Razer Blade 14 (2023) review: King of the hill

❘ Published: 2023-07-21T10:53:05

Dexerto

Razer’s Blade 14 laptops have been a breakout hit between portability and power. But, does its latest refresh still manage to retain its crown as the king of premium gaming laptops?

When shopping for a gaming laptop, you generally go either of two ways. Getting a chunky, 15-inch laptop, or going the portable route and opting for something a little bit smaller. Razer’s Blade 14 has long since been our go-to recommendation for those looking for a gaming laptop, but might not want to deal with having to haul around a massive, chunky notebook, too.

Newly refreshed with the latest AMD and Nvidia components, the Blade 14 is back. We’ve put it through our gauntlet of tests to tell you whether or not it’s worth the eye-watering price.

Key Specs

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS (8 core, 16 thread, up to 5.2GHz)

RAM: 16GB DDR5-5600MHz

GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 (8GB GDDR6, 140W)

Display: 14-inch 16:10 Mini LED (QHD 240Hz)

Battery: 68.1 Whr (230W power adapter)

Storage: 2x 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD

Operating System: Windows 11 Home

IO: 2x USB 4 Type-C, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, 1x HDMI 2.1 port, 3.5mm combo jack

Features: Anodized Aluminum unibody chassis, vapor chamber cooling, glass trackpad.

Price: $2,699.99

Buy the Razer Blade 14 (2023)

Design

The Razer Blade 14 is made from a sleek anodized aluminum body, flushed in matte black. The design of the system itself is not anything radically different from what we’ve seen previously seen, which is a good thing.

The metal chassis feels absolutely gorgeous in your hands, and its 1.8kg weight makes it easy to take around with you almost anywhere. The sheer build quality exuding from the chassis itself is almost a reason in itself to pick up a Blade 14 over lesser, plastic competitors. With rubber feet at the bottom, with plenty of vents for airflow, you can even crack the laptop open and upgrade its storage and RAM yourself. which is always welcome to see.

One thing to note however is that the black finish can smudge easily, and any tiny specks of dust will be immediately visible, so be sure to keep a microfiber cloth at hand if you want the laptop to look factory fresh.

IO is easily accessible from either side, with plenty of powerful ports, including two USB 4 inputs to power any kind of dock you want to throw at it. It’s safe to say that even if your work or gaming requires a load of peripherals, the Blade 14 can handle it.

You can also charge up to 100W via USB-C, but if you’re gaming, you will want to use the included 230W power brick, which plugs in via a flat connector to the system. The brick is still fairly weighty, and you will notice its heft if you choose to put it in your backpack along with the laptop.

One of our favorite things about the display is its screen, the gorgeous MiniLED allows for a super-fast response time and a refresh rate of up to 240Hz for competitive esports gaming.

Trackpad & Keyboard

Like the Blade 16, the Blade 14 has a near-perfect trackpad on a Windows PC, only bested by Apple’s OSX implementations, we were swiping along with gestures, browsing the web, and working with ease. Since a large portion of my job also involves writing, the keyboard is an essential part of any laptop I review.

Luckily, the chiclet-style keys of the Blade 14 made working from the system an absolute breeze, and its layout always felt comfortable, with very little adjustment period required. Flush with RGB profiles, you will also find that games automatically load RGB files when you boot them up, which again, is a fantastic little premium flourish that you will seldom find elsewhere.

Software & features

The AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS has some tricks up its sleeve, which will democratize a handful of quality-of-life features for your webcam using Ryzen AI. These include auto-framing, a background blur, and eye contact, which makes it look as though you’re staring straight at the camera. While these features are welcome, we found the fringing on the background blur effect in particular to not be quite as robust as Nvidia’s Broadcast implementation.

Though Ryzen AI’s use cases for most users remain a curio, it’s still welcome to see this functionality baked straight into the PC, rather than having to faff around with additional software.

Synapse is simple and clear

Razer’s Synapse also offers impressive features out of the box, which can fine-tune your display settings, as well as performance behavior. Should you want the most performance while plugged in, you can whack all of the boost settings up, and fire up the fan to play games at silky smooth framerates.

Synapse can be fiddly at times with other peripherals but on Razer’s laptops, it’s a robust implementation and we never ran into any issues throughout the duration of our testing.

Performance

At the heart of the Razer Blade 14 is the Ryzen 9 7940HS and an RTX 4070, equipped with 8GB of dedicated VRAM. The 140W GPU is joined by the supremely power-efficient CPU, which only reached a peak of 48W in our testing.

The screen offers up to a 240Hz refresh rate at 2560×1600 and can be scaled down to 1080×1200, which is how we benchmarked this laptop, to be compared against 1440p and 1080p desktop benchmarks. This might not be an apples-to-apples performance comparison versus our testbench system but will give you a good idea of how the laptop performs at a glance when compared to desktop parts.

In Razer Synapse, we plugged in the laptop and set the CPU profile to Boost, with the GPU cranked up to High, in order to really test how well the silicon inside performs.

