Razer Blade 16 (2025) review: A laptop this thin shouldn’t be this powerful

When I first saw the Razer Blade 16 (2025) at CES in January, I had questions, comments, and concerns. Razer has repositioned the Blade 16 as an ultra-thin and light gaming laptop, thinner than even the 2024 model.

The 2025 Razer Blade 16’s thin and light chassis does make it more portable than its predecessor, but that comes with a tradeoff in performance. While the Blade 16’s graphics and general performance are both still impressive, they’re not quite as mindblowing as you might expect from a laptop with Nvidia’s new flagship GPU, the RTX 5090 24GB.

Outside of pure power and performance, the Blade 16 is a fantastic laptop, offering a gorgeous OLED display, impactful audio, over 7 hours of web surfing battery life, a bouncy keyboard, and plenty of ports while weighing just 4.6 pounds. The Blade 16 also comes with Razer’s superb build quality, so you know you’re getting a good product.

Does the overall package of the Blade 16 make up for its faults? Did Razer deliver one of the best gaming laptops? Let’s find out.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Specs and benchmarks

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Price and configurations

No Razer laptop is ever cheap, and the Blade 16 (2025) is no exception.

The starting configuration of the Blade 16 (2025) costs $2,999 and gets you an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti with 12GB of VRAM, a 1TB SSD, 32GB of RAM, and a 16-inch, 2560 x 1600, 240Hz OLED display.

You can upgrade your GPU to the RTX 5080 with 16GB of VRAM for an additional $500. Opting for a 2TB SSD with an RTX 5080 also upgrades your RAM to 64GB for a total price of $3,799.

Jumping to the RTX 5090 with 24GB of VRAM gets you a CPU upgrade to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, plus a 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM. This is our review configuration, and it costs $4,499. If that’s somehow not enough storage, you can upgrade to a 4TB option (with dual 2TB SSDs) for an additional $400.

While $2,999 is a lot for a gaming laptop and upgrades get very costly, but it’s not that much more expensive than last year’s Razer Blade 16. The 2024 Blade started at the same price, and our 4090 review configuration cost $4,199. So, the RTX 5090 is just $300 more expensive than the last gen, which isn’t too bad.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Design

Razer kept to the standard Blade aesthetics for the Blade 16 (2025), with a matte black aluminum chassis, an oversized touchpad, and a minimalist keyboard deck. As always, the Blade’s black chassis is a fingerprint magnet. I’m pretty sure our review unit picked up smudges the moment I even thought about touching it.

The top cover panel features the Razer snake logo, though this time, the logo insert lights up with that electric Razer green, giving the 2025 Blade 16 a bit more dramatic flare than last year’s model.

One of the biggest changes with this year’s Razer Blade 16 is its ultra-slim chassis. Unlike the chunkier 2024 model, this year’s Blade 16 is light and thin, measuring 13.98 x 9.86 x 0.59~0.69 inches and weighing just 4.6 pounds.

The new design makes the Razer Blade 16 (2025) certainly more portable than other flagship gaming laptops, like:

• Razer Blade 16 (2024): 14 x 9.6 x 0.87 inches, 5.3 pounds
• Alienware x16 R2: 14.4 x 11.4 x 0.7 inches, 5.9 pounds
• Gigabyte Aorus Master 16: 14.05 x 10 x 0.91~1.18 inches, 5.5 pounds

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Ports

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Razer installed a full port array on the Blade 16, despite its ultra-slim size. The Blade 16’s port offerings include:

• 3x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports
• 2x USB 4 Type-C ports (DisplayPort 1.4, power delivery up to 100W)
• 1x HDMI 2.1
• 1x microSD Card reader
• 1x audio combo jack
• 1x Kensington security lock slot

Most gamers will have more ports than they need, but streamers may want to invest in one of the best laptop docking stations or USB-C hubs to connect multiple monitors, a studio microphone, and stream deck.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Battery life

Gaming laptop battery life is traditionally not very good, as most gaming laptops are built with power intensive CPUs and discrete GPUs. There have been a few notable exceptions, like the Asus TUF Gaming A14 and the Razer Blade 14 (2023).

With an RTX 5090 under the hood, I didn’t expect the Razer Blade 16 to last quite as long on the Laptop Mag web surfing battery test. However, I did expect the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU might offer a bit better power efficiency, and I was indeed correct. The Razer Blade 16 lasted for an impressive 7 hours and 22 minutes on our battery test.

As for a real-world test, the Blade 16 didn’t get through my whole workday, it did get me through the entire morning of email management, Chrome tab jenga, and some photo editing. When I went for lunch, the Blade 16 was at about 20% battery power, so I let it charge over my lunch break and could then finish out my day.

