noise disturbs the appreciation of the speakers when gaming.

Battery life

Razer promises 12 hours of battery life with the Blade 14. That's unheard of on a laptop with a beefy RTX 3070 or 3080, but the Razer Blade comes surprisingly close. In our local video playback test, it landed 11 hours and 20 minutes, which is almost three hours longer than the Razer Blade 15. It's a similar comparison in our light web browsing test, where it took eight hours and 17 minutes.

The Razer Blade 14 also outlasts the ROG Zephyrus G14 and Predator Triton 300 SE, which were previously champions in gaming laptop battery life.

You only get that much battery life from a laptop with an RTX 3070 inside, but Razer got more out of the 61.6 watt-hour battery that I thought was possible.

Our opinion

There are many cheaper gaming laptops that are just as powerful as the Razer Blade 14, such as the all-AMD ROG Strix G15. But none of its competitors have the premium fit and workmanship of the Razer Blade 14, nor the extremely small size. Add in good battery life, a colorful display, and surprisingly good gaming performance, and you have what it takes to become a new standard for gaming laptops. The fact that it's $ 500 cheaper than a similar configuration to the Razer Blade 15 is the icing on the cake.

Are there alternatives?

Other 14-inch gaming laptops are the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. Both are limited to an RTX 3060 and are a few hundred dollars cheaper than the Razer Blade 14.

The Razer Blade 15 obviously has a bigger screen, but costs $ 500 more for the same configuration.

How long it will take?

A couple of Razer Blade reliability issues have been well documented online, including the problem with the high battery, which is apparently the most notorious culprit. However, it is still not an issue that has been officially addressed by Razer.

Barring potential reliability issues, the Razer Blade 14 should last four or five years before it needs to be replaced. The vapor chamber makes it difficult to replace or repair yourself, but RazerCare offers up to three years warranty over a thorough (and expensive) upgrade to the standard one-year warranty.

Should you buy it?

Yes. It's the best gaming laptop you can buy right now, especially if you want your gaming laptop to be just as suitable for non-gaming activities.

Editor's recommendations



13 Jul
Blog

Razer Blade 15 (2020) Review: A Trailblazing Gaming Laptop

"Razer's Blade 15 is the most attractive gaming laptop you can buy for money."

  • Sleek design

  • Comfortable keyboard and touchpad

  • Exceptional gaming experience

  • 300Hz refresh rate

  • Ideal port selection

All other gaming laptops swim in the course of the Razer Blade. It is a design that others want to emulate in both aesthetic and portable terms.

But with two years on the same chassis, the Razer Blade may not be as impressive as it used to be. The latest version is a refinement of the formula that offers more power and a faster 300 Hz screen with just a few minor adjustments to the formula.

Razer offers models for up to $ 1,600, but my test device costs $ 3,000. Does the Razer Blade still stand out to justify its premium, or has the competition caught up?

Design and keyboard

The Razer Blade's greatest achievement is not what it accomplishes, but what it completely avoids. It is a gaming laptop that defeats any design cliché that is normally associated with its competitors. It resists decorations and facades and instead focuses on straight lines and minimal chrome. Put it next to the Acer Predator Triton 500 or the Alienware m15 and you will see what I mean. The Razer Blade looks like a normal laptop.

This makes it a good option for someone who wants to use the device not only for games but also for other tasks, especially since it only weighs 4.6 pounds. It fits in your backpack as well as a MacBook Pro 16-inch or Dell XPS 15. The quality of machined aluminum is also exceptional as long as you can forgive how quickly fingerprints are captured.

There have always been exceptions to the blade's ethos and they include glowing lights. Razer's iconic green snakes still shine on the lid. It's dimmed on the silver version of this laptop, but it still glows outrageously here. The same applies to the RGB-loaded keyboard, which is backlit per key in a spectacular way and has become synonymous with the Razer brand.

Speaking of the keyboard: Razer has slightly adjusted the layout. The keyboard was previously equipped with full-size arrow keys, which forced a separation between question mark and shift key. Players may have appreciated the roomy arrow keys, but it was frustrating to type.

The layout is now more conventional, which I consider an upgrade. However, the keycaps on the Dell XPS 15 feel a bit small. It's a minor issue, but I would like to see less space between the buttons in a future design.

