Razer Hones Its Thinnest Ever Blade 16 Gaming Laptop With RTX 50 And Ryzen AI 9 Muscle
Razer's making some interesting changes to its Blade 16 gaming laptop. For one, it's getting honed with NVIDIA's newly announced mobile GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, with options ramping all the way up to the GeForce RTX 5090. And secondly, the latest iteration will, for the first time ever, be offered with AMD Ryzen hardware inside instead of Intel chips like the past models.
Detailed specifications are not yet available, but Razer did divulge that its retooled Blade 16 will pack Ryzen AI 9 processors, up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. It's a stout part that packs four Zen 5 CPU cores and eight dense Zen 5c cores, for a total of 12 cores and 24 threads. Both types of cores have a 2GHz base clock, while the Zen 5c cores can boost to 3.3GHz and the Zen 5 cores can hit 5.1GHz. Other specs include 12MB of L2 cache and 24MB of L3 cache. It also features an onboard NPU with up to 50 TOPS of AI muscle (and up to 80 TOPS for the total chip package).
The inclusion of Ryzen hardware in the Blade 16 for the first time is a notable win for AMD, and obviously the chip designer is happy about the coup.
"Razer Blade series notebooks push the boundaries of creativity, style and performance for gamers and creators everywhere," said Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager, Client Business Unit, AMD. "This year, we are proud to expand our partnership with Razer to bring the first-ever Blade 16 powered by Ryzen AI 300 Series processors to the market. With the world’s most advanced NPU, Ryzen AI 300 Series processors will expand the possibilities of AI-fueled gaming and content creation on Razer notebooks."
Pairing a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with a GeForce RTX 5090 is a stout foundation for sure. It won't be a thicker Blade, though. Just the opposite, Razer redesigned the Blade 16 to be the thinnest gaming laptop it's ever built. Thanks to a new thermal hood, it's just 0.59 inches at its thinnest point. It's also "incredibly durable," according to Razer, which says the unibody chassis is precision cut from a single block of aluminum.
What about cooling, though?
"To achieve the ultra-thin profile, the Blade 16 features a new generation of vapor chamber cooling system with a dual-fan design to effectively cool the Blade while keeping it quiet under load. The new cooling solution covers 57% of the motherboard surface area and features 0.05mm exhaust fins to provide greater heat dissipation in a low-profile solution," Razer says.
We look forward to testing it out, should the opportunity arise.
Other specs include a 16-inch QHD+ OLED display (240Hz refresh rate, nominal 0.2ms response time, 4.7mm bezels), up to 64GB of LPDDR5X-8000 memory, "more speakers" (which translates to half a dozen, powered by THX Spatial Audio), and a redesigned keyboard with a deeper 1.5mm travel distance.
Razer didn't offer any hints on pricing, but did say that its sharpened Blade 16 will be available this quarter.
