The new Razer Blade 14 is definitely a gaming laptop that I myself would want, but I cannot reasonably recommend it to PC gamers who are simply looking for the fastest gaming laptop. to spend the kind of money that Razer is asking for.

You want a Blade 14 in particular, or at the very least the best compact gaming laptop available today.

Because it's a great laptop and embodies Razer's brilliantly refined and surprisingly restrained laptop design philosophy. Every inch of this laptop rocks the aesthetics of the gaming MacBook. I can't help but really like it, and I like the 14-inch form factor, and while I appreciate the move to a 16-inch design and the larger screen, the Blade 14 is equally at home as a gaming machine at home and as an office notebook for daily use It has become a usable laptop.

So, no clear recommendation" Well, that's a well-known argument against Razer laptops, but if you're looking for that kind of sense of value from your purchase, this is not the machine for you. For the core components and the performance you get from them, it is very expensive.

In other words, it's a gorgeous machine, and it's definitely well built, but it's considerably more expensive than other seriously powerful gaming laptops. We recently reviewed the Acer Predator Helios 16, which had the absolute best gaming laptop screen we've ever used. This is a $2,300 machine. Then there is the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, currently our pick for the best gaming laptop. This is a $2,500 system, but during the recent summer sale, you could get it for $2,200.

This Razer Blade 14 system I'm lovingly holding onto is a $2,700 machine with an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS and Nvidia RTX 4070 CPU/GPU combo. It also has the now-basic specs of 16GB DDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD, which is the minimum you'd expect from a $1,500 laptop, not a nearly $3,000 laptop. Nevertheless, this 2023 edition offers at least a RAM upgrade.

And the other two systems I was talking about are both 16-inch gaming laptops with Intel Core i9 13900HX CPUs and Nvidia RTX 4080 graphics chips. Intel processors are 24-core, 32-thread monsters. But the Ryzen chip is a standard 8-core, 16-thread CPU; the 140W RTX 4070 can't match the gaming performance of Lenovo and Acer's 175W RTX 4080.

In relative benchmarks, the Blade 14 is absolutely outclassed. Even our favorite budget gaming laptop, a Gigabyte G5 with an RTX 4060 GPU, jumps out to stick a shoe in the Razer's ribs at some points.

That said, I have to admit, I'm not convinced by the Cyberpunk 2077 numbers. But even so, the RTX 4060 is not far behind the RTX 4070, so the raw gaming performance alone should convince you that it is worth spending nearly three times the price.

1080p gaming performance

System performance

But at the risk of sounding like Razer's marketing department, Blade 14 is not about raw gaming performance. We're not talking about the overall experience, but we are talking about a truly premium high-end system as a whole, not just about individual components.

That said, leaving relative benchmarks out of it for a moment, these components are capable of delivering a great gaming experience even at the 2560 x 1600 native resolution of the pin-sharp 14-inch panel that Razer has included in this product. 240Hz display is also great at this scale.

We also appreciate the Radeon 780M iGPU on the Ryzen 9 7940HS. This is the same 12CU RDNA 3 graphics silicon that powers the ROG Ally and AOKZOE A1 Pro gaming handhelds, which actually delivers 1080p gaming frame rates. the Blade 14's built-in Nvidia discrete GPU is also a thirsty little imp. It's like a thirsty imp that drinks all the juice and has a nasty time away from the wall socket, but you can switch to the iGPU instead to get a little more gaming uptime on battery power.

This is also a slightly different machine than the previous two Blade 14 laptops that Razer released in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Like me, it has a little more wood as it gets older. The chassis is a little thicker, a little longer, and a little wider. I'm talking just a few millimeters here, so the Blade 14 still feels like a compact notebook. If that means a little more cooling (i.e., quieter) and you get a 16:10 display, I'd be fine with that.

In other words, it's not a mini-LED like the one on the Acer Helios 16 or the Asus Zephyrus M16, but it's certainly on par with the panel on the Lenovo. I really like the extra height that a 2560 x 1600 laptop display gives me.

So does that extra height make it quieter? Certainly, running visually-intensive games at full resolution in top performance mode does get a bit louder; not quite up to the worst levels of the MSI Titan or the Blade 16 we tested, but definitely audible without a good gaming headset.

There is an option in the Synapse software to drop to silent mode, and we were surprised at how quiet (but not necessarily silent) the operation was, but even more surprised at how close to full free mode the performance was. If you want to pass the Ridley Train Gaming Embarrassment Test with this product, you won't be embarrassed if you put it in Silent mode.

But this thing costs $2,700.

If money were no object and I wanted the best compact gaming laptop available, I would not hesitate to spend a fortune on this machine. The build quality is outstanding, and the sturdy aluminum chassis feels incredibly solid. The chiclet keyboard makes typing this review easy, with wide key spacing for a compact machine. The trackpad is very large, but not the most sensitive pad I've ever used. It's fine, but I wouldn't say much more than that.

This larger chassis size allowed Razer to pack a slightly larger battery than the previous two models. It packs a full 68Wh battery, as opposed to the 61Wh battery that the previous Blade 14 had, which gives it a decent level of uptime.

Frankly, I would have opted for these specs; the RTX 4060 version is $300 cheaper than this RTX 4070 edition, but I still want the low-end specs, which are over $1000 cheaper at $2400, by the throat.

Frankly, I've been brutally spoiled by the latest Blade 14. As much as I've enjoyed my new 16-inch machine, I don't want to go back to a big notebook now that Razer has packed a 1600p screen into this still compact frame. If I could scrape together the funds, I would buy this gaming laptop, but it's not for those who want the most powerful machine money can buy.