Test System

CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K

CPU cooler: Cooler Master PL360 Flux

Motherboard: ASUS ROG Z790 Maximus Extreme

RAM: ADATA XPG Lancer RGB 32GB DDR5-6000

Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB

Case: Hyte Y60

PSU: EVGA Supernova GT 1300

Razer Blade 14 (2023) 1600p gaming performance

Game	Razer Blade 14 (2023)	PNY RTX 4060	RTX 4060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition	RTX 4070 Founders Edition	Razer Blade 16 (2023)
Forza Horizon 5 (Ultra, RT & DLSS off)	97 FPS	104 FPS	108 FPS	132 FPS	107 FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra, RT Ultra, DLSS 3 Performance, Frame Generation / FSR)	73 FPS	60 FPS	67 FPS	126 FPS	126 FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra, RT Ultra, DLSS off)	17 FPS	21 FPS	32 FPS	39 FPS	38 FPS
Overwatch 2 (Ultra)	207 FPS	184 FPS	234 FPS	356 FPS	344 FPS

The Razer Blade 14 puts in an admirable fight against desktop-class GPUs, and even goes toe-to-toe in terms of performance to the RTX 4060. Additionally, when compared to the RTX 4090-equipped Blade 16, it still manages to put on an impressive showing, especially in esports titles, where you might be able to make use of that fantastic-looking display, to boot.

In AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077, with all the bells and whistles turned on, the Blade 14 even managed to beat our test results for the RTX 4060 Ti. The ballpark for performance overall sits somewhere between a 4060 and 4060 Ti, and considering the 140W of power behind it, it makes sense that the performance is looking mighty impressive.

Razer Blade 14 (2023) 1200p gaming performance

Game	Razer Blade 14 (2023)	PNY RTX 4060	RTX 4060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition	RTX 4070 Founders Edition
Forza Horizon 5 (Ultra, RT & DLSS off)	121 FPS	123 FPS	129 FPS	151 FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra, RT Ultra, DLSS 3 Performance, Frame Generation / FSR)	92 FPS	96 FPS	110 FPS	149 FPS
Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra, RT Ultra, DLSS off)	36 FPS	34 FPS	41 FPS	60 FPS
Overwatch 2 (Ultra)	284 FPS	269 FPS	372 FPS	422 FPS

If you are looking for consistent, triple-digit performance, then 1200p is where it’s at for the Blade 14. You can tear through titles at high framerates and will be on par with some desktop-class chips running at 1080p.

In particular, we were really impressed at how great Cyberpunk 2077 looked with DLSS 3 here. Usually when using DLSS at 1080p, the game can come across as muddy on bigger screens. But, the Blade 14 is perfectly poised for performance with its gorgeous screen size. So, when Phantom Liberty comes around, you might just be able to get great performance out of this little machine.

Synthetic benchmarks

3DMark	Razer Blade 14 (2023)	PNY RTX 4060	RTX 4060 Ti	Razer Blade 16 (2023)
Time Spy Extreme	5617	5287	6231	9279
Port Royal	7262	6002	7777	11980
Speed Way	2902	2535	3112	4951

Thermals & boosting

We observed that the Blade 14 got warm during sessions of Street Fighter 6, but when sat in your lap, the chassis never got drastically hot to the touch, as Razer’s vapor chambers seem to be putting in some work here. However, under intense loads in our synthetic benchmark tests, we did observe that the CPU reached a peak of around 93 degrees. However, the RTX 4070 only ever reached a peak of 78 degrees, well clear of any thermal limits.

We spotted that the CPU does boost up to 5GHz, but often hums along at around 4GHz in most gaming workloads. The GPU manages to keep its stable boost clocks, however.

Noise & battery life

When the Blade 14 was initially announced, we had several concerns over its battery life. However, working from the system with a gaming break consisting of an hour of Street Fighter 6 resulted in around 6 hours of life before we went to plug the system in.

If you’re not gaming at all, we also observed that we could achieve around 7 hours of total battery life. But, when gaming, this gets significantly reduced, depending on the type of title you play. For us, this meant that we were able to achieve around 4 hours of play on Stellaris before our battery ran out. However, there are enough settings to tinker around with in Synapse in order to optimize this further.

Considering its size, we were pleasantly surprised that the Blade 14 can survive a day of work, only needing a short pitstop to charge rapidly with the 230W brick.

Noise

The Blade 14 can get quite loud, especially if you tune Synapse to allow for maximum fan speeds. With several profiles on offer, however, you can easily tune this to lower yourself. Outside of putting a huge load on the system, the Blade 14 was mostly silent in most scenarios. However, even with tuned profiles, when the fans ramp up, it can be an annoyance to those in the room around you.

Should you buy it?

Coming in at $2699.99, the Blade 14 is by no means cheap. Even its direct competitor, the Zephyrus G14 is cheaper and will come in more powerful variants for around the same price. Though, what you get is a laptop with unparalleled build quality for gaming, which can handle almost any game you throw at it, with most of the bells and whistles turned on at playable framerates.

The Verdict: 4/5

The price is a tough pill to swallow, but considering the sheer quality of the hardware on offer, there’s nothing else like it on the market, so Razer goes unchallenged with its pricing. Is it worth the money? Well, you just won’t find a laptop that’s as powerful, or as well built anywhere else. If those two things are important to you, then the Blade 14 is a no-brainer.