Razer Blade 14 Review: Still the Best Gaming Laptop for Its Size

OLED looks great, but one of the advantages of OLED is HDR in games, thanks to the incredible contrast due to the ability to turn off individual pixels. OLED isn’t known for being bright, but lately this has improved on laptops and external monitors. The Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10’s OLED display, for example, can achieve over 1,000 nits, creating an impressive HDR effect. The Razer Blade 14, however, only maxes out at 620 nits in HDR and 377 nits in SDR. Because of this, I could barely tell that HDR was enabled. It’s still a nice screen, and OLED has other advantages over IPS panels, including faster response times, less motion blur, and higher contrast.

Unfortunately, the Razer Blade 14’s OLED panel isn’t as colorful as the one I tested on the Razer Blade 16, with a color accuracy of 1.3 and 86% coverage of the AdobeRGB color space. Additionally, the 120Hz refresh rate is standard for OLED laptops, but you can get speeds of 240Hz on laptops that use IPS, like the Alienware 16X Aurora, which turns out to be a much cheaper device.

The Razer Blade 14’s biggest competitor is the ROG Zephyrus G14. I haven’t tested the latest model yet, but it’s a laptop we’ve loved for years now, and it goes on sale quite often for a lower price than the Blade 14. The only real difference is that the Blade 14 uses a more powerful AMD processor, the Ryzen AI 9 365. Not only does it perform better in anything CPU-intensive, like some games and creative apps, but it’s also a more efficient chip.

This leads to improved battery life, at least better than your average gaming laptop. I spent 10 hours and 19 minutes in a local video playback test, which is about the most you can expect from the device. On the other hand, Asus offers more powerful configurations of the Zephyrus G14, including one that includes the more powerful Ryzen AI 9 HX.

The RTX 5070 takes charge

Photography: Luke Larsen

Bad news: RAM is no longer user-upgradable on the Razer Blade 14, so you’ll have to configure it in advance with what you need. My review unit had 32GB, but you can also choose between 16GB or 64GB. Because it’s soldered, memory speeds are faster. As for internal storage, you still have an open M.2 slot to expand the space if you need to, supporting up to 4TB.