Razer Blade 16 (2025) Review: Sitting in the Gaming Lap(top) of Luxury (2025)

The new Blade 16 starts at $2,399.99, including an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor, 16GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU, and a 1TB SSD. While this is undoubtedly an expensive way to acquire an RTX 5060 laptop, much of the cost is baked into the laptop's high-end finishes and features—more on those next. You’ll have to justify paying a premium for this system alongside its performance.

As always, Razer promotes plenty of air flow in its super-thin laptop chassis. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Our review configuration significantly ups the price and power. It packs a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, 32GB of memory, an RTX 5090 GPU, and a 2TB SSD for $4,499.99. If the starting model seems spendy to you, this is rarified air. The 24GB mobile RTX 5090 was the first RTX 50 series laptop GPU I had the chance to test (see that standalone testing piece), and it's an extreme performer.

You'll find several GPU options (RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5080) between our test model and the base model, but only those two aforementioned AMD CPU options. Memory and storage top out at 64GB and 4TB, respectively, so our unit is not the most expensive possible configuration. While the base model doesn't look like a super deal for the price, because nothing about the laptop design changes between configurations, Razer's step-up options make the laptop more appealing and surprisingly competitive as you add them.

Until Razer embarks on one of its rare complete redesigns, we know what we’re getting when a Blade machine crosses our test bench. That’s not a bad thing—these are some of the most premium gaming laptops around, and no one expects, say, Apple to change the MacBook Pro’s design annually. I’ve just reviewed many similar-looking Razer systems over the years.

This laptop lid has become practically iconic by this point. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The trademark thin aluminum build, all-black style, and green lid logo stay the same, leading to a machine that feels as trim and luxe as ever. If you’re seeking exact measurements on this thin design, it measures 0.87 by 14.0 by 9.6 inches (HWD) and weighs roughly 5.4 pounds at higher-end configurations like ours. (The lightest is 4.7 pounds.) These are the same dimensions as the 2024 version of the Blade 16.

Razer's touchpad is roomy and remains one of the smoothest and most responsive on any Windows laptop. I don’t like the keyboard quite as much (other pricey systems have more feedback and travel), but it’s still comfortable. It's just a bit flat-feeling. The cost of this system is obviously high, and while a lot of that is because of the top-end components, much of it is this more premium build, too. Budget laptops have infamously cheap-feeling keyboards or touchpads, as higher-quality parts are more expensive to produce.

One area for slight improvement: Razer could level up the keyboard a bit. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

That extends to the display, as well. The only panel currently available on the new model is a 240Hz QHD+ (2,560-by-1,600-pixel) OLED screen. (The screen with variable resolution and refresh rate that was seen on the previous model is no longer an option.) Its colors are brilliant and vibrant, as you’d expect from OLED, and the panel’s incredibly sharp. However, I found one glaring caveat: The shiny finish on this panel is highly reflective. The finish produces enough glare to the point I find it almost constantly distracting—in normal and even lower-light rooms, I see myself reflected in the screen as much as I see the image on the screen.

The single 240Hz display option isn't a super match for an RTX 5060, but it sings with higher-tier GPUs. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This issue was challenging to grapple with while gaming, as I squinted past the reflection in dark environments while trying to aim. I encountered this while running some game-specific performance tests on Doom: The Dark Ages, and it remained a persistent issue while working on this review. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s basically a tinted mirror when the screen displays all black or mostly dark images.

You might not like proprietary power cords, but they do free up a USB port. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This laptop's connectivity is wide-ranging, with its slim chassis thick enough to hold all essential ports. The left edge holds two USB Type-A ports, one USB4 Type-C connection, a headphone jack, and the proprietary power connector. The right flank hosts one more USB port of each type, an HDMI connection, and an SD card slot. The only potential miss here is an Ethernet jack, though it's never a given on a gaming machine, even big ones. Ethernet can promote a more consistent internet connection, but it isn’t essential, and USB adapters are available.

This is a lot of ports for a laptop this thin. (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Razer also includes Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a 1080p webcam in each Blade laptop. In my testing, this camera delivers above-average picture quality and video sharpness, with clear output and effective handling of lower-light environments.

To gauge this high-end laptop's relative performance, I put it through its paces on our benchmark test suite. Then, I gathered the following group of alternatives to compare the results against.

