Razer Blade 16 (2025) review: The best gaming laptop I've ever tested
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What is the Razer Blade 16?
If you want the best gaming gear, be it a gaming chair, keyboard, mouse, gaming headset or PC, Razer's catalogue of devices is a good, if pricey, place to start. In a nutshell, they make luxury gaming products for grown-ups, and if you're after a stellar gaming laptop that hides its light under a bushel, you should look to Razer.
The new Blade 16 might look more like an upmarket productivity device, but this is the first laptop I've reviewed with the latest RTX 50 series Nvidia graphics. Apart from improvements in efficiency and baseline performance, this also brings the latest iteration of Nvidia's DLSS upscaling technology, DLSS4, promising major frame rate increases in the latest games.
How we test laptops
Testing gaming laptops combines the subjective and the empirical. A colorimeter can tell you how good a display is technically, but the eyeball is the final arbiter, especially when it comes to motion fidelity. A sound meter will tell you how loud a laptop's speaker system can go, but your ears will tell you what the sound quality is like and how good the directionality is.
Gaming performance is the key metric. I run some demanding gaming benchmark tests to get a handle on performance, primarily Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong. I also run productivity tests to see how the machine handles more day-to-day tasks and intense workloads such as 3D modelling.
Not every reviewer opens up the laptops they are given to test, but I do so I can tell you how easy it is to get inside to add more storage, more memory or just perform basic maintenance like blowing dust out of the fans or replacing the battery.
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Design and usability
Score: 9/10
Made from aluminium with an anodised black finish, the Blade 16's design can best be described as angular-industrial with a pinch of Bauhaus. The only nod towards the adornments you may expect on a gaming laptop is the green backlit logo on the lid.
The aluminium construction makes for a stiff and solid laptop, but Razer has managed to keep the weight and thickness down. The 2025 Blade 16 is just 15mm thick compared to the 2024 model's 22mm. At 2.2Kg, it's also surprisingly light for a high-end gaming laptop: I've tested many at over 4Kg.
Despite the slender profile, Razer has found room for a comprehensive range of ports. On the left side, I found two 10Gbps USB-A connections, a USB-C 4.0 port that also supports DisplayPort 1.4 video output, a 3.5mm audio jack and the proprietary power socket. On the right, there is another Type-A and Type-C port as well as an HDMI 2.1 video connection and an SD card reader.
The only thing it's missing that some gamers may bemoan is an Ethernet port, but in these days of blazing fast Wi-Fi (the Blade 16 supports the latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 standards), that's not such an issue.
The only negative aspect of the design is that the bodywork shows fingerprints more than I would have liked, and that's despite having what Razer calls a 'fingerprint resistive coating'.
Getting inside the Blade 16 is a straightforward affair, and while you can't add more memory, you can add a second SSD for additional storage, which means you can buy the basic 1TB model and up that to a whopping 8TB as your game library expands.
Incidentally, the 2TB SSD in my review machine performed like a champ, recording sequential read and write speeds of 5,500MB/s, which is perfect for moving large game and media files around in no time at all.
Keyboard and touchpad
The Blade's keyboard is a standard albeit high-quality chiclet affair that doesn't look or feel particularly 'gamey'. I understand Razer's thinking here; anyone who buys a hardcore gaming laptop will probably invest in a separate mechanical keyboard for the best experience, like I did.
Aesthetics aside, the keyboard benefits from being rock solid with a well-engineered 1.5mm of key travel and a full per-key RGB lighting system that you can modify via the Razer Chroma app. For example, you can set up the WASD and arrow keys to glow a different colour from the rest of the deck.
The speaker grilles that flank the keyboard preclude the fitting of a numeric keypad, but there is a very useful column of five customisable macro keys on the far right to give faster access to whatever you deem the most important functions.
The touchpad is a large 150 x 95mm affair with a glass surface that offers excellent sliding characteristics. The click-action on the lower part of the pad is crisp and quiet. There's no fingerprint scanner on the keyboard, but the rather basic 1080p webcam does support Windows Hello IR facial recognition for secure unlocking.
Display and audio
Score: 10/10
The Blade 16's display is a 2,560 x 1,600 OLED with a 240Hz refresh rate, and by every measurable metric, it's a cracker. Maximum brightness is good at up to 630 nits, and there's colour aplenty with gamut volumes of 162% in sRGB and 115% DCI-P3.
It's extremely accurate, too, with a Delta E variance score of just 0.74. That's as close to perfect as you'll get on a laptop and makes the Blade 16 perfect for colour-critical work.
Razer claims a 0.2ms response time, which, when combined with that high 240Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync technology, delivers superb levels of motion fidelity at incredibly high frame rates.
The Blade 16's panel is also VESA-certified HDR500, which makes for a high level of HDR performance when playing High Dynamic Range games. Both Alan Wake 2 and The Last of Us Part II looked great in HDR, with both bright and dim environments looking more detailed than ever.
