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 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.
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 can be both a daily driver laptop and a gaming companion away from the desk, the Blade 14 ticks all the boxes. For one, the 14-inch form factor is absolutely my favourite gaming laptop setup, mostly because it's not my one and only gaming system.
I know that for a lot of people the 14-inch screen is too small to enjoy big cinematic adventures on, and I would agree—if I want to immerse myself in a new adventure, then I'll take to my desktop and that RTX 5090 to splash the game across a larger monitor. But for me, this Football Manager obsessive, I love having a system that can quietly purr away on my lap when I'm second-screening in the living room and breeze through most games without pause.
And it's compact enough that it's my standard work laptop, and comes everywhere with me, so even on my travels I always have something that can capably game, whether I've got the RTX 5070 on rendering duties or am relying on the 880M iGPU baked into the Ryzen mobile chip at its heart.
That means it works beautifully away from the plug socket and, with the RTX Blackwell GPU's updated Battery Boost feature, that's true even if you are putting that discrete GPU to work. I've happily had Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 playing in power-sipping mode for a quick blast when my desktop machine's not been available.
The machine has downsides, though, and I am not unaware of them. The Razer Synapse app itself seems to tax the battery life unduly and, being a Windows machine, is as inconsistent as any other x86 Windows laptop when it comes to sleep. Before the Blade 14, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge was my go-to notebook, and that Snapdragon X Elite system absolutely nails the whole shut-the-lid-and-come-back-4-days-later-and-it-instantly-opens-again thing MacBooks have, but standard x86 Windows machines still cannot reliably manage.
It's also a classically expensive Razer product. Granted, the company has been more aggressive on pricing this year, but it's still one of the more expensive RTX 5070 laptop options around. Though I was surprised to see some great discounts on this exact model over Black Friday this year, suggesting that it might become a more regular phenomenon.
During the year, I've also spent a long time with the latest Zephyrus G14, but even it failed to turn my head. Mostly because when it did turn my head, it was only because of the weirdly pitchy fan noise it generates even when doing something basic. It's still a stylish machine, for sure, but the Blade 14 really does have the edge (sorry) this go around.
There are other laptops I've loved this year, though. In fact, its bigger sibling, the Blade 16, really impressed with its own stylish new chassis and unprecedented gaming performance away from a plug socket. I've also been seriously impressed with Lenovo's Legion Pro 7i, and more specifically, the LegionSpace app, which offers the user a level of trust no other laptop maker seems willing to give.
But none of that can change the fact that the Blade 14 has been ultra reliable in every other aspect in my daily usage, from gaming, to writing, to PhotoShop edits, it's managed it all with aplomb. And I'm more than a little bit in love. I probably should give this review sample back to Razer at some point, but as far as they know, my dog ate it, so I think I'm good.
Well, so long as they don't read this. Or realise I don't have a dog. Or that dogs are incapable of digesting unibody aluminum chassis. Nah, nah, I'm good.
If you want to find out who wins in the PC Gamer Hardware Awards, we'll be publishing all the winners on New Year's Eve.
1. Best gaming laptop: Razer Blade 16
2. Best gaming PC: HP Omen 35L
3. Best handheld gaming PC: Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS ed.
4. Best mini PC: Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT
5. Best VR headset: Meta Quest 3
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