A triumph of gaming laptop design

Razer wants you to fall in love with its new thin and light gaming laptop from the moment you lift it out of the box, with its gorgeous CNC-milled aluminum body, OLED screen, glowing Razer logo, and ingeniously designed RGB keyboard all doing their best to tug at your emotions and your credit card. The new Razer Blade 16 2025 has been lavished with attention, with the chassis shaved down to just 15mm at its thinnest point, and it’s packed with the latest components too.

With a new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU handling gaming duties, the Razer Blade 16 even has multi frame gen in its arsenal, and Razer has also swapped the CPU for a brand new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. Comparatively, the 2024 Razer Blade 16 model used Intel CPUs, with a Core i9 14900HX in the top-line designs. That’s a fast CPU, but it also runs hot and draws a lot of power, and the new CPU is a much better choice for a gaming machine.

Meanwhile, Razer has made the sensible choice to kit out this laptop with a 2,560 x 1,600 screen, rather than a panel with a ridiculously high resolution. With a gorgeous new chassis, and the usual top build quality you expect from Razer, the Blade 16 also looks like one of the best gaming laptop designs out there. Does it all add up to a winner? To find out, I’ve been using the Razer Blade 16 as my main gaming machine for over a week, on my desk and on the move, while also using it for work and running loads of game benchmarks on it.

Specs

The new Razer Blade 16 2025 has a double whammy of big specs changes, with a new AMD CPU and a new Nvidia GPU as well. Let’s start with the latter, as that’s the really big draw when it comes to a gaming laptop. Our test sample comes with the very best graphics card for laptops that Nvidia has to offer, the mighty RTX 5090, though cheaper versions are also available, starting with the lower-spec RTX 5070 Ti.

While the laptop RTX 5090 doesn’t have quite the same killer spec as the desktop GPU we tested in our RTX 5090 review, it’s still a formidable component, with a similar spec to the desktop RTX 5080. In fact, it even has more VRAM than RTX 5080 desktop cards, being equipped with a massive 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM, which is 8GB more than the RTX 4090 laptop chip, and will mean you have absolutely no worries about memory being a limit when you’re gaming at this laptop’s 2,560 x 1,600 native screen resolution.

The memory is attached to a 256-bit wide memory interface, which is much narrower than the 512-bit bus on the desktop card, but the fact that the VRAM runs at 1,750MHz (28Gbps effective) means you still get a massive 896GB/s of memory bandwidth on this card. Comparatively, the RTX 4090 laptop GPU tops out at 576GB/s, so this new chip can shift data much more quickly between the GPU and its memory.

Meanwhile, the GPU itself has 10,496 CUDA cores, which is a long way off the 21,760 of the desktop card, but again not far off the 10,762 of the desktop RTX 5080. The GPU is also equipped with Nvidia’s very latest RT cores and Tensor cores, and fully supports DLSS 4, including multi frame gen. This means it can use AI to insert up to three frames between every pair of genuinely rendered frames in your game, which can massively increase your frame rate.

Razer has even given the GPU a little bit of a clock speed bump. By default, the RTX 5090 boosts to 1,515MHz, but the default Performance profile in Razer’s Synapse software increases this to 1,597MHz, with the ability to supply up to 160W dynamically to the GPU when it needs it. Basically, this is an incredible amount of GPU power that should be plenty for gaming on the 2,560 x 1,600 screen.

Next up is the CPU, with the new Razer Blade 16 coming fitted with a brand new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point chip. This 12-core CPU is divided into four full AMD Zen 5 cores, with a further eight Zen 5c cores. The latter still use the same core architecture as the full-fat ones, but they have less cache and a lower boost clock of up to 3.3GHz, compared to 5.1GHz on the full Zen 5 cores.

This CPU has another trick up its sleeve too, which is an integrated Radeon 890M GPU with 16 compute units and a decent neural processing unit (NPU). While the latter doesn’t have anywhere near the AI power of the GPU, it hits the 50 TOPS required for Microsoft CoPilot+, meaning you can save power by not engaging the Nvidia GPU if you want to use basic AI from the desktop (the keyboard even has a CoPilot key). Comparatively, the NPUs in Intel’s current Arrow Lake chips are much less powerful.

