Razer Blade 16 (2025) Review

Let’s not bury the lede: the Razer Blade 16 (2025) laptop is, hands down, the best Windows laptop I’ve ever used. It combines powerful gaming performance with the portability I’ve come to expect only from my Apple MacBook Air M2 in a form factor that screams premium. Equipped with an RTX 5090 mobile GPU, the Razer Blade 16 utilizes all of Nvidia’s Blackwell technologies to create an experience that, simply put, I still can’t get enough of, even as I get ready to ship our loaner unit back. 

Specs:

• Price: $4499.99 at Razer (as configured)

Razer Blade 16 First Look 

When the Razer Blade 16 first appeared on my doorstep, I was actually taken aback by how small the box seemed for a laptop of this size. Despite it only being a 16” display, nestled inbetween the Razer Blade 14 and Blade 18 as the “Goldilocks” of form factors, I expected the box to be a smidge smaller.

However, there was no wasted space in the packaging, and I’m happy to say that the Blade 16 came with mostly recyclable materials, which is great to see. Everything about the packaging screams premium, and opening the laptop felt like a mini event all its own. 

From the feel of the aluminium milled chassis to the cloth used to protect the Blade 16’s brilliant display from dust accumulated on the laptop’s incredible keyboard, I was excited at every turn to open the Blade 16 up and let it rip. 

What blew me away the most, though, was its thickness. Sporting an RTX 5090 under the hood, the laptop is surprisingly thin, and weighing in at just 4.6 lbs, it’s light and perfectly suited for portability, something gaming laptops are just not really known for. I knew how thin the laptop was going to be from my time checking it out at GDC 2025 earlier this year, but getting it in my own environment with my setup was something else entirely. Closed and it’s just barely taller than my MacBook Air, and only an ounce or two heavier, all with a larger screen and larger trackpad to boot. 

As someone who daily drives a laptop for work, especially given how often I travel, the Razer Blade 16 was an attractive laptop to put to the test, especially given its being pitched as a product that cleverly balances performance with form factor. As a result, the Razer Blade 16 does limit the power draw of its power RTX 5090 in order to fit it all in the chassis to 160W versus the 175W variant found on the larger Razer Blade 18, but the trade off is a lighter, more portable product. 

Personally, after a few weeks living with the Razer Blade 16, I’m finding it hard to go back to my Apple MacBook Air’s 13” display, even as brilliant as it is. The size afforded by the 16”, 1600p (16:10 aspect ratio) OLED panel feels perfectly suited for the form factor, and it's brilliant to boot. The display is factory calibrated and Calman Verified, supporting a wide range of color profiles, from Nvidia’s own, Adobe RGB, and more. The OLED display has a refresh rate of 240hz and is a GSYNC display, ensuring that gameplay always feels smooth thanks to matching the display’s refresh rate with the framerate of the game. 

The build quality is also exceptional. Each Razer Blade 16 is milled from a single block of aluminium. There doesn’t feel like there is any flex when typing on the Blade 16’s great keyboard, and while the glass trackpad is the closest I think a Windows laptop has come to emulating the incredible feel of a MacBook’s trackpad, it is a little large for my liking. While typing, my palms tended to brush against the trackpad itself, moving my cursor to somewhere else in my doc. This is fixed by just disabling the trackpad and using a USB or Bluetooth mouse, but it’s something to note either way.

I will note, though, that the matte finish on the Blade 16 is a fingerprint magnet, and I constantly fought the battle of wiping it down, only to leave fresh finger and palm prints where my hands had been in the process. It’s not a deal breaker for me, but just something to be aware of the first time you handle yours.

The Razer Blade 16 does come packed with an impressive amount of I/O for a thin laptop, including three total USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A Ports, two USB4 Type-C Ports with both power delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 via iGPU support, a MicroSD card, and an HDMI 2.1 output slot. This is all handled on the sides of the chassis, along with Razer’s proprietary charging port, which charges its 90 WHr battery with its 280W adapter. This is really meant for gaming, but if you need a top-up while on the go, you can use one of the USB Type-C ports using a 100W PD charger. 

All that I/O is on the side because the back of the Razer Blade 16 is taken up by powerful exhaust fans, blowing heat away from the components under pressure. Despite the chassis being made from metal, during intense gameplay I never quite felt like the Blade 16 was too warm to the touch, and this is thanks in large part to Razer’s vapor chamber cooling system. 