The obvious inclusion is the previous Blade 16 model ($4,199 as tested), while the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 ($2,299.99 as tested) shows what another thin, but less expensive, 16-inch alternative can do. Finally, the two 18-inch laptops, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 ($3,899.99 as tested) and the Razer Blade 18 ($4,499 as tested), are all-out power machines with comparable prior-generation GPUs.

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.

Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the freeware video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

The new Blade 16 delivers fast processing performance any way you slice it, even if it wasn't the quickest system in this particular group. The 13th- and 14th-generation Intel systems pushed higher scores on average, which may tip the scales if you’re a content creator eyeing this machine. Still, this Blade is generally more than fast enough for gaming and high-intensity productivity or content creation workloads.

We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. We also turn to 3DMark's Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment. This benchmark works with native APIs, subjecting 3D scenes to increasingly intense ray-traced workloads at 1440p.

Our real-world gaming testing comes from in-game benchmarks within Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.

We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR, on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies.

I wrote plenty about this system’s gaming prowess on these benchmarks in my first RTX 5090 test piece, but let’s run down the results again. We crowned the RTX 5090 the new fastest mobile GPU (as you’d expect), even considering the Blade 16’s thinner form holds that GPU back from its full potential.

In a couple of cases here—namely, on F1 with DLSS active, which we found is more an issue of being CPU-bound with DLSS at its higher levels—the last-generation 18-inch laptops pushed higher average frame rates. However, in most instances on these tests, especially at higher resolution, the Blade 16 was the highest-scoring laptop.

DLSS is a significant aspect of the RTX 50 series’ improvement over the RTX 40 series, with more efficient performance and support for multi-frame generation. As just outlined, DLSS leans increasingly on the CPU as you ratchet toward the Ultra performance level, which can have an impact. But by and large, the RTX 50 series can push far superior performance with DLSS active.

In its latest (DLSS 4) iteration, DLSS generates more artificial frames inserted between traditionally rendered frames than it could before. This multi-frame generation can produce as many as three artificial frames for every traditionally rendered frame, significantly boosting frame rates. You'll find some downsides to this—you may notice a blurrier look or ghosting effect depending on the game, especially at maximum DLSS level—but it’s a surefire way to get smoother frame rates with ray tracing active, or to allow less powerful laptops to run new games smoothly at all.

For the standalone testing piece, I created separate DLSS-only test runs to compare this laptop against itself with DLSS disabled, enabled, and enabled with multi-frame generation. Here are those results again.

With DLSS, Cyberpunk changes from virtually unplayable at 1600p and maximum settings to increasingly smooth. Even the first level of this upscaling technology changes the landscape, more than tripling the score to 77fps. Going even further down this path, turning on Frame Generation (at “2X” in Cyberpunk’s settings) almost doubles the score again, to 147fps, which makes sense given how the technology works. Finally, Multi Frame Generation set to “4X” increases the frame-rate result by nearly a further 73%.

We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Razer's latest Blade posted an impressive battery result, improving over the outgoing model's running time. Whether it's thanks to the processor difference or other optimizations is hard to say, but the result is lengthy battery life for a gaming laptop, which gives you all the more reason to take it on the road.

The display-testing numbers are also fantastic, particularly the screen's sky-high, MacBook Pro-level color coverage ratings. The display's brightness also scored well, though the strong peak brightness can only do so much to combat the panel’s glare issue.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Razer’s new Blade 16, especially our tricked-out RTX 5090-based model, delivers exactly the experience you’d expect, for better and worse. The Blade looks and feels as luxurious as ever; it has an advanced gaming-ready display; and it delivers blistering-fast frame rates with the top-end GPU from the latest generation. However, the laptop is also quite expensive across all configurations, only a plausible pick for the most affluent shoppers. Even for those who look at, say, higher-end MacBook Pro models, this is like ordering one of Apple’s machines with all the frills.

Most shoppers simply won’t consider this price range, but some do; for those enthusiasts, the Blade presents that luxe experience and performance. If you're going to pay this much, you'll find gaming laptops with higher performance ceilings—bigger and thicker machines that focus on power—but the Blade 16 mixes it all together with a decisive, unmatched cool factor among laptop PCs.

Razer Blade 16 (2025) Appears in These Best Lists:

• ● The Best Battery Life Laptops for 2025
• ● The Best OLED Laptops for 2025