You also get 32GB of 8,000MT/s LPDDR5 RAM in this laptop, with an option to spend more and get a 64GB model. Sadly, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard, so you won’t be able to upgrade it to your own choice of the best gaming RAM yourself. On the plus side, however, all the configurations come with at least 32GB, unlike the meager 16GB found on some of the similarly-soldered Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 models from last year.

One part that you can upgrade is the SSD, with a pair of M.2 PCIe 4.0 ports provided for storage, each of which can accept up to a 4TB single-sided SSD. A 2TB Samsung PM9A1 drive is installed by default in our sample, which is a fast enough drive that doesn’t overheat, but it’s good that there’s also room to upgrade it to the best gaming SSD you can afford at a later date.

Features

Razer wants you to feel a sense of pride when you open up this laptop, and nowhere is that more visible than in the attention to detail when it comes to features. The Blade 16 might be expensive, but you’re not just paying for the latest components here – you’re also paying for the feature set, with several little touches that elevate it beyond the standard laptop.

One that I really like is the keyboard, which has the typical per-key RGB lighting you would expect from Razer, but with an added extra. There are two RGB LEDs in some of the keys, and the lighting shifts from one set of LEDs to the other, so you can instantly see whether you’re enabling a Shift-key function or Fn-key function before you press it.

This might seem gimmicky, but I found it genuinely useful on a number of occasions. Press the Fn key, and only the secondary functions light up, so you can see whether you’re going to actually press F5 to refresh your app, or rewind an audio track instead. Press the Shift key, and the lights on the number and punctuation keys will flick to the appropriate symbols – it’s invaluable for moments when you need to type in a long password full of symbols and numbers, and it instantly tells you what you’re about to press.

Handily, there are also five customizable macro keys on the side, which double up as other features, such as PgUp and PgDn keys, and there’s a really useful mic mute button in the bottom right corner too. It’s great to have a dedicated key for this now regularly used feature, rather than making it a secondary function of another key. It’s a membrane keyboard, so there are no mechanical keyswitches, but there’s a decent amount of travel in the keys (1.5mm according to Razer) when you press them, the keycaps are sensibly sized, and the whole unit feels secure and firm under your fingers.

The keyboard even supports Razer’s new SnapTap feature, which enables you to overlap the activation of the A and D keys when you’re strafing left and right, meaning you don’t need to lift your finger off one key before you activate the other. It’s handy if you’re holding down D to strafe right, for example, but then very quickly need to strafe left – you don’t need to lift your finger off D; you can just hit the A key with your other finger. It’s so effective that it’s even been banned in some games, such as CS2.

I’m also really glad to see a decent port selection on this laptop. There’s a USB-C port on both the left and right sides, both of which support high-speed USB 4 with 100W charging (great if you want to plug in your Steam Deck), and there are also three standard USB A ports, meaning you don’t have to attach multiple dongles to attach your devices.

Razer has also put a lot of work into its Synapse software, from which you can customize your lighting, monitor temperatures, adjust the refresh rate, change the performance profile, adjust fan speeds, and set which GPU you’re using, plus loads of other features. I had it set up to use the Nvidia GPU for games and the AMD GPU for the Windows desktop, using Optimus, but it’s good to have the flexibility.

Then there’s that screen, which has the same core spec as the panel found on last year’s Blade 16. This OLED display has a very quick response time of just 0.2ms, and it also supports Nvidia G-Sync, so you can synchronize its refresh rate with the frame rate output of the GPU. It tops out at a 240Hz refresh rate, so it’s really quick as well, especially with that tight response time, and its resolution is just right for the power of the GPU.

Colors look bright and vibrant, with high contrast and deep blacks, and its OLED panel looks great when it’s displaying movies and games with HDR enabled. I also much prefer the 16:10 aspect ratio to 16:9 on a laptop, especially if you want to do some work on it too, as you get some extra screen real estate at the bottom. If there’s one criticism, it’s that the glossy surface of the screen can be overly reflective in some lighting conditions.