If you press a key, you will be rewarded with a fantastic key loss. There is a lot to travel with a satisfactorily springy mechanism that made me feel comfortable straight away. The glass touchpad is also a winner. It's big, responsive, and quiet. You won't find a better keyboard or touchpad on a gaming laptop.

Ports and security

All the bells and whistles are here, far beyond what your standard gaming laptop offers. Razer even throws an IR camera over the top bezel for Windows Hello face authentication. It is typical for gaming laptops to include HDMI and lots of USB 3.2 Gen 2. The blade contains both with a total of three USB-A and a single USB-C connector.

However, Razer goes one step further by including both Thunderbolt 3 and a full-size SD card slot. Creative professionals and content creators will appreciate it, which can support high-speed storage and quick access to camera files. Your photo shows how Razer wants to position the blade.

Although you can power the laptop through the Thunderbolt 3 port, Razer has a proprietary charging port on the left for full performance.

The Razer Blade even supports the latest connectivity standards like Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1.

performance

Owners like to use the Razer Blade for everything from video editing to gaming, but the balance of its performance tends towards the latter. This has ramifications for performance in productivity applications, which are not bad, but lag behind laptops that tend to work rather than play.

This year's model features the latest 10th generation Intel Core i7-10875H. The eight cores and 16 threads are a major advance over the six-core processors of previous generations. This is promising if you don't want to use the Razer Blade just for gaming.

In the Cinebench R20 multi-core benchmark, the latest Razer Blade 15 is a significant leap over the previous year. Again, it can thank these additional cores and threads for the bump. However, the Razer Blade lags behind some other non-gaming laptops that use the same processor. For example, it is 29% behind the Dell XPS 15.

Interestingly, the blade is a whopping 36% behind the Dell G5 SE. The G5 SE is a gaming laptop, but uses an AMD GPU and CPU, as well as SmartShift technology to share the performance between the components.

Handbrake video encoding tells a similar story. The Razer was 9% slower than the Dell XPS 15 and 19% behind the XPS 17.

That doesn't mean the Razer Blade 15 is a bad choice as a content creation laptop. If the GPU can be used, it is quite powerful. For example, it is a powerful video rendering rig in an application like Adobe Premiere Pro. It exported a 2 minute 4K video clip to ProRes 422 in 7 minutes and 42 seconds. This is much faster than the configuration I checked last year, which had an Intel processor with six cores and an RTX 2070 Max-Q .

Options like the Dell XPS 17 or the Microsoft Surface Book 3 are still unsurpassed in these tests. Although the Razer has a charged RTX 2080 Super, the XPS 17's RTX 2060 finished the same rendering in Premiere 46% faster. That's what a bigger chassis and improved thermal system mean to you.

All versions of the Razer Blade are equipped with 16 GB of dual-channel RAM as standard and no longer allow anything. Most other performance-oriented laptops offer up to 32 GB, including the Acer Predator Triton 500 and the Dell XPS 15.

Gaming performance

The greatest power of the Razer Blade is gaming. It comes with either the Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Max-Q or the 2080 Super Max-Q. These new Nvidia GPUs add just a few frames per second (fps) than the previous non-super versions. Fortunately, the Razer Blade was already an extremely powerful gaming laptop.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the most challenging test game, and the Razer Blade still reached an average of 60 fps with graphics details at Ultra High. This and Civilization VI were the only two games in which the Acer Predator Triton 500 came up a bit and offered up to 8% faster frame rates at the highest settings in both games. Still, you probably won't complain about the Razer Blade, which averages 134 fps.

Returning to a 60 Hz screen feels chunky by comparison.

Elsewhere, the Razer Blade dominates. Fortnite and Battlefield V performed spectacularly and exceeded the Triton 500 in both cases. In Battlefield V at Ultra, the blade achieved an average of 98 fps. When I pulled the settings back to medium, the system released 122 fps, which is a new record for 15-inch laptops. This is really impressive for such a small laptop.

Fortnite was similarly fast, and the Razer was again one of the fastest 15-inch laptops I've tested. With epic settings, it easily reaches 110 fps. But responsiveness really came alive with lower settings. For example, 161 fps with settings at high felt incredibly smooth. The return to a 60 Hz screen on my XPS 15 felt chunky by comparison.

I even tried the Rocket League, which had no problem reaching its maximum speed of 250 fps with the highest graphics quality. That's not quite 300, but the animations are still incredibly smooth.