Squeezed inside the Blade 16 are no less than six speakers, pumping out plenty of volume with rich bass and high levels of detail and good stereo separation, with the latter helping with the directionality of sound effects. Whether it was playing music or game soundtracks, the Blade 16's audio system never failed to impress.
Performance and configurations
Score: 10/10
The Blade 16 can be purchased with an Nvidia RTX 5070Ti, 5080 or 5090 GPU and an AMD AI 9 HX 365 or HX 370 processor. You can also choose up to 4TB of storage and 64GB of RAM.
Prices start at £2,699.99, but the big price hikes come when you move to the RTX 5080 (a £400 jump) or the top-end RTX 5090, which is another £800 increase.
To get a grip on base-level performance, I ran the Black Myth: Wukong benchmark on the RTX 5090 Blade 16 and the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16, which uses the older generation RTX 4070.
The game ran at 2.5K screen resolution in both tests with ray tracing, high detail, DLSS 3.5 upscaling, and Frame Generation. On the Acer laptop, the game recorded an average frame rate of 63fps, which is a healthy showing. However, on the Blade, with the same settings, it ran at nearly twice the speed at 120fps.
I also tested it against the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark, with DLSS 4 enabled. Set to the highest Frame Generation setting, which had no noticeable detrimental impact on image quality, and again at 2.5K resolution with ray tracing and high detail levels, the Blade managed a staggering 231fps.
Moving away from games, the Blade 16 ran the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling benchmark at a blistering 220fps, which is the fastest I've ever seen on a laptop and by some margin.
There's no such thing as a truly quiet gaming laptop. All that heat generated by the GPU has to go somewhere, and the fans have to shift serious volumes of air to keep things cool. That said, even when running under heavy stress, the Blade 16 can run both the CPU and Nvidia GPU at full utilisation without it sounding like you are standing underneath an aeroplane.
Battery life
Score: 8/10
The AMD Ryzen 9 AI 370HX processor in my review Blade 16 is the same as that used in the Asus Zenbook S16, leaning more towards efficiency rather than outright power. That may sound a little odd in a gaming laptop, but it makes sense considering the Blade 16 ran for 9 hours and 28 minutes in our battery test.
That may not sound like much, but I've tested many gaming laptops with equally large batteries that haven't lasted half as long in the same test. Of course, that result is achieved without the power-hungry Nvidia GPU playing any part in proceedings. Fire it up, and that runtime will drop by 75 per cent, such is the power draw of a powerful discrete GPU.
Technical specifications
In my recent round-up of the best laptops on the market, I singled out the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 as the best gaming laptop. Of course, that was written before the arrival of the new batch of machines running Nvidia's latest RTX 50 graphics.
The two machines are similar in many areas, but it's the price and dimensions that are the most stark differences. These laptops will come down in price, but for the time being, if you don't want to spend an arm and a leg, then a machine with a previous-gen RTX 40 is still a good option. The Razer Blade 16 starts at £2,699.99, but I was sent the top-end specification for review:
Should you buy the Razer Blade 16?
As a combination of quality and gaming performance, the Razer Blade 16 is without equal. Thanks to the high-quality OLED display and the immensely potent Nvidia RTX 5090, the Blade 16 delivers a gaming experience that is simply outstanding.
That could equally be applied to the latest range-topping RTX 5090 gaming laptops from the likes of Asus, Alienware, and Lenovo, but none of them are smaller and lighter than a 16-inch MacBook Pro, which the Blade 16 is. Add the useful battery life into the mix, and the Razer Blade 16 is the most omni-competent laptop money can buy.
It's powerful enough to run even the most demanding games incredibly fast at the highest settings, yet it has a civilised keyboard and a good selection of data ports. It even looks every bit as professional as a MacBook Pro, so you can whip it out and plonk it on a boardroom table without a second thought.
Yes, if:
No, if:
Razer Blade 16 FAQs
How much is the Razer Blade 16 and when is it available to buy?
The Razer Blade 16 (2025) starts at £2,699.99. This is for the model with an RTX 5070 Ti GPU, AMD Ryzen AI 9 365, 32GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. The top-end configuration, with an RTX 5090, Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD costs £4,299.99. The Razer Blade 16 is available to buy right now.
Should a gaming laptop have a mechanical keyboard?
Arguably yes, but very few manufacturers now offer that option due to issues of size, weight and cost. There's also an increasing tendency for people to use their gaming laptops as 'desktops' when gaming with a separate gaming-optimised keyboard and mouse. A laptop keyboard and touchpad are suboptimal for gaming, no matter what type they are.
How can I tell what games support Nvidia's new DLSS4 upscaling?
Nvidia lists all the games that support DLSS4 and Multi Frame Generation. At the moment, this list runs to over 100 titles, which puts adoption ahead of what we saw at the launch of DLSS3 on the RTX 40-series GPUs. Expect most AAA games to support DLSS4 going forward.
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