Razer Blade 16 (2025) assessment: extremely settings on an ultra-thin laptop computer for an ultra-high worth

Few gaming laptops stand out like Razer’s Blades. They’ve lengthy been the gaming different to the MacBook Professional: glossy, highly effective, and grown-up trying, with out the majority and garish stylings of most gaming laptops. However cramming highly effective graphics playing cards into slim confines means Blade laptops generally tend to run sizzling, get loud, and carry ridiculous worth tags.

So that you’d be excused for feeling anxious that the 2025 Blade 16, which presents Nvidia’s strongest laptop computer GPU, is 30 % thinner and considerably lighter than its predecessor. In my preliminary testing, it solely appeared slightly extra highly effective than the 4090 Blade it replaces.

However now I’ve used it far more extensively. I’ve even examined it in opposition to cheaper, thicker RTX 5080 laptops with extra cooling capability, that are the higher purchase for those who’re centered squarely on gaming efficiency. Nonetheless, nothing fairly matches the Blade 16’s stability of top-end specs, skinny chassis with all-black aesthetics, and a beautiful OLED display I’d fortunately stare in any respect day.

The 2025 Blade 16 is simply 0.69 inches at its thickest (0.59 inches on the entrance) and weighs 4.6 kilos. That isn’t simply thinner and lighter than final yr’s 0.87-inch / 5.4-pound Blade 16, it’s additionally a bit lighter than the 16-inch MacBook Professional — although the Professional is barely thinner general, at 0.61 inches. And it’s priced like a MacBook Professional: the Blade 16 starts at $2,999.99 with an RTX 5070 Ti graphics card.

Earlier than Razer eliminated its US preorder pages and pricing after which introduced a few of them again amid April’s ongoing tariff chaos, our assessment unit, with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU, 32GB of RAM, 2TB SSD, and a Nvidia RTX 5090 cell GPU, was listed at $4,499. That configuration isn’t listed anymore, and the one mannequin with a 5090 now prices $4,899 however comes with twice the RAM and storage. It’s not clear how a lot this configuration of the Blade 16 will price or if it will likely be accessible. However one factor is for certain: the Blades will keep costly.

All fashions of the 2025 Blade 16 include a wonderful 16-inch, 240Hz, and 2560 x 1600 OLED show. With excellent colour distinction and sharp appears to be like, it’s one of many laptop computer’s strongest property. It’s not as high-res because the 16-inch MacBook Professional’s 3456 x 2234 mini-LED, however its variable 240Hz refresh is twice that of the Mac’s.

And the remainder of the Blade 16’s {hardware} feels “professional” with out dropping sight of its gaming focus. It has two USB 4 ports (one on either side), three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Sort-A, HDMI 2.1, a full-size UHS-II SD card reader, and a proprietary charging port with a reversible plug. It’s the identical connector as final gen, although the ability brick is now 280W as an alternative of 330W.

The Blade’s 1080p webcam appears to be like ok and handles combined and low lighting simply high-quality, although it’s lacking the privateness shutter from final yr. Its six-speaker setup will get very loud and sounds fairly full, although a bit muddy in comparison with the MacBook Professional. The keyboard has deeper key journey and extra tactile suggestions than a MacBook’s, and its trackpad is equally humongous — although its top-hinged design is simply okay in comparison with Apple’s wonderful haptic trackpads. Razer’s trackpad is so giant I used to be at first susceptible to unintended clicks with my palms, however I adjusted to it, simply as I needed to be taught to not hit the mic mute key on the right-hand macro key column when aiming for the arrow keys. And whereas these elements don’t all the time match Apple’s when it comes to high quality, they’re a reduce above most different gaming laptops.

Final yr’s thicker Blade had surprisingly good warmth administration in comparison with earlier fashions, so I used to be apprehensive that the thinner 2025 mannequin could be a step backward. As a substitute, it’s a small step ahead, with caveats. The 5090 mannequin has between 5 and 20 % increased body charges than the 4090 in Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Fantasy: Wukong, whereas staying round 4.5 levels Celsius cooler, with a mean GPU temperature of 81C in comparison with 86C. The chassis by no means obtained uncomfortable; I even performed video games with it on my lap with none issues (although I’ll doubtless really feel completely different within the sweltering summer season months).

Since my preliminary testing, I’ve additionally been utilizing the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 and Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 — each configured with the RTX 5080 (the subsequent GPU down from the 5090), each a lot thicker than the Blade 16 and each at the very least $1,000 cheaper. In a volley of Black Fantasy: Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks at 4K and a pair of.5K, the Blade 16’s common body charges had been at most 3 to 7fps increased (as much as 27 with 4x body era), placing the 5080 practically on par with the last-gen flagship RTX 4090 Blade 16. Each thicker laptops pushed the RTX 5080 previous 140W, with common GPU temperatures of 76C.

Razer says the Blade 16’s complete graphics energy for sustained workloads is 135W, and Nvidia Dynamic Enhance can push that to 160W in brief bursts by pulling energy from the CPU’s allowance. However the RTX 5090 can draw as much as 150W, so it’s doable the RTX 5090 will carry out higher in a laptop computer with extra cooling capability. However I examined the Blade 16 with Razer’s Laptop computer Cooling Pad, which lets the Blade’s GPU pull nearer to 150W; sadly, though the GPU stayed round 9C cooler, it didn’t make any constant distinction in body charges, and the loud cooling fan drove me up the wall.