The Blackwell Touch

Powering its gaming performance is Nvidia’s latest line of mobile GPUs powered by the RTX 50-series Blackwell architecture. As we’ve covered before, Blackwell offers improvements to DLSS in the form of DLSS 4 multi-frame generation, as well as being able to more efficiently use the new transformer models of DLSS compared to its previous gen counterparts. Blackwell also opens up the possibilities of neural rendering with Neural Shaders, RTX Mega Geometry and more.

What makes the Blackwell architecture on mobile so interesting to me is how Nvidia’s chip is leveraged in both gaming and regular use scenarios. Instead of running the RTX 5090 at full tilt all the time, the Blade 16 will swap between the Nvidia GPU and the integrated graphics on the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 to conserve power, both while plugged in and while running on battery. 

Nvidia’s also uses Advanced Power Gating to help turn off parts of the GPU that aren’t being utilized to offer better battery performance. This is coupled with Battery Boost in the Nvidia App, which uses  a scene aware algorithm while on battery to identify whether or not the scene you’re in needs to run at full tilt, dynamically adjusting the frame rate down to 30fps to conserve battery. 

This means that while during gameplay the Blade 16 might be running upwards of 100fps, when in the menus or a cutscene where FPS isn’t as important, the GPU will dynamically adjust down to 30fps to keep the battery running just a little bit longer. 

I experienced this a lot while playing through the first few hours of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, as I bounced between joining the Dark Brotherhood and fiddling with my inventory in the menu screen. While it can be somewhat jarring to pop back and forth from a high 60+ fps to 30fps at times, even if it is just a menu, I did appreciate the extra juice it saved, allowing me to play unfettered longer until I had to reach for that charging cable. 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: DLSS is straight black magic. DLSS 4’s Multi-frame Generation feels perfectly suited to this form factor, allowing for high refresh gaming, even while on battery. 

Razer Blade 16 RTX 5090 Benchmarks

How it performs is a big factor here, especially for a laptop that, as equipped, will run you around $4499.99 (assuming the current tariff situation doesn’t make things worse for consumers). Given that this is our first laptop review of the generation, we won’t have any comparative data (though, it should be noted that comparing laptop performance isn’t always apples to apples anyway), but we’ll be slowly building up our benchmarks as the year goes on and more devices move through our test bench.

That said, we tested a few games at their max settings while using the Performance power mode in the Razer Synapse program. Each of the games tested was running plugged in to give the best possible performance out of our 160W GPU, and when possible, we turned on ray tracing and DLSS’s suite of tools to eke out the best possible performance under pressure. 

When possible we used a built-in benchmark tool (Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail and Black Myth Wukong), while in Marvel Rivals we ran a replay of a match played on the machine, starting and stopping at the same part and from the same view point to recreate the most consistent run we could. 

For Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, we created a repeatable circuit around Kuttenberg, putting the CPU and GPU under load, as this is one of the more hardware-heavy sections of the RPG.

We tested each game at both 1200p and 1600p, the 16:10 relatives of 1080p and 1440p, respectively. Unless otherwise noted, all settings were at their maximum preset during the testing.

We also ran the Razer Blade 16 through a suite of 3DMark’s synthetic testing: Night Raid, Steel Nomad, and Speedway. 

Gaming benchmarks, especially for a laptop, are pretty stellar. Final Fantasy XIV runs exceptionally well on the Blade 16, while running around Kuttenberg in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 doesn’t really show any signs of breaking a sweat. Marvel Rivals sits at over 100fps average at full ultra (which includes Lumen hardware ray tracing) without frame generation. It only gets better once MFG 4x is turned on, blazing up to almost 300fps with Nvidia’s Frameview measuring only 38ms of latency, which might be high if you’re playing competitively. Still, if you’re a scrub like me, it’s serviceable.

The game I was most impressed with, though, is Cyberpunk 2077. Yes, it’s a few years old now, but it’s still one of the most visually demanding games on the market, especially with all the bells and whistles turned on. There is something magical about playing Cyberpunk at the same visual fidelity I would on my desktop, but on the go. Despite the fact that I’m playing at 1600p and not 4K (though my main gaming monitor most days is still my 49” Philips Evnia ultrawide 5120x1440 monitor I reviewed last year), I don’t feel like there are any compromises being made here to achieve this level of performance, thanks in large part to DLSS MFG pushing through it all.

Razer Blade 16 Battery Life

The true test of any gaming laptop is its battery life. Until now, gaming on battery has been a joke, but thanks to the advances promised by Blackwell, the RTX 5090 inside holds its own when it's not powered by anything other than its 90 WHr battery. 

