The Blade 14 is Razer’s first laptop with a powerful AMD Ryzen processor — and it’s awesome
After years of waiting, Razer and AMD are finally teaming up. With a Ryzen 9 5900HX and up to RTX 3080, the Blade 14 is now “the world’s smallest 14-inch gaming laptop.”
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What you need to know
Since the very first Blade gaming laptop, Razer has always used Intel mobile processors. We’re now on11th Gen CPUs, and the tech community (including some of us in the media) continues to ask for AMD offerings. It seems as though Razer has been listening because it’s launching the new Blade 14, powered by an AMD Ryzen mobile processor.
Pricing starts at $1,799 and it starts shipping today. Here is all you need to know about the new Razer Blade 14.
Powerful hardware, compact design
Razer Blade 14 (2021): Specs and features
As the name implies, the Blade 14 rocks a mid-sized 14-inch display that comes in either full HD (1920 x 1080) at 144 Hz refresh or QHD (2560 x 1440) with 165Hz refresh, both of which are non-touch.
The full HD display hits 100% DCI-P3 while the QHD settles for 100% sRGB for color accuracy. Both, however, do feature AMD FreeSync Premium low framerate compensation (LFC) and are factory calibrated.
But it’s that AMD CPU that is the star of the show …
The processor in question is the mightyAMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, a perfect match for a contender forbest gaming laptops. It has eight physical cores with multi-threading support, offering up to 16 threads for heavy workloads and gaming sessions.
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Accompanying the AMD processor is up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, 16GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD, and all the other usual premium features one can expect from a gaming laptop.
The design is a familiar Blade one from Razer, including an all-aluminum chassis with precision milling. It’s also a relatively thin laptop (for gaming, at least), coming in at just 0.66-inches making it “the world’s smallest 14-inch gaming laptop.” No small feat.
Take Razer’s Book 13, toss in AMD and NVIDIA, and you have something close to the new Blade 14.
Razer solves cooling by using an aggressive vacuum-sealed vapor chamber design with dual fans (each with 88 blades) ideal for those long gaming sessions.
There are the usual Windows laptop features like Windows Hello IR for face recognition, a 720P webcam, per-key Razer Chroma RGB, and audio provided by the dual upward firing speakers with THX Spatial Audio.
And for ports, users get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports with power delivery, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports for connecting legacy items, HDMI 2.1, and a 3.5mm jack
Unfortunately, there is the lack of Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe 4.0, which are common downsides of AMD’s finest.
Overall, the design looks killer. The Blade 14 has the compactness of the productivity-basedRazer Book 13 laptopbut approaches the gaming performance of the biggerRazer Blade 15. Along with reported long battery life, the Blade 14 could be the best Razer Blade yet for those who want to work and game all in one PC.
Get it now
Razer Blade 14: Pricing and availability
The Blade 14 has just three configurations making it an easy decision. The main differences are the display and GPU, while all have the identical Ryzen 9 5900HX processor:
The new Blade 14 is available now at Razer.com, RazerStore retail locations, and select retail partners.
In addition to the Blade 14, Razer also announced the refreshedRaptor 27 monitorand new130-watt GaN portable charger.
Razer and AMD finally unite on their new Blade 14 gaming laptop. Featuring Razer’s traditional all-black Blade design, a 14-inch display up to QHD, and a beefy AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, this could be the ultimate gaming laptop for fans of Team Red.
Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer,podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.