I also put Nvidia’s new Battery Boost tech to the test. Nvidia claims this system will get you up to 40% better battery life while gaming. I can’t quite say I saw a 40% increase in gaming battery life, but I did have a mostly smooth 2-hour gaming experience using the RTX 5090 unplugged.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Display

The 16-inch, 2560 x 1600, 240Hz glossy OLED display on the Blade 16 is beyond gorgeous. OLED displays offer an infinite contrast ratio and tend to be on the vivid side, but colors on the Blade are almost super-saturated, with the panel benchmarked at 144.6% of the DCI-P3 color gamut.

Few laptop displays have ever made my gaming experience look better. Between the lush Scarlet Forest of Monster Hunter Wilds to the stunning tropical vistas of Avowed’s shipwrecked beach, it was more of a fight to actually play games on the Blade 16 than just watch them.

The OLED’s infinite contrast was particularly helpful with Monster Hunter Wilds. While some displays require a lot of tweaking to the brightness and gamma settings to capture all of the details, the Blade 16 looked gorgeous even with the default settings, and took only a slight tweak of the gamma to be perfect. While it didn’t always help me dodge fin swipes and splash damage from Uth Duna, I had no excuses other than my rusty hunt skills to blame.

The one downside of OLED displays is often low brightness, but the Razer panel peaks at 372 nits. While not the best choice for working outside in the summer, the Blade 16 is bright enough for gaming indoors. The glossy OLED does pick up glare and light reflections, but unless you’re pointing studio lights at the Blade 16, the OLED is bright enough to cut through most indoor light glare.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Keyboard and touchpad

The Blade 16 (2025) may sport a slimmer chassis, but it still keeps that signature Razer keyboard deck, with an oversized touchpad and a lattice keyboard at 1.5mm of key travel and 5 macro keys.

The lattice-style keyboard keeps each key nicely spaced apart, so you don’t need to second-guess your hand position. The front-facing speakers on the side of the keyboard keep the keys organized, so the shift and control keys are where I want them, easily in reach.

That deep key travel provides a satisfying typing experience, whether you’re using the Blade 16 for gaming or keeping up with your friends on Discord. The keys aren’t exactly springy, but there is a nice tactile feel on each key depression, so my fingers don’t bottom out but I also don’t feel like I’m typing on a marshmallow.

I blazed past my usual 88 words per minute (WPM) average on the 10fastfingers.com advanced typing test with a score of 93 WPM. I was also as accurate as usual, with a 96.6% accuracy rate. So, from a pure typing speed standpoint, I should probably use the Blade 16 for my day job instead of my MacBook Pro 14.

The glass touchpad is oversized, measuring 5.9 x 3.8 inches, and offers a silky feel with just enough matte surface to provide a grounded scrolling experience. The touchpad does not click at the very top, but the majority of the surface area is clickable. I tend to stick to tap gestures with touchpads myself, but having a solid, if small, click is a nice touch for when you need the satisfaction of tactile feedback.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Audio

Onboard audio is perhaps not the most important thing for a gaming laptop, but I was suitably impressed by the powerful THX-tuned front-facing speakers on the Razer Blade 16 (2025).

While running around in Monster Hunter Wilds, the max volume of the Blade 16 drowned out the blaring fan noise. In fact, I mostly played Monster Hunter at 60% volume so I could still coordinate with my friends over voice chat. I could still hear the epic hunt music of the Forbidden Lands.

The Arkveld theme in particular was an auditory feast, with the Blade 16’s woofers pumping up the bass in contrast to the sharp high-notes, perfectly capturing the nail-biting tension of the track.

Of course, if you want a fully immersive gaming experience with studio-quality sound, I’d recommend using a set of the best headphones rather than the built-in speakers.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Gaming and graphics

While the Razer Blade 16 (2025) generally outperforms its predecessor, the new Blade’s slimmer chassis and non-gaming CPU may lead to worse performance compared to 2024’s i9-14900HX and 4090 model. Assassin’s Creed: Mirage and Far Cry 6 are the two biggest outliers, with the 4090 getting up to 15 fps higher than the 5090. However, it isn’t just the RTX 4090 that outpaces the Blade 16’s 5090 performance.

The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 features an RTX 5080 Laptop GPU with 16GB of VRAM. And on Assassin’s Creed: Mirage and Far Cry 6, the Gigabyte outperformed the Blade by up to 25 fps.

That doesn’t mean gaming on the Razer Blade 16 (2025) is bad. Just about every game we test hit playable speeds in pure silicon performance, with only new intensive titles like Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and Black Myth: Wukong failing to pass the 60 fps mark at their highest graphics presets.

Software upscaling like DLSS 4 and frame generation can get even more performance out of the RTX 5090, offering a smoother experience on titles like Avowed and Monster Hunter: Wilds. We did run into some general RTX 50-series issues while testing the Blade 16, however. in games like Red Dead Redemption II and Borderlands 3.

This appears to be an issue with the Microsoft DirectX 12 graphics API. Older titles will be impacted by Nvidia’s decision to drop support for the 32-bit version of PhysX. While the PhysX support issue can be a problem for game preservation and fans of some older niche titles, the DirectX 12 problem with Red Dead Redemption II is a known issue, and Nvidia will likely patch it in a future driver.

