Razer Blade 14

Good things come in small packages

- DAVE JAMES

THIS A LOVELY LAPTOP.

It’s the very epitome of Razer’s superbly refined and surprisingly restrained notebook design ethos. We love the 14-inch form factor, too. This smaller scale makes the Blade 14 a laptop that can be equally at home both as your home gaming machine and your daily driver office notebook.

The catch? It simply isn’t good value. It’s just so damned expensive for the core components and the resulting performance. Take the Acer Predator Helios 16, with one of the best displays in any gaming laptop. That’s a $2,300 machine. Or how about the excellent Lenovo Legion Pro 7i? That’s a $2,500 system, and one you could find for just $2,200 over the recent summer sales period.

And the Razer Blade 14? $2,700 buys you an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU and Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU combo. You also get the now basic standard of 16GB DDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD, which is the sort of minimum spec you’d require in a $1,500 notebook, not an almost $3,000 one. You can at least upgrade the RAM in this 2023 edition, which you couldn’t with the previous Blade 14 machines.

And those other two systems? They’re both 16-inch gaming laptops with an Intel Core i9 13900HX CPU and a Nvidia RTX 4080 graphics chip. Consequently, it’s a veritable bloodbath in the benchmarking stakes, with the Blade 14 taking an absolute hiding. Even a budget gaming laptop like the Gigabyte G5 with its RTX 4060 GPU can occasionally stick a shoe in the Razer’s ribs. Ouch.

And yet, the Blade 14 is about much more than raw performance numbers. Calling it a holistic experience might sound pretentious, but with this kind of premium high-end system, it’s more about how it hangs together as a whole than the individual components.