The Razer Blade 14 is one of the best gaming laptops available. This is because there are some clear caveats when talking about where this product came from, why it exists, and what it means for gaming performance.

This is Razer's first AMD Ryzen-based gaming laptop and its first 14-inch machine since Windows 8.1 was "in"; Razer had been looking at Asus' ROG Zephyrus G14 with envy, but the Ryzen 9 5900HX CPUs, it clearly felt the time had come to establish itself on its own at this small scale.

Not that the 15-inch Razer Blade laptop is chubby, as close as you can get to a matte black MacBook gaming PC, but the slender Blade 14 is a gorgeous Razer ultrabook Razer Blade It's only a slight step up from the size of the Stealth 13 series and is considerably smaller than the larger Blade 15 machines.

It is only slightly thinner than the larger Razer laptops, but 15 mm shorter and over 35 mm narrower across its sturdy anodized aluminum frame. This makes it feel genuinely smaller than the Blade 15.

And I love the form factor. [Honestly, this is gaming laptop specs for me: you can absolutely put an RTX 3080 GPU on this slim laptop, but you really shouldn't. I picked up a Razer Blade 14 with Nvidia's RTX 3060 graphics silicon at its heart, a 100W TDP, and a 1080p 144Hz screen installed, and I'm convinced this is virtually the ideal version of a gaming ultrabook.

Say what you will about the chassis and the cooling it provides to the internal components, 2021 performance is inseparable from heat. In other words, the Blade 14's constrained design inevitably means that gaming performance will be lower than if a hungry GPU like the RTX 3080 were mounted in a more robust 15-inch chassis.

Mount the RTX 3080 in the behemoth of a Gigabyte Aorus notebook and you will see the GPU really fly. You may not like its aesthetic or the noise it generates, but you will appreciate the frame rate.

However, with the RTX 3060 on board, cooling will not limit the frame rate. Of course, you're probably buying the Razer Blade 14 because of its shape, style, and size, but if you've splurged on the RTX 3080 version, the sting of knowing you'll get gaming performance that is noticeably slower than its 15-inch laptop peers It would be hard not to.

Graphics chips are what we spend a lot of time on about gaming laptops, but the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is what got us here in the first place. Despite the name, this is more like the Ryzen 7 5800X, the AMD 5000 series CPU for desktops, with 8 cores and 16 threads of processing power and a nominal maximum clock speed of 4.6 GHz.

While not as powerful as the 12-core, 24-thread desktop CPUs, the 5900HX is one of the most powerful mobile processors available.

On the new Razer Blade's 14-inch frame, a strong 3.5 GHz clock speed was obtained under all-core load, and under single-core load, the Zen 3 silicon recorded a perfectly respectable 4.4 GHz.

System Performance

This means that the Ryzen 9 5900HX can go toe-to-toe with the latest octa-core processors in Intel's Tiger Lake H series, such as the 11800H (shown here with the new Acer Triton 500 SE) and I have seen higher Cinebench scores with the 11900H chips, but they have always been on much larger machines.

The processing power that AMD's CPUs can provide, all of the Zen 3 cores target productivity issues, turning this 14" machine into something like a mobile workstation. It's great to see in a sleek Razer laptop that can be tossed into a messenger bag.

The CPU performance evolution over the Ryzen 7 5800H chip in the Alienware m15 R5 Ryzen Edition machine is slight, and is better than the 10th generation Comet Lake Core i7 10870H in Gigabyte's laptop. superior.

Alongside the Razer Blade 14's latest AMD chip and Nvidia GPU (RTX 3060, RTX 3070, or RTX 3080), there is also a 16GB DDR4-3200 and 1TB Samsung NVMe SSD. 1080p panel and a 165Hz 1440p display. Now, I love QHD laptop displays, but at 14 inches, the pixel pitch of this 1080p panel is sufficient for gaming.

It's not the brightest, so if you're hoping to game outside on a warm summer day, a 1080p screen is probably not for you.

However, it is a great match for the 100W RTX 3060 GPU. The whole package delivers gaming performance at very playable frame rates. All at the highest settings, and with the latest games supported, and Nvidia's DLSS magic increasingly becoming an option, Blade 14 has a lot to offer when it comes to gaming performance.

Gaming Performance

Against a pair of other RTX 3060-powered laptops (an Acer and an Alienware machine), the Blade 14 was able to show its stuff in our GPU benchmarks. These two machines are also slightly higher-spec versions, with Acer featuring a 105W TDP chip and Alienware a 125W RTX 3060.

Also shown for reference is a Gigabyte Aorus 15G with a 105W RTX 3070 GPU; at 1080p, it shows how super-powerful Nvidia's lower-spec graphics silicon is in regards to gaming.

In terms of general battery life, Razer likes to talk about 12 hours of uptime, but definitely not while gaming. In our PCMark 10 testing, the actual gaming time was just under 80 minutes. And you thought Steam Deck's 2-hour minimum number was bad: ...... Every gaming laptop we have tested in the last year has been under 2 hours.

But if you're looking for the Blade 14 to combine gaming and office life, it absolutely can, and with the AMD iGPU on board, it will get pretty close to the 12-hour mark for general use. The Blade 15 also allows you to be away from the power outlet all day in the office.

However, the Blade 14 retains the green Razer logo on the back of the screen, so there is no under-the-radar branding like the almost invisible logo on Razer's Stealth 13 notebook.

Ultimately, as a notebook with a great Razer chassis shrunk down to a 14-inch beauty and packed with the latest AMD and Nvidia components, the Blade 14 is an incredibly attractive machine. And the price, under $1,800 for the RTX 3060 version, is not bad either.

However, we have a few complaints. Not the actual system itself, but the fact that this is the only way to get an AMD-based Razer laptop; the Ryzen 9 5900HX is a great mobile CPU and would be a great part for the Blade 15 or the more productivity-oriented Blade 17 Pro series. However, this CPU, while certainly an excellent design, is only available in this product.

PCs are all about choice, and while it is great that Razer has finally given us the option to use AMD CPUs, their inability or unwillingness to fully adopt Zen silicon across their entire portfolio of gaming laptops makes this half-hearted It feels like only a half-hearted measure.

We feel that enclosing AMD processors within the Blade 14's sole lineup is a good way to ensure that Intel and AMD CPUs are not competing for customers within a single machine. And it's a good way to satisfy longtime industry partners while still offering alternative tips.

Still, it is worth noting that we have heard nothing from Razer about a possible Blade 14 using AMD discrete Radeon GPUs along with Ryzen CPUs. That may be going too far.

But forget all the politics, the Razer Blade 14 itself is fantastic and one of the most attractive gaming laptops I've had this year. Maybe ever. the 14-inch form factor also deserves to be one of the best-selling products in Razer's extensive laptop lineup. And if this notebook turns out to be a success, Razer may be faced with a difficult choice of which CPUs to offer and where.

But the choice you have to make is which graphics card to go with. Certainly, the RTX 3080 is faster, but its gaming performance is greatly reduced. For this reason, I would vote daily for the less expensive RTX 3060, which offers the full frame rate.