Razer's Ryzen-powered Blade 14 is raw power, but it'll cost you

At today’s E3 conference, Razer announced the Blade 14, the company’s first gaming laptop with an AMD Ryzen processor. Alongside the 14-inch beast, two other products, an updated Raptor 27-inch gaming monitor, and a 130W Gallium Nitride (GaN) charger, were also announced.

The new Blade 14 is absolutely stacked despite its size, which Razer says is 30 percent smaller than most 15 inchers, making it the smallest 14-inch gaming laptop. The new clamshell features AMD’s top-of-the-line mobile Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU and Nvidia’s RTX 30-series laptop GPUs in 3060, 3070, and 3080 flavors. All models come with 16GB and 1TB PCIe SSD.

The laptop also comes with the choice of either an FHD (1080p) resolution and 144Hz refresh rate or QHD (1440p) resolution and 165Hz display. With 12 hours of advertised battery life and vapor chamber cooling, the Razer Blade 14 sounds like a dream machine for gaming and productivity. There is no release date yet for the Razer Blade 14, but we know pricing: it starts at $1,799.

Red team and green team unite — AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX is a multithreaded CPU with 8 cores and 16 threads that can reach a max clock speed of 4.6GHz. On the graphics side, the Razer Blade 14 can be equipped with up to the RTX 3080 mobile GPU from Nvidia, which has 8GB of VRAM. All this is cooled by Razer’s “next gen” vapor chamber cooling technology, which uses vaporized liquid to cool components along with two ultra-thin fans. Even with all this cooling, the laptop remains 0.66 inches thick when closed.

Also important are the I/O ports, which often are reduced to make the laptop thinner or less expensive. But not here. The Razer Blade has four 3.2 Gen 2 USB ports — two Type-A and two Type-C ports — and a full HDMI port, which is rated for 4K 120Hz. There’s also the latest Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

Other features on the laptop are maybe not as useful, but they’re no less impressive. For all the RGB PC peripheral lovers out there, Razer has added per-key Razer Chroma RGB, which can be customized with the Razer Synapse software. Of course, this laptop also comes with a webcam, a 720p one, in this case, that supports Windows Hello login.

For that money, building a PC is always going to be way cheaper, but with the current GPU shortage, this may be the best way to get your hands on an Nvidia RTX 3080, even if it’s just the laptop version. You’ll still get ray tracing, DLSS, RTX voice, and all the other features that regular 30-series GPUs have. The high-end Ryzen processor will likely keep a stable framerate when gaming, but it’s the potential for productivity that should be noticed. With a 4.6GHz boost clock, this laptop will sing when using it on multi-threaded workflows such as Premiere Pro.

Don’t forget about us — Also announced at the conference were the new Raptor 27 gaming monitor and a USB-C 130W GaN charger. The Raptor 27 is a 27-inch IPS gaming monitor with a QHD resolution and a 165Hz refresh rate. The monitor is compatible with both AMD Freesync and Nvidia G-Sync technology. This being Razer, the monitor stand is decked out with RGB lights. The monitor has a 1ms response time, a nice addition for competitive gamers and pros. Pre-orders are up now for $799, or the price of a low to mid-range PC.

The 130W GaN charger is 40 percent smaller than the Anker Atom PD4, and it has two 100W USB-C ports and two 18W USB-A ports. The small charger can fast charge up to four devices at once, making it the perfect companion for travel. At $179, the 130W GaN charger is pretty steep. But you get that Razer logo! It’s available for pre-order and ships within the next 30 days.