Razer’s Blade 14 is the most powerful 14 inch gaming laptop I’ve ever tested!
I mean it can go right up to Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti graphics! But so much power in such a
small space means other compromises though, and potential problems that you need to know about.
As is always the case with Razer’s laptops, the solid metal CNC aluminum chassis feels excellent,
easily the best feeling build quality as far as Windows based gaming laptops are concerned.
We’ve still got the black anodized finish and green Razer theme with the lid logo that lights
up, and you can use the software to change the lid light between static, breathing or off.
Aluminum is a softer metal, in just a couple of weeks of use I’ve somehow
already got a silver dent on the lid. I’ve only been using this at home and
haven’t even attempted to travel with it or anything, so expect these to appear over time.
The black finish is a massive fingerprint magnet,
but I also found it fairly easy to clean with a microfiber cloth.
There’s an indent on the front in the middle which makes it easy to
get your finger in to open the lid. As a 14 inch model it's lighter and
may start tipping a little before you extend it the full 136 degrees.
The hinge motion feels nice and sturdy, and it makes a satisfying snap sound when the lid closes.
There’s not much flex to the metal lid or keyboard thanks to the solid metal build.
The laptop alone weighs just 4lb or 1.8kg,
increasing to 5.8lb or 2.6kg with the 230 watt power adapter.
It’s extremely portable, even for a 14” laptop and is quite thin. I’ll compare
it in depth against the Zephyrus G14 from ASUS soon, make sure you’re subscribed.
My Blade 14 is maxed out with Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti graphics, but the lower 3070 Ti and
3060 options still come with the same Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU, 16 gigs of DDR5 RAM and 1TB SSD.
Unlike last year’s Blade 14, this year’s version gets a MUX switch, meaning we can
disable optimus to get a speed boost in games, but at the expense of worse battery life.
Unfortunately there’s no Advanced Optimus so you have to reboot to swap. There’s no G-Sync, but you
get FreeSync to remove screen tearing with optimus enabled and the integrated Radeon graphics active.
The screen looks decent with alright color gamut for a gaming laptop,
contrast was pretty average. It’s bright enough with 100% brightness coming in
at 357 nits. Above 300 nits at maximum is the lowest I want to see, this is fine for indoor use.
Like the larger Blade 15 and 17, there’s no screen overdrive mode available.
This means no overshoot or undershoot, but also not an amazing grey-to-grey
screen response time. But expect different results with the 144Hz 1080p screen option.
This year’s Blade 14 is still using the same panel as last year’s model,
so it’s not surprising to find out that the response time is
unchanged. This year’s Zephyrus G14 was faster despite having a lower 120Hz refresh rate.
The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire
appears on the screen in CS:GO. This year’s Blade 14 has a larger improvement compared to
the screen response time thanks to the addition of the MUX switch, but again the G14 was faster.
There was basically no backlight bleed in my screen in this worst case test scenario,
but this will vary between laptops and panels.
There’s a 1080p camera above the screen in the middle and it has IR
for Windows Hello face unlock.
This is how the camera and microphones look and sound, this is what it sounds like while
typing on the keyboard, and the screen isn’t wobbling at all while doing this.
It’s got a per-key RGB backlit keyboard, and all keys and secondary functions get lit up.
You can adjust the brightness through software,
or with the F10 and F11 shortcut keys to 15 different brightness levels.
More control sounds better, but I found it a bit annoying to press the keys so many times
for subtle changes. Lighting and effects can be customized through the Razer Chroma software.
Typing felt fine, the keys have a clicky feel despite the key
presses not feeling like they go down too far.
Despite the power button being right next to delete and backspace,
and the fact that Windows 11’s default is to put the system to sleep on a power button press,
I found that you need to hold it for about half a second before it goes to sleep,
so an accidental mispress when typing won’t do anything.
The glass touchpad is smooth, quite big considering the size of the laptop,
it clicks down anywhere and feels nice and accurate.
There are front facing speakers on either side of the keyboard.
I thought they sounded pretty average, there’s not much bass and they’re a
little tinny with a little palm rest vibration at higher volume levels.
The latencymon results weren’t looking amazing, but I’ve seen far worse.
The left side from the back has the power input,
a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port and a 3.5mm audio combo jack.
The right side has a second USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C and Type-A port,
HDMI 2.1 output and there’s a Kensington lock at the back.
The power plug can go in two ways. One way blocks the left Type-A port,
so don’t do that if you need it.
Both of those Type-C ports can be used to charge the laptop,
and they both also offer DisplayPort support. If you’ve got optimus on, both of the Type-C ports
connect to the integrated Radeon graphics. But if you disable optimus and reboot, then both of
the Type-C ports connect directly to the Nvidia graphics. So that would be preferable for VR.
HDMI on the other hand connects directly to the Nvidia graphics regardless of whether optimus
is on or off, and we confirmed it could run an external 4K screen at 120Hz 8-Bit with G-Sync.
