Good things come in small packages

Razer’s update Blade 14 is slightly bigger and a whole lot better.

THIS A LOVELY LAPTOP. It’s the very epitome of Razer’s superbly refined and surprisingly restrained notebook design ethos. We love the 14-inch form factor, too. This smaller scale makes the Blade 14 a laptop that can be equally at home both as your home gaming machine and your daily driver office notebook.

The catch? It simply isn’t good value. It’s just so damned expensive for the core components and the resulting performance. Take the Acer Predator Helios 16, with one of the best displays in any gaming laptop. That’s a $2,300 machine. Or how about the excellent Lenovo Legion Pro 7i? That’s a $2,500 system, and one you could find for just $2,200 over the recent summer sales period. And the Razer Blade 14? $2,700 buys you an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU and Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU combo. You also get the now basic standard of 16GB DDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD, which is the sort of minimum spec you’d require in a $1,500 notebook, not an almost $3,000 one. You can at least upgrade the RAM in this 2023 edition, which you couldn’t with the previous Blade 14 machines.