Even the sound system is surprisingly capable for such a slim machine, with six speakers (three speakers on each side of the keyboard) pumping out a decent frequency range. I never expect to get incredible sound from a laptop, but the audio quality from the new Razer 16 doesn’t sound tinny or treble-heavy, and there’s a decent amount of bass. Ideally, you’d plug in a headset or a pair of speakers, but the audio quality is fine for listening to music or gaming in a hotel room.

Design

With its solid, cold aluminum body and slimline profile, the Blade 16 looks and feels like a quality device in your hands, with none of the cheap, flimsy plastic seen on cheaper laptops. Razer’s use of a fingerprint-resistant black anodized coating is also an improvement on the 2024 model, although touching it does sometimes result in a bit of a smeary effect instead of a fingerprint. Meanwhile, the snaky Razer logo on the lid glows green when the machine is powered on, and this new machine is also much slimmer than last year’s (already svelte) model.

There’s a bit of a catch here, though, as the bottom of the Blade isn’t all the same thickness – it’s a little chunkier at the back where the cooling system is held, and then tapers to a thinner edge at the front, going from 0.69 inches (17mm) to 0.59 inches (15mm). Both measurements are significantly lower than the 22mm of the 2024 model, though, and this is a genuinely slim machine, especially when you consider the powerful components inside it.

The reduction in chassis size has also reduced the weight from 5.4lb (2.5kg) to 4.72lb (2.41kg). This is still relatively heavy in this field, however, with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (which also has an aluminum chassis) weighing in at 4.29lb (1.95kg), for example. I had no trouble carrying the Blade 16 in my backpack for a three-mile walk, though, and the thickness of the aluminum used in the Blade 16’s well-built chassis is undoubtedly a factor here too. There are lighter laptops available, but the Blade 16 is still highly portable.

Another factor here, though, is the size of the power brick, and the one with the Razer Blade 16 is seriously chunky. This is what happens when you pack so much component power into a gaming laptop – if you don’t want to limit the power supplied to your GPU and CPU, then your laptop also needs a decent PSU.

Those two components are kept in check by Razer’s cooling system, which has two fans on the bottom, each with a grille underneath, plus a large vapor chamber unit and a load of exhaust vents on the back of the machine, with the latter sitting behind the screen when the laptop is open. One quirk I found with this cooling system, however, is that it appears to direct a lot of heat toward the top of the chassis above the keyboard, which can get hot to the touch if you’re gaming.

One of my main criticisms of the Blade 2024 was that its cooling fans made a horrible amount of noise when you were gaming, and while the noise from the 2025 model isn’t as bad, the fans still make a cacophony when you fire up a game.

Thankfully, you can reduce the noise considerably by engaging the ‘Silent’ mode in Razer’s Synapse software, and while that has an impact on frame rates (more on that later), that’s a sacrifice worth making in some circumstances, particularly if you’re gaming in the same room as other people. It’s far from actually being silent in this mode, of course, but the noise is more in line with what you’d expect from a standard desktop gaming PC.

Performance

I’ve run the Blade 16 2025 through our new test suite of game benchmarks, which includes both old and new titles, some of which support multi frame gen and high levels of ray tracing, while others stress pure rasterization performance.

The Razer Blade 16 2025 isn’t just a pretty face, with the company using the very latest components from AMD and Nvidia to produce a seriously powerful gaming machine inside that slim chassis. Razer sent me a sample with the new RTX 5090 and AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370, and its performance is absolutely superb – you can genuinely play the latest games at the screen’s 2,560 x 1,600 resolution on this machine, and they look fantastic.

Cyberpunk 2077

I’ll start with today’s ‘but can it run Crysis?’ equivalent, which is Cyberpunk 2077. It might be an old game now, but CD Projekt Red has continued to add new features to it, the latest of which is support for Nvidia’s new DLSS 4 tech. This includes Nvidia’s new transformer model for upscaling, where the GPU renders the text, menus, and HUD elements of a game at the selected resolution, but renders the game at a lower resolution, then uses AI to scale it up.

Nvidia’s older CNN model worked well enough, but often resulted in ghosting, shimmering, blurriness, and smearing, and the new transformer model mostly clears this up – you can now enable DLSS upscaling in Cyberpunk 2077 and the image will be stable and sharp, with smooth motion. On this new GPU, the game can also now use multi frame generation, using AI to insert up to three extra frames between every genuinely rendered pair, and the result is transformative.

