Razer's Little Blade Has Been My Ride-or-die Throughout The Year...

Check out more of the year's best tech in our PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2025 coverage.

I'm lucky enough to have played with a ton of exciting hardware this year, from the latest graphics cards to interesting new handhelds, PCs, and laptops. And while that's meant I've been able to regularly game on an RTX 5090 Founders Ed. (still a really lovely looking pixel pusher) and play AI overlord with the endlessly endearing Framework Desktop, there really is only one piece of hardware that's captured my heart this year, and it's Razer's new-for-2025 Blade 14.

I'm a simple fella, easily swayed by a mix of beautiful form and exquisite function, and the little Razer lad has both to offer in spades. And it's also a sign that the US/Singaporean company listens to its users and does pay attention to the market, even if it's seemed resolutely aloof in the past. That's because the last-gen version really wasn't great, and this feels almost like an apology in laptop form.

I have no business body-shaming anything, but Blade 14s of 2023 and 2024 were rather portly gents, and far too thick to be a genuinely pleasing compact gaming laptop.

Asus saw this, too, and swooped in last year with a fancy new ROG Zephyrus G14 design that matched Razer's unibody design and managed to create a more slimline gaming machine that became the instant object of gaming desire for anyone lucky enough to have one in their hands. It was thinner, more effective, and a laptop you would happily take anywhere.

That will have rankled Razer CEO, Min-Liang Tan, for sure, and the new design is testament to that. The focus was obviously on shrinking down that chassis, and it is much thinner than the previous generation, recapturing the matte black MacBook Pro aesthetic the original Blade 14 evoked so well.

Sure, its diet means it doesn't have the same level of cooling, and therefore slightly lower performance than a big 16-inch machine sporting the same 115 W RTX 5070 GPU, but when there's only a few percentage points in it, that's a worthy compromise I'd be willing to make.

And it's been my constant companion ever since it landed on my desk in the summer.

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There are multiple reasons, and I get that largely they are personal to me, which is why it's not got even a mention in the Best Gaming Laptop 2025 Hardware Awards nominations. But for someone with a decent desktop PC, who just wants a machine that

Source: PC Gamer