Razer Thins Out the Blade 14 and Fattens the Price Tag

Gizmodo

19-05-2025

The newly announced Razer Blade 14 isn't quite stiletto-thin, but it's becoming far more knife-like over time. Compared to past iterations, the shell is now as tall as 10 pennies stacked on top of each other, which means the new blade might be as thin as your wallet after buying one. On top of being the thinnest Blade 14 Razer has ever made, it's also the most expensive, starting at $2,300 for a version with Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 5060 laptop GPU. Razer's always tried to offer quality for its high price, but with tariffs in effect, the new Blade 14 is pushing what consumers can expect from gaming laptops.
The Blade 14's base price is $100 more than you would have paid for the 2024 Blade 14 with an RTX 4060. If you upgrade the new Blade to the version with the RTX 5070, Razer told us you could spend $2,700 for the sake of a laptop that's 'not a big brick,' as the company put it. Razer is always an enticing buy because of its generally strong build quality, but even a frisbee-light frame doesn't take the sting out of today's tariff-inflated product prices.
Razer's new ultra-thin design houses an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and up to 64GB of 8,000MHz LPDDR5X RAM. It's the first time Razer is pairing a Copilot+ CPU made for lightweight laptops with an Nvidia GPU in a thoroughbred gaming machine, which means it's compatible with Windows 11 AI features like Recall (which you should probably remember to turn off during setup). The laptop sports a bevy of ports, including HDMI and a microSD card slot. As per usual, Razer promotes its hardy aluminum with an anodized black finish that will manage to stave off bumps or blemishes.
We don't doubt that all that combined will offer enough juice to showcase the Blade 14's 3K, 120Hz OLED display. We do wonder what kind of CPU performance it might provide compared to a similarly sized laptop like the Asus TUF Gaming A14 and its top-end AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. Asus' older model also costs hundreds of dollars less than Razer's latest. Razer promised you'll get 2 to 3 hours while gaming on the 72WHr battery. That doesn't sound like much, but it's technically better than what you already get on the Razer Blade 16 from this year. We've yet to find a gaming laptop with a battery life that will keep up for extended periods.
The Blade 14 powers the RTX 5070 up to the max 115W TGP, which may give you enough juice for most modern games at the max 2,880 x 1,800 resolution. The RTX 5060 laptop GPU is still so new, we don't yet know how it performs compared to Nvidia's mid-range graphics options. No matter which GPU you choose, the machine will still support a six-speaker system through upward-firing speakers. That may offer better sound quality than you may be used to on such small systems, especially with support for THX Spatial Audio.
There has been a rash of relatively light gaming laptops from 2024 stretching into this year. Razer seemingly knew it needed to step up its game with the 2025 edition of the Blade 14. At 0.62-inch thickness and weighing in at 3.59 pounds, it's 11% thinner and lighter than the 2024 edition. It takes the same thermal hood design from this year's rendition of the Blade 16. That laptop also went on a diet for the sake of customers who want a less hefty device to fit a little bit better in their backpacks. We found it also tended to get rather hot when playing intensive games, so we hope that's less of a problem with a smaller battery and less demanding GPU.
The one thing that hasn't been brought over from the Blade 16 is the improved keyboard. It's a Razer device, so of course it's packed to the gills with gamer lights, including per-key RGB. Those keys still only have 1 mm of key travel compared to the deeper, more impactful 1.5mm on the redesigned 16-incher. There are no color options save for black and white, as much as we might beg Razer to bring back the 'coral' pink color from the 2019 Razer Blade Stealth. There's nothing wrong with a thin system, but perhaps a pink blade would help take away the sting of price hikes.