OLED looks great, but one of OLED’s strengths is HDR in gaming, thanks to the incredible contrast achieved by being able to turn off individual pixels. OLED is not famous for its brightness, but it has improved recently laptops and external monitors. The OLED display on the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10, for example, can reach over 1,000 nits, creating a stunning HDR effect. However, the Razer Blade 14 only achieves 620 nits in HDR and 377 nits in SDR. Because of this, I could barely tell that HDR was on. It’s still a beautiful screen, and OLED has other advantages over IPS panels, such as faster response times, less motion blur, and higher contrast.
Unfortunately, the Razer Blade 14’s OLED panel isn’t as colorful as the one I tested on the Razer Blade 16, with a color accuracy of 1.3 and 86% coverage of the AdobeRGB color space. Also, a 120Hz refresh rate is standard on OLED laptops, but you can get 240Hz on laptops that use IPS, such as the Alienware 16X Aurora, which is a much cheaper device.
The Razer Blade 14’s biggest competitor is the ROG Zephyrus G14. I haven’t tried the latest model yet, but it’s a laptop which we’ve liked for years, and it’s quite often sold for less than the Blade 14. The only real difference is that the Blade 14 uses AMD’s more powerful processor, the Ryzen AI 9 365. Not only does it perform better in anything CPU-intensive, like some games and creative apps, but it’s also a more efficient chip.
This means longer battery life, at least better than the a laptop normal games. I got 10 hours and 19 minutes on the local video playback test, which is the most you can expect from the device. On the other hand, Asus offers more powerful Zephyrus G14 configurations, including one that includes the more powerful Ryzen AI 9 HX.
The RTX 5070 takes over
Photography: Luke Larsen
I have some bad news for you: the Razer Blade 14’s RAM is no longer user expandable, so you’ll need to configure it beforehand with what you need. My review unit was 32GB, but you can also choose between 16GB or 64GB. Because it is soldered, the memory speed is faster. As for internal storage, it still has an open M.2 slot for expanding the space should you need it, with support for up to 4TB.