Using Procyon’s Office Productivity Battery Life Test, I was able to eke out over 9 hours of battery life from the Blade 16. This was with energy saver settings tuned to their maximum and with Razer’s iconic RGB lighting switched off to save extra power. With the lighting turned on, the test averaged around 5 hours of battery life, which is still mighty impressive given the power of the components under the hood. 

Gaming on battery is also impressive, especially since the hardware is so powerful for a laptop. Playing on a mix of high and medium settings, I was able to get about an hour and a half of gameplay in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 out of the Razer Blade 16, and I likely could have pushed that even further had I dropped all the settings down a notch, but I really wanted those higher quality textures and such as I played through its opening hours. Since I was playing with a controller, I could have also easily turned off the RGB lighting, getting even more juice out of my battery. 

Razer Blade 16 Acoustics And Thermals

Heat is a huge issue with any gaming component, especially so in smaller form factors like a laptop. The vapor chamber at the heart of the Razer Blade 16’s cooling solution puts in work when gaming on the machine, its fans ramping up to expel as much hot air as possible away from you while gaming. 

As a result, our RTX 5090 never went over 80 degrees Celsius in our testing, which is impressive overall. Heat also never seemed to be an issue when using the keyboard to game, something that I have experienced on other laptops, considering the components getting the warmest are typically right under the keyboard. I could comfortably rest my hands on the Blade 16’s chassis even after a longer stretch of gaming, and it never felt too hot to touch, unlike other gaming laptops I’ve used in the past. And as a reminder: the Razer Blade 16’s chassis is metal - so you’d think it’d get too warm over time.

Those fans, however, are loud, though not so loud that they drown out the Razer Blade 16’s impressive speaker array. The Blade 16 features a six-speaker system tuned by the audio pros over at THX to give impressive soundscapes, whether you’re gaming or just watching a movie. I do think that if you’re doing some heavy gaming, a set of headphones might serve you best so nothing gets drowned out by fan noise, but in a pinch, they are definitely good enough to be the main audio drivers of the setup.

Razer Blade 16 Final Thoughts

So what do we make of all this? As I said from the first, the Razer Blade 16 is the best Windows-powered gaming laptop I’ve ever used, full stop. And it should be, as it’s also the most expensive gaming laptop I’ve ever had the privilege to use. 

Living with the Blade 16 for a few weeks now, traveling with it, using it as my daily driver for work and play, it’s an absolutely stellar piece of kit. Its lightweight and thin form factor makes it easy to put in my bag and head to Starbucks to knock out a few articles, and it’s lightweight enough to travel with on my back throughout a long day. 

Hell, there were times I had both my MacBook Air and the Razer Blade 16 in my backpack and barely felt them throughout the day. Our hardware editor says I’m just too used to heavy backpacks, and he’s probably not wrong, but it’s still a testament to the design of the Blade 16 that this is even possible - especially since I had my 15” portable display in there as well.

As a MacBook Air user, I was curious if I would like the form factor, portability, and the overall experience of the Razer Blade 16 enough to want to think about replacing my MBA. The only thing holding me back was the heavy power brick, but once I dialed in the perfect productivity battery life, the Blade 16 was convenient enough that I started to leave my Apple at home. 

The fact that I can also just plug it in and game - or even do some gaming on battery life for more than just half an hour is supremely compelling. 

But it’s expensive. And that’s okay, if I’m honest. 

For a flagship laptop, the Razer Blade 16 outperformed my expectations at every turn. Its portability rivals my experience with my MBA, while the power under the hood can drive some of the most demanding gaming experiences on the go. It is one of those rare overall products that feels worth the asking price.

Thankfully, too, the Razer Blade 16 isn’t just available in the RTX 5090 variant, as cheaper models feature the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 mobile chips, which bring the cost down but still benefit from Blackwell’s suite of features to help performance at these lower tiers. 

At the end of the day, the Razer Blade 16 is an easy recommendation, and hands down the best laptop I’ve ever used and reviewed. It’s pricey, but that price comes with incredible performance both when simply working and relaxing with a demanding game. The build quality is among the best I’ve ever experienced, and Razer has done an excellent job dialing in that Goldilocks zone of power and portability, making it one of the most effortlessly portable gaming laptops I’ve ever used - and at times made me consider replacing my trusty MacBook Air altogether.

Full Disclosure: The product reviewed was provided by the manufacturer on loan for the purposes of this review.