TweakTown’s Rating: 90%
The Bottom Line
Razer expands its offerings with the AMD powered Blade 14, a solid performer for gamers, but it does lack in the battery department for anyone wanting a multi-purpose solution.
Pros
- + Chassis and design
- + Gaming performance
- + Upgradeable SSD
Cons
- – Proprietary power adapter
- – Battery life
- – Soldered memory
Should you buy it?
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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing
31VIEW GALLERY – 31 IMAGES
This year’s Blade 14 from Razer departs from the traditional combo of Intel CPUs with discrete GeForce graphics, instead opting for the high-end of AMD’s Ryzen 6000 series lineup to handle the processing. Interestingly enough, Razer didn’t opt to make this platform a pure AMD design with a discrete Radeon GPU, instead going with what they know in the GeForce RTX 30 series from team green.
Specifications
31The specifications of this platform look quite good on paper. At the top, we have the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU, AMD’s top SKU for mobile, which is an 8-core / 16 thread design with a 4.9GHz boost clock. This is paired with 16GB of DDR5 4800 RAM, which is soldered, so it’s not upgradeable. We also have a 1TB Gen4 NVMe solution offering a nice start for large game installs.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti handles discrete graphics in our SKU. The Blade 14 can be configured with an RTX 3080 or 3080 Ti for those wanting more. Display options include the QHD 165Hz IPS panel in our review sample or a Full HD 144Hz panel.
The pricing for the Razer Blade 14 has a wide range depending on the build, from $1900 to $3200. Our review sample, as described above, comes in at $2449.99.
Razer Blade 14 Gaming Laptop
| today | yesterday | 7 days ago | 30 days ago | ||
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| $2299.99 | $2315.99 | – | |||
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* Prices last scanned on 10/10/2022 at 7:35 pm CDT – prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission. |
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Notebook Overview
Razer Blade 14 Overview
31Packaging for the Blade 14 included the standard brown box adorned with the Razer logo.
31Included in the box, the Blade came with its power adapter, as seen above.
31Unboxing, The Blade carries a satin finish, all black which makes the Razer logo stand out prominently.
31The bottom includes two large cooling vents to bring fresh air into the chassis; you can see that air moves out through the top. The bottom also has two rubber bars to lift the chassis off your desk to allow more airflow.
31The right side starts us off with a Kensington lock far right, followed by the HDMI output, USB-A port, and USB-C.
31Moving to the left side, we have a power input, USB-A, and USB-C. Last a 3.5mm audio jack.
31Opening the unit, the trackpad is large and takes up a lot of space on the Y axis. The keyboard is backlit with Chroma RGB and is sunken into the chassis, and speakers flank each side of the keyboard.
31You can see the Chroma RGB in action with the lights turned down.
BIOS/UEFI and Software
UEFI
31Razer goes with an old-school AMI BIOS design, with no mouse functionality, just arrow keys. At the first level, you will get all the information about the hardware used in the machine, along with serial numbers, mac address, etc.
The following screen will allow the configuration of the CPU power levels, USB ports, Network stack, and NVMe. In the end, we have basic options like boot priority and an option for fast boot.
Software
31The software for this platform is Synapse, allowing full configuration of the Blade 14. At the start, you will note the laptop shows up as a device in the dashboard. Across the top, there are further options for systems, profiles, and Chroma Studio.
31If we move over to the system, we can customize the keyboard’s Fn and multimedia keys. You can also turn on gaming mode here to disable the Windows key.
31Moving over to the lighting tab, there are a few options. These include functionality when on AC power and battery; you can also choose to switch off lighting during certain situations and Chroma Studio to configure the lighting colors.
31The performance tab will allow you to customize the fan profile; we use a custom always-on for testing. You can also disable NV Optimus here and go with dedicated only.
System/CPU Benchmarks
Cinebench
Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to highlight their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests, a single-core workload that will utilize one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU.
31The Blade 14 returned a single thread score of 1495 in R23.
31Multi-thread was much better, coming in at 13796, still a bit behind Intels 12th Gen but a good amount better than 11th.
AIDA64 Memory
31Memory performance came in at 50K read, 54K write, and 47k copy.
BAPCo CrossMark
CrossMark™ is an easy-to-run native cross-platform benchmark that measures the overall system performance and system responsiveness using models of real-world applications. CrossMark™ supports devices running Windows, iOS, and macOS platforms.
31CrossMark landed the Blade 14 near the bottom, just above last year’s Blade 15 Adv, with a score of 1542.
UL Procyon
31Looking at our real-world workloads with Procyon, the Blade 14 was consistent in its performance, scoring 7503 in office, 5412 in photo, and 6674 in video.
3DMark
31CPU Profile offered 907 single threads and 6220 at sixteen threads. The Blade 14 did best at eight threads with a score of 6237.
313DMark Timespy’s overall score was 9538, around 400 points shy of the Blade 15 Adv.
31If we look at our CyberPunk 2077 chart, the Blade 14 did quite well here, offering 78 FPS at 1080p followed by 51 FPS at 1440p.
31Storage for this platform scored 437 MB/s of bandwidth, sadly the lowest we have seen.
Battery Life, Value, and Final Thoughts
Battery Life
31Battery life for the Blade 14 offered 139 minutes with the UL Procyon workload and 110 minutes using the PCMark workload. Overall, it did have the least amount of battery life of the platform we have tested.
31Going over the performance of each platform, the Blade 14 landed in the middle of the road at 97.1%, offering a good amount of value for the available performance.
Final Thoughts
I didn’t spend much time with the Blade 14, probably not as much as I could have, but I had an impending CPU launch I was testing for. So after Blade 14 finished testing, I did write a few articles on it and ran through a few sessions of Warzone to get a feel for the keyboard and display before sending it back.
With that said, the trackpad isn’t the greatest. To me, this is expected because most gamers are going to break out their favorite mouse anyways, so why put a ton of R&D into something that will immediately be replaced? The keyboard was good, not as good as a Lenovo X1, but fantastic for a portable gaming machine, with a solid return on the keys and good feedback on the way down. Chroma lighting on the keys was good but can be a bit bright, but again manageable with Synapse.
As for performance, the Ryzen 6900HX lets this system down, particularly in productivity workloads. As you can see from our charts, in nearly every case, it’s chasing 12th Gen Intel platforms, including its larger Blade 15 counterpart. That said, legit gaming workloads, like our CyberPunk 2077 and Timespy benchmarks, showed the Blade 14 holding its own, so this could be a terrible platform in synthetic benchmarks but produces the FPS when needed.
Outside of this, the display is gorgeous; almost no bezels, and its IPS-like characteristics give it deep color and black blacks, if that makes sense. Overall a solid platform if you must have an AMD CPU.
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