Even the quickest laptop computer GPU is constrained by the ability and cooling capability of the laptop computer it’s in. The RTX 5090 laptop computer GPU within the Blade 16 is about on par with a desktop RTX 5070, so it’s proper at dwelling with the Blade’s 2560 x 1600 native decision, and utilizing Nvidia’s DLSS 4 and Multi Body Gen software program can assist it reap the benefits of that 240Hz show — particularly on essentially the most graphically intense video games.

For instance, with DLSS and Multi Body Gen, I used to be capable of common 146fps within the new Half-Life 2 RTX demo at native 2.5K decision utilizing extremely settings. It was a graphical feast of volumetric lighting and path-traced reflections. Nvidia’s software program methods can typically trigger small artifacting and a little input latency. However, frankly, for those who’re not the sort to go pixel-peeping, you’ll doubtless admire the sleek efficiency at excessive resolutions greater than you’ll discover an innocuous anomaly like a small little bit of smearing or ghosting.

Personally, I’m cool with utilizing DLSS and body era for single-player video games, as a result of with the ability to crank one thing like Cyberpunk 2077 to maxed-out “overdrive” settings with full path tracing and 151 common frames per second is simply beautiful. However it isn’t magic: if a sport isn’t operating easily earlier than body era, it’ll nonetheless really feel like a uneven mess afterward, even when Multi Body Gen pushes it over 60fps. To play at 4K — on an exterior monitor or the display on the upcoming Razer Blade 18 — you’ll most likely nonetheless have to show some settings down.

The Blade 16’s gaming efficiency on battery is fairly good, however the expertise varies by sport. Nvidia’s Battery Boost makes use of simply sufficient of the Blade’s energy to focus on 60fps and lowers it to 30 throughout non-action moments like cutscenes and map shows. Utilizing the Nvidia app’s optimized settings, I used to be capable of get slightly over 90 minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 on a cost and practically two hours of Elden Ring on one other. However Cyberpunk was set to low with out ray tracing, operating with DLSS 4 set to extremely efficiency mode and averaging 120fps because of 4x Multi Body Gen (so round 30fps for those who exclude AI frames). Elden Ring, which doesn’t assist DLSS, averaged simply 38fps.

Whereas operating both sport, the GPU was restricted to 30W and the CPU round 10W — I didn’t even hear the followers. By comparability, whereas plugged in, Cyberpunk’s one-click optimization makes use of a mixture of excessive and extremely settings, full with ray tracing and balanced DLSS. That yields a mean 179fps with the GPU getting 114W and the CPU at 36W. The followers run loud, however not sufficient to be a nuisance. Video games look so significantly better plugged in, and video games are most likely why you’re spending $4,500 right here.

That plugged-in efficiency does additionally translate to the Blade’s content-creation prowess. It ran our Premiere Professional 4K export check in a single minute, 56 seconds — 17 seconds sooner than Apple’s 16-inch M4 Professional laptop computer ($3,349 as examined), although 38 seconds slower than the M4 Max mannequin ($6,149 as examined).

It’s a good different to the MacBook Professional for content material creation, and much exceeds it in gaming, however the Blade lags far behind in battery life. Not simply behind the MacBook Professional — which may rise up to 18 hours on battery — however even behind different Home windows gaming laptops. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, with the identical Strix Level CPU and an RTX 4070 GPU, lasted over eight hours in combined non-gaming use. The Blade couldn’t make it six below the identical situations, even with its display set to 60Hz. I finally obtained it by way of an eight-hour workday by enabling Home windows 11’s Vitality Saver mode the entire time. It wasn’t perceptibly slower throughout a comparatively mild day of Slack, Google Docs, and a one-hour Google Meet name, however Vitality Saver limits background app exercise, so it may probably hinder heavier multitasking.

There’s no getting round the truth that Home windows laptops ship much less energy on battery. On battery energy, I can really feel sluggishness in Lightroom Traditional when the Blade 16 makes use of built-in graphics to avoid wasting battery. Macs don’t have that problem. Forcing Home windows to make use of the discrete GPU made it speedy once more, however importing round 2,000 RAW information and doing mild enhancing on simply half of them used 25 % of the Blade’s battery in below an hour. If I do this on a MacBook Professional, I’m normally accomplished enhancing properly earlier than I even fear about plugging in.

There’s nonetheless nothing fairly just like the Blade 16. It’s the well-fitting black T-shirt to the try-hard tacticool cargo pants of different gaming laptops, and it’s nonetheless the closest factor you’ll discover to a MacBook Professional for gaming. The battery life is middling and the value for the 5090 model is obscene, however laptop computer avid gamers all the time pay a premium for portability.

The most important hangup with the 5090 model of the Blade 16 is that the 5080 is respiratory down its neck for $1,000 much less. We don’t know but if the Blade’s thinness is holding the 5090 again — not till I check a Blade with the 5080 or one other 5090 laptop computer with extra thermal headroom. Regardless, Razer aimed to make the Blade 16 a return to kind, and it delivered.

Pictures by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge