In this video,
I want to focus on the gaming experience
on the new Razor Blade 14,
specifically the base model version with a RTX 3060 GPU.
I'll be talking about the form factor
including ports and design
followed by overall gaming performance.
And I will also discuss the cooling capability
and heat dissipation followed by some pros and cons
of the 144 Hertz, 10 ADP screen it features.
So first of all, let's start with form factor.
Now, when you think of gaming laptop,
you think of a massive behemoth with huge fan grills,
but the Blade 14 has quite a subdued look
especially if you put a skin over the Razer logo
on the back if you're not a fan of it.
Now, the Blade 14, although it is a gaming computer
with a very, very efficient cooling design,
which I'll touch on later,
it is still relatively nice and thin.
And I almost like to compare this
as the MacBook of the gaming laptop world.
Now, it has most of the ports that you're going to need.
And I just think that laptops like this one are really good
for if you have a home set up, but you still travel
and only want to use a single powerful computer.
That being said, this machine will still work perfectly well
as a stand alone laptop if you're just on the road 24/7.
Okay, so moving on to gaming performance.
So I have to say, I was pretty impressed by this machine.
It's been a very positive experience
as you would hopefully expect
for a relatively premiumly priced product.
I can run Warzone at a very solid 100 FPS at high settings
with DLSS on and games like Rainbow Six Siege and Valorant
can run very easily at 140 FPS at 10 ADP resolution.
Now I won't go into too much detail as to specific FPS
you can achieve with different games.
I'll leave that up to the people who are better
at this stuff than I am,
but I just wanted to talk about the performance in general.
And for me, what I really want out of pretty much
any gaming laptop realistically,
is to be able to play AAA titles like Warzone or Battlefield
at a good FPS, at a relatively medium
to high level of graphical settings.
Now all of my testing and benchmarking was done
with performance mode enabled in the Razor settings,
with CPU set to boost and GPU set to high.
Here's the time spy results in case you're interested.
Now, not breaking any records here,
but this puts the Razor Blade 14 at a very competitive level
with other gaming laptops on the market.
Now, moving on to the thermals and cooling section,
which is something I want to spend a little bit of time on
because things like this are really important
in a gaming laptop,
let alone a really thin gaming laptop like the Blade 14.
So I started playing an intensive game
in this case, Warzone from a cold idle.
And you can see temperatures almost immediately
go to around 80 to 85 degrees Celsius.
Now, I didn't get any thermal throttle alerts
while I was doing this testing,
but I did get some power throttling,
which means either the total GPU wattage was reduced
by the system to keep thermals cool,
or the RTX 3060 simply had room
to draw more power if it could.
Judging from my results here,
I'd guess the former, here's the GPU temperature
and GPU power charts overlaid on each other.
You can see when the GPU temps hit 85 degrees Celsius,
the system reduces the GPU wattage down to around 75 Watts.
Now, this makes sense because Razor has of course set
a 100 watt TGP limit for the entire Razor Blade 14 lineup,
regardless of GPU choice.
Whatever system Razor has put in place,
whether it be hardware or software related,
it just works really well.
GPU temps stay consistent with no overheating
and you can pretty much squeeze
most of the available performance out of the RTX 3060
while keeping the system temperature
and fan noise relatively low.
And don't forget, this is all within a really thin
and compact shazzy for a gaming laptop.
Now, one of the biggest problems that thin gaming laptops
such as Blade 14 have is the hand and keyboard area
getting really hot during gaming.
Now, with the Blade 14,
you can see the middle of the keyboard can get quite toasty,
but it almost completely drops off around the WASD area,
and these keys are relatively cool.
Now you'll still, of course likely get some palm sweat
from resting your hand on the metal shazzy,
but overall, it was not a bad experience.
Now in terms of the fan noise,
of course, it's a gaming laptop,
it will get relatively loud, but in terms of the Blade 14,
I didn't find it obnoxiously so.
Here's a small sample for you to listen to.
So it seems that the vapor chamber that Razor has used
to cool the internals is working quite well.
And this is also in part due to the overall efficiency
of AMD's Ryzen CPUs and also NVIDIA's RTX GPUs.
They simply run cooler.
And this is a far cry from previous offerings we've seen,
especially from Intel.
Now, moving onto the screen,
which is another major section of this video,
there's a lot to like and also a lot to dislike
about this screen.
So let me break it down for you.
So in terms of pros,
a big pro is of course the resolution, 10 ADP
is very, very good for gaming,
especially fast paced games like CS GO, Valorant,
or Rainbow Six Siege,
and paired with a 144 Hertz refresh rate,
this is great for almost all games,
because even on newer games,
if you can't max the settings out,
if you drop them down slightly,
you can still very easily in some situations
get between 100 and 150 FPS.
Now, unfortunately that's where the pros of this screen end
and the cons begin.
Now the biggest con for me personally,
is response time.
The RTX 3060 version of the Razor Blade 14
with the 10 ABP panel of course,
has around a 20 millisecond response time.
Now this isn't exactly horrible,
but it's not good for a gaming oriented device,
especially if you're playing games
like Valorant or CS GO with a really high refresh rate.
And you'll notice it even more
if you're used to playing on a proper gaming monitor,
for example, a setup at home that has
a one millisecond response time.
Now this 20 millisecond response time is more noticeable
in certain games at least for me personally.
Rainbow Six Siege was okay, but Warzone for example,
wasn't the best experience.
You'll also notice some ghosting,
but it's not super noticeable.
And this is something where I actually recommend
shelling out the additional cash if you can,
to get the 1440p and RTX 3070 model,
because Razor advertisers that model
with a 10 millisecond response time or half the time
of the 3060 model.
Even then, 10 milliseconds is nowhere near as good
as some other gaming laptops out there,
such as the Asus Zephyrus G15
with a four millisecond response time.
Now, in terms of screen brightness,
this particular screen isn't the best,
but it's not the worst either.
It is only around 311 nits where other laptops
range anywhere from 500 to 270 nits.
Now I've found that it's only really a big deal
if you're in a relatively bright environment
and you're doing productivity oriented tasks
like Excel or emails or web browsing,
and if you're just gaming normally,
you likely won't notice it.
But at the end of the day,
it is quite nice to be able to bump the brightness up
to say 350 or 400 nits, which this machine just cannot do.
Anyway, guys, hopefully you enjoyed this brief look
into the gaming experience on the Razor Blade 14,
if you have any comments or questions,
make sure you leave them down below,
but apart from that, I'll catch you in the next one.
(upbeat music)