There are 10 TR5 screws of the same length to remove to get inside. After removing them,
the bottom panel came right off with just my hands, but the screw type is less common. The
tools I use for opening laptops had me covered though, I’ll leave a link to them below the video.
Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, single M.2 slot just above on the left,
and Wi-Fi 6E card on the right. Memory is soldered to the motherboard and cannot be upgraded.
This results in a relatively low upgradeability score compared to most other laptops out there.
You can change the same number of components as last year’s Blade 14.
The Zephyrus G14 scores higher here for having one memory slot and not using TR5 screws.
The Wi-Fi performance wasn’t as bad compared to most of the RealTek
and MediaTek options that I usually find to be paired with AMD gaming laptops.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever had Qualcomm Wi-Fi, and on at least two occasions
Wi-Fi just wasn’t working. Device manager showed an error for the card but it worked
fine after I rebooted it, hopefully that improves with driver updates.
The 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD that came in my Blade 14 was performing very nicely.
While you can upgrade it, keep in mind there’s just the one slot,
so you’d either have to reinstall Windows on a new drive or find some way of cloning it.
The Blade 14 is powered by a 61.6Wh battery.
The Razer Synapse software lets you press the function plus R shortcut at any time
to lower the screen’s refresh rate down to 60Hz, which helps increase battery
life. This is why the screen flashes black when you press it. Unfortunately it doesn’t
happen automatically when you unplug the charger like with ASUS and MSI laptops.
The total run time was around 48% longer just by using that option to run at 60Hz,
and both were far longer compared to running with optimus off,
as the Nvidia graphics use more power compared to the integrated Radeon graphics in the CPU.
It was lasting longer compared to last year’s Blade 14,
however both this year’s Zephyrus G14 and last years were lasting even longer,
though those do also have larger batteries. AMD Ryzen laptops tend
to last longer in my YouTube video playback battery test compared to Intel alternatives.
Let’s check out thermals next. The whole back section of the laptop is covered by a
vapor chamber cooler with two fans. Air comes in directly above the intake fans
through these vents. They have some sort of mesh over them, but as we can see here
dust still gets through and builds up. Air then gets exhausted out the
back underneath. You can’t actually see the exhaust vents below unless you look under it.
Razer’s Synapse software lets us change between different performance modes. We
can set balance mode and optionally customize the fan speed, silent mode with no additional changes,
or custom mode with the option of setting 4 different CPU modes and 3 different GPU modes. You
can set these to whatever combination you like, and as we can’t test everything we’ve chosen to
test with both modes set to low, medium, high, and then CPU on boost and GPU on high for full power.
I found it strange that you don’t get any fan control in custom mode,
it makes more sense to me to have it there.
You can also hold the function key and press P to cycle between silent,
balanced and custom modes at any time. It would have been nice if the R and P keys
lit up when holding function so you know they’re shortcuts, but at least the software tells you.
The temperatures were fine when just sitting there idle. The rest of the results are from
combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent a worst case full load scenario. Most
applications don’t fully load both the CPU and GPU at the same time like this. Setting the fans
to full speed in balanced mode was able to lower the GPU by about 11 degrees and CPU by about 6.
The CPU was the warmest in boost mode, which makes sense as that’s as high as it goes. The
cooling pad I test with, linked below the video, was able to lower the temperatures a little.
These are the clock speeds for the same tests just shown. Balanced mode was basically hitting the
same CPU clock speeds as custom mode set to high and above, though the GPU wasn’t clocking as high.
This is because of lower power limits. Balanced mode with the fans on auto ran the GPU at 80
watts, but then with the fans maxed out this actually lowered down to 75 watts as it’s instead
favoring CPU power. With the CPU and GPU both set to high, the GPU was running at around 95
watts while the CPU was on 40, then setting the CPU to the highest boost mode seems to
increase it by 6 watts, but the power budget is removed from the GPU. It’s a tradeoff.
Here’s how an actual game performs with the different performance modes in use. High
plus high and high plus boost ended up scoring the same at 1440p, the native resolution of my screen.
The CPU power limits are able to go a bit higher when the GPU isn’t being
used. Compared to Intel laptops, AMD seems to do quite well with less power,
so although 54 watts wouldn’t be great for an i7 or i9, it’s a decent amount for the 6900HX.
Especially considering the smaller 14” machine it’s in.
It’s only slightly better compared to last year’s Blade 14 with the older 5900HX.
There’s less than a 5% boost to the single core performance,
while the multi core gap is honestly small enough to be within the margin of error. Ryzen just can’t
compete with Intel 12th gen this year when it comes to single and multi threaded performance.
Ryzen can compete when we unplug the charger and run purely off of battery power,
as a number of other 8 core laptops are at the top of the graph. The Blade 14 wasn’t
one of these though, as it seems to lose a lot of performance when running on battery.
My first thought was maybe this is why the battery life was decent,
but the G14 from ASUS was lasting longer while also still performing better with a HS chip.