These games were all played with the native screen resolution of 1080p. You could connect to a higher resolution external monitor and I suspect it would handle 1440p quite well. While 4K would be a stretch in some games, turn-based strategy games like Civilization VI shouldn't be a problem.

The Razer Blade is of course quite expensive. Though it's equivalent to the $ 3,000 Asus ROG Zephyrus S15, it's $ 400 more than the Triton 500, though the performance is very similar. With the Alienware m15, you get a similar package for almost $ 800 cheaper. Some of these options, such as B. the Triton 500, also offer G-Sync support. The Razer Blade lacks this feature, but the high refresh rate is surprisingly good to avoid tearing the screen.

In general, the Razer Blade is still running hot. Surface temperatures can be roasted during the game, but that's not too surprising. The frustrating part is idling temperatures. Since nothing is running, the palm rests and keyboard are still a bit warm, and this can be uncomfortable.

Display and speakers

Razer offers two 15.6-inch viewing options, one for content creation and one for gamers. The game-oriented screen I tested is a 1080p display with the above-mentioned refresh rate of 300 Hz. The option focused by the creator is a 4K display, which is intended for photographers and video editors who need this high number of pixels. The 4K screen also has a glossy surface, a touchscreen and a refresh rate of 60 Hz.

While the 4K screen undoubtedly offers a sharper picture, the 1080p screen looks great. The contrast is high at 1,010: 1, and although it is maximum at only 310 nits, the matte screen excellently blocks glare. The screen is also fairly color accurate, though if you need a wide range of colors you'll need to go with the 4K OLED panel.

The Razer Blade offers a decent set of speakers shooting up. They are on par with the Dell XPS 15, although they lag behind the MacBook Pro 16-inch. They still lack the bass and there is certainly room for improvement.

Battery life

Because the Razer Blade doesn't have G-Sync, its battery life doesn't suffer the same fate as other gaming laptops. These models, like the Predator Triton 500, only last a few hours in normal use.

The five hours of the Razer Blade are, of course, nothing to write home about. Despite the 97-watt-hour battery, you still can't get through a full working day without needing a charge. Less powerful laptops like the ROG Zephyrus G14 or the Dell G5 SE can last an extra hour. Even the 4K Dell XPS 15 lasts up to 7 hours.

Of course, it all depends on how you use it. In our lightest test, where a local 1080p video is repeated, the Razer Blade lasted almost 7.5 hours. If you run heavy applications or games, you can expect no more than 3 hours on a single charge.

That may not sound that impressive, but you won't find a laptop with an RTX 2080 Super that lasts that long.

The basic edition

The Razer Blade Base Edition

When you buy a Razer Blade, you will come across an "Advanced Edition" and a "Base Edition". I have reviewed the Advanced Edition and it is the version that gives you the latest parts.

However, the Base Edition has its advantages. It offers the same processor and memory options. You can even opt for the same 4K OLED screen if you want.

The differences depend on the housing and the refresh rate. The Base Edition reaches a maximum speed of 144 Hz for the 1080p model, and the case is slightly thicker and heavier. The Base Edition also offers a different selection of graphics cards, from the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti to the RTX 2080 Max-Q.

Razer also offers a “Studio Edition” that supports Nvidia's RTX Quadro 5000 graphics and comes with Windows 10 Pro.

Our opinion

The Razer Blade does not require you to use it in any particular way. It tries to satisfy the modern player – the one who could also use his laptop for work or as a content creator. The design of the Razer Blade is no longer as revolutionary as it used to be, but there is no question that it is still the best.

Are there any better alternatives?

The Acer Predator Triton 500 offers similar performance at reduced costs to the Alienware m15. However, these laptops look brighter and do not work as well as everyday laptops.

If you're looking for a subdued design that matches the Razer Blade, the MSI GS66 Stealth is a close rival. The build quality is not that good and previous versions didn't work as well.

How long it will take?

Like most premium laptops, the Razer Blade should last at least four or five years. The build quality is second to none and the components are all up to date. It comes with a standard one-year warranty, but Razer offers three years of protection with its two different warranty plans, starting at $ 250.

Should you buy it

Yes. This is the best gaming laptop you can buy, and it works great in just about any other environment.

Editor's recommendations