Gamers hoping for desktop-replacement RTX 5090 graphics will likely need to opt for a different gaming laptop. The Blade 16 (2025) is a powerful gaming laptop, but it’s built for portability and battery longevity over raw CPU and GPU gaming power.

The Razer Blade 18 (2025) will feature a more powerful CPU and more robust cooling system, which should fill that gap in graphics performance.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Performance and heat

As for all-around performance, the Razer Blade 16 (2025) is no slouch. The Blade 16 easily crushed my daily workload. I had a good 25 Chrome tabs open with games downloading in the background, and the Blade 16 didn’t have any performance issues. I could swap between tabs without lag.

On occasion I would run into a bit of a processing delay when exiting out of a game, but nothing that felt particularly life-altering.

In benchmarks, the Blade 16’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor does perform worse than the 2024 Blade 16’s desktop-class Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU and the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16’s Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX chipset. The 2024 Blade 16 outperforms its successor in Geekbench 6 by 8.9%, while the Aorus outperforms the Blade 16 (2025) by 19.6%.

However, the new Blade 16 is an improvement over the Alienware X16 R2’s Intel Core Ultra 9 185H AI PC processor, with a 13.6% difference. So if you plan to use the Blade 16 for STEM classes or heavy data analysis, this should have you covered.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): AI features

Razer opted for AMD’s AI CPU, so you get a 50 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) NPU with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. This gives you access to the Copilot+ suite of AI features, including Live Captions and CoCreate in Microsoft Paint.

Neither Razer nor AMD pre-loaded much AI software on the Blade, but it’s CPU, NPU, and GPU combo is powerful enough to run whatever large language model (LLM) you want.

The most useful AI tool on the Blade 16 is actually a feature of the new Razer Synapse 4. With this version of Synapse, you have an AI-powered hardware configuration tool that can automatically optimize your CPU voltage.

Razer Synapse 4 also has macro features to increase efficiency, allowing you to simplify complex key inputs for recurring tasks. This can be handy for gamers who do a lot of in-game crafting or for students who might use the Blade 16 for schoolwork.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Webcam

Razer packed a 1080p IR webcam in the Blade 16’s bezels, and its certified for Windows Hello secure sign-on. The quality is not the best we’ve ever seen, and the feed gets grainy when viewed at full resolution on the Blade 16’s 1600p OLED panel.

There wasn’t much color bleed with the Blade 16’s webcam, and it even avoided putting the usual red cast over my very pale face. Most colors looked pretty accurate with the IR webcam, from the faded teal of my hair to the more saturated blue of my eyes.

If you’re going to use the Blade 16 for a lot of video calls or for streaming, we’d recommend using one of our best webcams instead.

Razer Blade 16 (2025): Software and warranty

The Razer Blade 16 comes with Windows 11 Home, which includes a number of standard Windows apps already installed like Microsoft Copilot, Office 365, and the Xbox App. Razer has also included installations of the Razer Synapse application and Razer Chroma.

While the number of pre-installed Windows applications is constantly growing, with only two additional Razer applications, it doesn’t quite edge into bloatware territory.

Razer includes a 1-year limited laptop warranty and a 2-year limited battery warranty on the Blade 16.

Bottom line

Razer opted for a non-gaming AMD Ryzen AI CPU to power the Blade 16 due to its ultra slim chassis. Razer also revamped the vapor chamber cooling system for the same reason. However, both have their issues.

The Blade 16 (2025) still gets extraordinarily hot under pressure. And while the RTX 5090 gaming performance on the Blade 16 is very smooth, it isn’t quite as powerful as we expected, especially compared to the RTX 4090 or RTX 5080. It's not a bad implementation of the RTX 5090, but it is a complicated choice for the flagship GPU.

The Razer Blade 16 is also an expensive laptop, with very pricey upgrades. While we haven’t tested the RTX 5080 or 5070Ti versions of the Blade 16 (2025), it may be worth opting for a more mid-range GPU to save some money without a massive performance hit.

That said, it’s still fantastic. The Blade 16 features a stunning OLED display, Razer’s subperb build quality, over 7 hours of web surfing battery life with almost 2.5 hours of gaming battery life, and more ports than Bluetooth-shy gamers will ever need.

The improved keyboard with 1.5mm key travel and THX spatial audio tuning are also worthy upgrades over the 2024 Blade 16. And it’s incredibly portable at just 4.6 pounds and 0.59 inches thick.

Whether or not you should buy the Razer Blade 16 (2025) model really depends on your priorities.

If you want a desktop replacement with blazing fast CPU and GPU performance, it may be worth holding out for the Razer Blade 18 or one of the other upcoming RTX 50-series laptops with an Intel Arrow Lake or AMD Fire Range gaming CPU. You could also opt for the 4090 version of the Blade 16 while its still available.

But if you prefer portability, battery life, and gorgeous OLED displays, the Blade 16 (2025) is a great option.