On battery you’re forced into silent mode,
and I did this testing with CPU boost enabled which allows for better processor performance
when running off of the battery. With this setting off we got even lower results.
Most laptops I test sit around the low 30 degrees Celsius point when doing nothing at
idle, and the Blade 14 was much the same. It was much warmer with the stress tests running,
especially in the middle which was a little hot, but as you’ll hear soon it was also still quiet.
Balanced mode with the fan on auto was quite similar. The palm rest
was always warm due to it being metal. It was cooler with the fans maxed out,
but still warm feeling due to the metal build. The WASD area was noticeably cooler though
as air seems to go through the keyboard. The highest performance mode was quite similar,
there wasn’t a whole lot of difference, but the fan noise changes, let’s have a listen.
The fans were still audible when idling in silent mode and they got progressively louder with the
stress tests running in the higher modes, as you’d expect. I didn’t think it was that loud compared
to other laptops, even with the fans maxed out. The G14 from ASUS for example is louder.
Now let’s find out how well the Blade 14 actually
performs in games and see how it compares against other laptops!
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got this year’s Blade
14 shown by the red highlight. I found it extremely interesting that the Blade 14 was
performing about the same as the larger Blade 15. It makes sense when you consider that both
laptops are able to run the RTX 3080 Ti at 90 watts in games, and it would seem
that the difference between the Intel and AMD processors doesn’t really matter in this game
at the native 1440p resolution. The CPUs probably make a bigger difference at 1080p though,
and I'll fairly compare Intel with AMD soon so make sure you're subscribed.
The Blade 14 was slightly ahead in Control at 1440p as well,
but this is only a 5% boost compared to last year’s cheaper Blade 14 with non-Ti
3080 graphics. Not really much difference in a year. Compared to this year’s Zephyrus
G14 from ASUS, the Blade was reaching a 38% higher average FPS. This game seems to prefer
Nvidia’s GeForce graphics compared to AMD’s Radeon, hence the big gap.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on the other hand seems to do better with Radeon graphics, which is why the
G14 was much closer to the Blade 14 this time. They’re basically within the margin of error
range with a 1-2 FPS or so difference, nothing important, but still goes to show how Nvidia
and AMD options can differ based on the game. The larger Blade 15 was a little ahead here,
but clearly size isn’t everything considering where the even larger 17 inch MSI GS77 is sitting.
We’ve also tested this Blade 14 in 14 games at all setting levels
with features like DLSS, FSR and ray tracing,
and I’ll leave a link to that video to check out after this one in the description below.
Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some content creator tests.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark tool. Like the games,
this year’s Blade 14 wasn’t much higher compared to last year’s,
though both were ahead compared to the other 14 inch competition from ASUS.
This year’s Zephyrus G14 was scoring quite a bit better in Adobe Photoshop,
but at least this year’s Blade 14 had more of a boost compared to last year’s.
Unfortunately I don’t have DaVinci Resolve data with version 17 on last year’s Blade 14, but like
the games we can see it’s close to the larger Blade 15, and also ahead of this year’s G14 too.
We’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
The BIOS is extremely basic and outdated looking compared to other modern laptops.
There isn’t a whole lot of customization that can be done through here. But it gets the job done.
Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 22.04 live CD. By default the keyboard,
touchpad, speakers and camera worked. Wi-Fi wasn’t recognized, it probably needs drivers.
Keyboard shortcuts for key brightness, volume adjustment and screen brightness
all work. HDMI didn’t output an image by default, again might need drivers.
Let’s discuss pricing and availability next. This will change over time so refer to the
link below the video for current prices and deals.
At the time of recording, the Blade 14 with RTX 3080 Ti goes for $3500 USD, which is $900
more expensive compared to the 3070 Ti version, or $1500 more than the 3060 model.
Honestly for most people, I think the 3060 would still do pretty well running
most games even at 1440p. Especially once you make use of features like DLSS and FSR.
There’s no way I could see myself spending more to get more to get the 3080 Ti compared to the
3070 Ti. Every time I’ve compared both of those at lower GPU power limits, the 3080 Ti hardly
offers that much extra performance. But it costs way more. Seriously, don’t even consider the 3080
Ti unless you’re just rich and want the absolute best possible performance from a 14 inch laptop.
Are you getting the best possible performance from the CPU and GPU in this machine?
No. But the Blade 14 still does offer impressive performance for its smaller size.
Especially compared to other 14 inch options if portability is priority number one.
The biggest issue I’ve got is that it only has 16 gigs of memory. You can’t even get
more with the most expensive $3500 option. Now to be fair, 16 gigs of memory is still a decent
sweet spot today when it comes to gaming. But for a machine this expensive that I’d be keeping
around for the next few years, I just think they should have offered a 32 gig option as well.
At least the Zephyrus G14 from ASUS does have some memory upgradeability,
and you can check out my full review of it over here next. Or this video instead if you want to
get a better idea of how well this Blade 14 performs in more games. I will also be
comparing this Blade 14 against the G14 soon, so make sure you’re subscribed for that comparison.