I ran the game at both 1,920 x 1,080 and 2,560 x 1,600 to get a spread of results. As you can see in the graph above, the game is just about playable at 1080p with the ultra ray tracing preset even without DLSS, but enabling DLSS on the Quality setting takes the average up to 76fps, then enabling multi frame gen makes this figure rocket all the way up to 286fps. Enabling the path tracing mode at the same settings, where the lighting looks incredibly realistic, resulted in an average of 227fps, with the game looking and feeling great in action.

Interestingly, in this one game, the minimums reported by the game were significantly higher than the 1% lows reported by Nvidia FrameView (with a much larger disparity than usual). I use the latter to get a more accurate figure for the worst case scenario of frame rates, and while 86fps for the latter result is still fine, it’s worth noting that Cyberpunk 2077 itself was reporting a minimum 200fps, and the game worked really well when I was playing it at these settings.

More remarkably, moving up to the screen’s native 2,560 x 1,600 resolution is still possible in this game, which averages 63fps at the ultra ray tracing preset with DLSS upscaling on the Quality setting, and goes up to a massive 200fps with multi frame gen enabled. Again, you can even run it at this resolution with path tracing enabled, where it runs at 147fps. Our result in the above graph was achieved with DLSS at the Quality setting, but what’s great about the transformer model is that it still looks decent at the lower settings, so you could run this game at the Performance or Balanced preset to get an even faster frame rate.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Next up is Bethesda’s brutally tough (for hardware) Indy adventure, which forces you to use ray tracing at every setting, and has an incredible-looking path tracing mode if you have a powerful enough GPU. We’ve seen this game drop to unplayable levels on even some of the latest GPUs at top settings, thanks to a lack of VRAM, but that’s not a worry with the 24GB of GDDR 7 memory connected to this machine’s GPU.

Firstly, you can simply run the game at the Ultra preset at 2,560 x 1,600 without even needing to switch on any DLSS features – it averages 93fps with a 63fps 1% low, and is absolutely fine to play. I then tried maxing it out at the Supreme preset with full RT path tracing enabled, enlisting some help from multi frame gen and DLSS upscaling on the Quality setting. At these settings, it averaged a smooth 128fps and looked superb.

As this isn’t a fast action game, with the exception of a little fistfight action, I found it was fine to play in my time with it at these settings. However, without multi frame gen, the average drops down to 40fps with a 33fps 1% low, which isn’t great as a starting point. If I were running the game at maxed-out settings, I’d again run DLSS upscaling at the Balanced or Performance settings at this resolution (where it still looks great with DLSS 4), so you have a higher starting point for frame gen.

F1 24

High-speed racing at top settings is also a breeze on this laptop, and I was able to completely max out F1 24 at 2,560 x 1,600 and still average 82fps, even without any DLSS features enabled. Enable frame gen and set DLSS to the Quality setting and this figure climbs all the way to 162fps, with a 1% low of 95fps, and it looks and feels great in action.

I also tried this game with the Silent preset enabled in Razer’s Synapse software, to get an idea of its impact, and was pleasantly surprised by the result. The average frame rate dropped from 162fps to 136fps, but the game was still really smooth, and the fans were significantly quieter.

Call of Duty Black Ops 6

Not all the latest games are packed full of fancy ray-traced lighting, though, and their standard rendering techniques can be demanding as well. A case in point is Call of Duty Black Ops 6 when you really turn up the settings. However, the Razer Blade 16 had no trouble with this game at all. Even without DLSS enabled, it averages 112fps at 2,560 x 1,600, with a 71fps 1% low. Enable DLSS at the Quality setting, along with frame gen, and this goes up to 173fps – a great result.

