Razer Blade 14 Review: Zen 4 Ryzen-Powered Mobile Powerhouse

The fans in the Razer Blade 14 run constantly, but at idle or when the machine is under a light workload, you cannot hear them. You have to put your ear up against the bottom of the system to hear anything at all when the machine is idling on the Windows desktop. As such, nothing would register on our sound meter in the lab, which has a minimum sensitivity of 30dBa. And because the Razer Blade 14's venting is on the bottom of the system, which further masks any sound, it is surprisingly tame when not under load.
razer blade 14 bottom

Razer Blade 14 Thermal And Acoustic Performance

razer blade 14 break out

The Razer Blade 14 features a redesigned vapor chamber cooler, with dual 67-blade fans, and 83mm heatsink fins. The company also uses a server-grade graphite TIM for the CPU and GPU, and graphite-PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) heat barriers for the keyboard and bottom plate. The cooling setup is designed to exhause as much heat as possibe, within the constraints of a 14", .7" thin laptop. Air is pulled in from the bottom of the system, and blasted from vents that run the entire length of the rear hinge. The vents are hidded by the bottom of the display.

To get a sense for acoustics and thermals under load, we ran multiple in-game benchmarks and then fired up the 3DMark Stress Test and looped it for 25 iterations to fully warm up and saturate the Razer Blade 14's thermal solution. The heat and noise generated by the Razer Blade 14 with these tests should be indicative of what a typical, prolonged gaming scenario might produce.

noise output razer blade 14 2023

When under load, the fans in the Razer Blade 14 spin up and get considerably louder, but that's expected for a gaming laptop. When we held the sound meter around 12" from the display, we measured approximately 50.6 dBA. That's quieter than most gaming laptops, but it is a stark contrast to this machine's idle acoustics. Thankfully, the noise character has a low pitch and is not irritating to our ears. The fans emit a deep whir as hot air is exhausted from the chassis, which is somewhat louder than some other 14"notebooks, but not off-putting in our opinion. Considering how much CPU and GPU horsepower is in this little rig, it is fairly tame acoustically.

skin temp razer blade 14 2023

The body of the Razer Blade 14 does not get too hot to the touch either. The hottest point we could find on the surface was near the back, above the GPU, where the keyboard deck meets the display hinge. Here we measured about 117°F. Once we moved down to the keyboard though, the keys registered in the lower 90s, and because the machine sucks air in through the keyboard, your fingers will actually remain cool when hovering over the W-A-S-D keys.

razer 14 pcmark details
PCMark 10 Hardware Health Data

The hardware health data gathered during a PCMark10 run, which features content creation and gaming workloads that are both single and multi-threaded, shows how the Razer Blade 14's GeForce RTX 4070 and Ryzen 9 7940HS behave in various scenarios. As you can see, the GPU remains surprisingly tepid throughout all of the run and never breaks the 70°C mark. The CPU didn't report temps will exceed 90°C until sustained loads, which causes frequencies to swing up and down accordingly. This is expected behavior, though, and not a fault of the Blade 14's cooling solution. Power in our machine was being reported incorectly (obviously), and we've made AMD aware of the issue, but it didn't seem to impact performance -- an update to SystemInfo is likely required to read sensor data from the Ryzen 7040 series.

razer 14 3dmark details
3DMark Time Spy Hardware Health Data

If we look at similar hardware health data gathered using 3DMark, which isn't as taxing on the CPU, thermals look much different. With this simulated gaming workload, the GeForce RTX 4070, once again, remains relatively tame and the CPU frequency is more consistent.

Razer Blade 14 (2023) With Ryzen & RTX 4070: Our Review Verdict

If it wasn’t obvious reading through this article, we really like the Ryzen 9 7940HS-powered Razer Blade 14. Despite its relatively small 14” / .7” thin, 4lb form factor, this machine handles an 8-core / 16-thread CPU and powerful GPU with aplomb – for all intents and purposes, the Razer Blade 14 offers performance about on par with much larger, previous-gen laptops featuring higher-power HX-series processors and beefier GPUs.

The Razer Blade 14’s design is also very attractive in our opinion. The machine is built from premium materials and exudes quality from every angle. If you’re OK with some sharp edges, and couple of green accents, and dig the matte black and clean lines, you’ll love how the Razer Blade 14 looks and feels in person. We wish the machine had a built-in SD card reader like its 16” sibling and that the power cord wasn’t so thick, but other than that, there aren’t many trade-offs with the new Razer Blade 14. Performance was very strong across the board, battery life was relatively good, AMD's Ryzen 9 7940HS with Ryzen AI offloads video conferencing features that would typically require more CPU/GPU resources on other x86 systems, the display is excellent, and the Blade 14 just plain looks great. There is, however, a premium to pay for a machine of this caliber. The configuration we tested will be available today for $2,699. That’s not chump change, but in light of other premium, modern laptops, it’s not exorbitant either.

If you’re shopping for a high-performance, highly-portable laptop in the 14” range, the AMD Zen 4 mobile-powered Razer Blade 14 is absolutely worth a look. It is built well, it looks great, battery life is good, and performance is top notch across a wide array of workloads. There is a lot to like here.


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