Cinebench

With Razer swapping to a new AMD CPU with this lineup, I was also interested to see how its application performance compared to last year’s Blade model. The Blade 16 2024 used an Intel Core i9 14900HX, which is extremely powerful in both games and multi-threaded software, but is also hot and power-hungry, with a dramatic impact on fan noise and battery life. We can already see that the new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 copes fine with gaming demands, but how does it fare in multi-threaded software

To find out, I ran Cinebench R24 on the new machine, and the results were interesting. The Core i9 14900HX is definitely quicker in both single-threaded and multi-threaded applications, but the AMD chip is substantially faster than the new Meteor Lake Core Ultra 9 185H used in the ROG Zephyrus G16. The latter result is interesting, as the Core Ultra 9 185H has 16 cores (six P-Cores and ten E-Cores), compared with 12 on the new AMD CPU, but the latter is quicker across the board.

Meanwhile, the Core i9 14900HX is still the performance king, but that’s hardly surprising with 24 cores and a high clock speed at its disposal. Crucially, the margin isn’t huge, and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is cooler and more power-efficient.

Battery

Razer may have only equipped the new Blade 16 with a 90Whr battery (compared to 95.2Whr on the 2024 model), but the new components have had a dramatic impact on battery life. This is particularly the case with the CPU, as the Blade 16 2025 lasted an incredible 508 minutes (eight and a half hours) in the PCMark Modern Office battery life test, with the screen set to half brightness. You can genuinely take this laptop out for work on long journeys without having to worry about power.

Gaming battery life is also significantly better, with Nvidia making large-scale improvements to the power gating and frequency switching of its new GPUs when running on battery power. The Blade 16 2025 lasted for 108 minutes in the PCMark Gaming battery life test, compared to just 85 minutes on the 2024 model (which only had an RTX 4070 in our test sample).

I also put this to the test myself, playing Civilization 7 on a train journey. I played for a good hour and ten minutes, and the battery was still at 47% when I reached my station and shut the machine down. Another positive about the Blade’s CPU and GPU setup is also the option to use the integrated AMD GPU if you want to save on battery power. You can choose which GPU you want to use in the Synapse Software, and I found that Civilization 7 was easily playable without engaging the Nvidia GPU, for example.

Price

Razer gear seldom comes cheap, and as with Apple hardware, you pay a premium for it. The brand is a big factor in the price, of course, but so are the premium materials, design, and features. There’s no getting around the fact that this is a very expensive laptop, though. Our sample with an RTX 5090 costs $4,499 / £3,899, and that’s a serious outlay.

You can save some money by opting for a cheaper component setup, with $2,999 / $2,699 buying you a machine with an RTX 5070 Ti, and we’re also pleased to see that every laptop in the lineup comes with at least 32GB of RAM, even at the cheaper end of the scale. Even so, these are premium prices, and you’ll be able to buy machines with similar specs for less money elsewhere. What you’re buying here is the quality of the build and design.

Alternatives

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16

Asus’ nearest equivalent of the Blade 16 doesn’t have quite the same level of flair and wow factor, but it’s not far off, and it’s much cheaper. With a gorgeous OLED screen, aluminum chassis, and powerful GPU options, this is a great alternative if you can’t afford the Razer premium. Like the Blade, it also has soldered memory, so we recommend starting with 32GB as a minimum.

Read our full Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 review.

Verdict

With amazing gaming performance, a stunning screen, a gorgeous chassis, and a useful feature set, the Razer Blade 16 is a triumph of gaming laptop design. Thanks to the RTX 5090, you can now genuinely play the latest games maxed out at the screen’s 2,560 x 1,600 resolution, even with path tracing enabled, and the AMD CPU maintains solid performance without overheating or quickly running the battery dry.

The fact that you can get over eight hours of life out of this rig is also a big bonus, and I love Razer’s attention to detail with the design. Every aspect, from the dual RGB LEDs in the keyboard, to the slimline aluminum chassis and effective cooling system, has been thought through with precision. The Synapse software is also really useful, giving you full control over the laptop’s fan curves and display settings, as well as which GPU to use when.

Yes, it’s ridiculously expensive, and no, I couldn’t afford to buy the Razer Blade 16 with this spec myself, but I really wish I could. You’ll almost certainly be able to buy cheaper laptops with similar components, and those machines will be better choices if you don’t have deep pockets. If I had the money, though, this lovely metal slice of unadulterated gaming power is absolutely the laptop I’d buy.

For more portable gaming ideas, check out our guide to the best laptop games, as well as our guide to the best handheld gaming PC, where we take you through all our recommendations at a range of prices.