Razer Blade 16 (2025) Review: Sleek and light but lags in performance

The 2025 Razer Blade 16 continues the shaky tradition of packing some top-of-the-line PC gaming hardware into a laptop chassis that can almost be considered thin and light. For a 16-inch laptop, the Razer Blade 16 impresses at well under five pounds and under 0.7 inches thick, and yet it’s still rocking a solid aluminum design, a fantastic display, and more ports than you’d expect. 

There are always some downsides to this formula, as the new Blade 16 ranges in price from $2,399 to $4,499 as tested here in a high-end configuration and yet lags behind some cheaper competitors where performance is concerned. It’s that awkward balance of performance, price, and design that sees the Blade 16 struggle with value. Those who want the most performance can get it from something like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 instead. But where slimness, weight, and battery life for a gaming laptop are concerned, this new Blade 16 still has something to offer. 

Razer Blade 16 2025: Specs and features

• Model number: RZ09-05289EN9-R3U1
• CPU: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
• Memory: 32GB LPDDR5
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia RTX 5090 (175-watt TGP)
• Display: 16-inch 2560×1600 240Hz OLED
• Storage: 2TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 1080p + IR
• Connectivity: 2x USB 4 with DisplayPort 1.4 (from iGPU only) and 100W PD input, 3x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x SDcard reader, 1x 3.5mm combo audio
• Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Windows Hello facial recognition
• Battery capacity: 90 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 13.98 x 9.86 x 0.69 inches
• Weight: 4.65 pounds
• MSRP: $4,499 as-tested ($2,399 base)

At the time of testing, the 2025 Razer Blade 16 started out at $2,799 to get you a configuration with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU, 32GB of memory, 1TB of storage, and an RTX 5070 8GB GPU. Since then, Razer introduced an even lower configuration for $2,399 that drops to an RTX 5060 and 16GB of memory.

Razer allows some different customization options but links many of them with other adjustments. So even though you have the option to select a different GPU up to the RTX 5090, can swap for a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and can increase storage to 4TB and memory to 64GB, you may not get to mix and match these elements as you please. 

For instance, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is tied to the RTX 5090. If you want one, you’re also getting the other. Some of the other adjustments are perplexing. For instance, if you choose 64GB of memory, you must also select 4TB of storage unless you opt for an RTX 5080. If you want 2TB of storage, you have to select at least an RTX 5080.

If you want 4TB of storage, you have to get a max-spec system. Just about every option you select in the configuration tool will change other options, making it a mad game of guess-and-check to see if you can get the specific configuration you want. On the bright side, the high-speed OLED display comes standard on all models. 

Every time I’ve tested a high-end Razer Blade, I’ve seen it sacrifice performance in its pursuit of a slimmer, lighter design. That’s true again here, putting it at odds with the kind of high-performance parts you can configure the 2025 Blade 16 to include.

Razer Blade 16 2025: Design and build quality

The 2025 Razer Blade 16 maintains the minimalist, understated design that has been a hallmark of Razer’s laptops. It’s truly a hunk of deep black aluminum with very tightly rounded corners and edges and almost perfectly flat surfaces. The big tells that it’s a gaming laptop are the illuminated three-snake Razer logo on the lid and the per-key RGB keyboard.

While prior models we’ve tested have had only slight flex in the chassis, the 2025 model has some more noticeable bending in the display and flex on the keyboard deck. It’s still quite firm, and I’ve never been concerned while holding the laptop up at one corner. 

The difference is perhaps stemming from how much is packed into this model. The 2024 Razer Blade 16 measured in at 5.4 pounds and 0.87 inches thick, but this model has trimmed that way down to just 4.65 pounds and 0.69 inches thick. While both models feature the highest-end mobile GPU available to them at the time (and both at 175 watts), this new model uses a lower-wattage CPU than the Intel Core i9-14900HX found in the 2024.

Therefore, it may have gotten away with lighter cooling. As thin as the Blade 16 manages to be for the most part, there is a raised area on the underside to provide more room for the motherboard and cooling components.

While the prior model had impressively thin bezels around the display, the 2025 unit mostly does as well; the bezel below the screen is considerably thicker. The all-black design helps it blend in at least. The display sits on a firm, wide, smooth-moving hinge that stretches most of the width of the laptop. It only has a little wiggle to it, and it opens easily using a single hand. 

The surface of the laptop is largely occupied by the keyboard, which has been slightly expanded to include an extra column of shortcut keys along the right edge. Rather than go for a number pad, which would have been squished anyway, the Razer Blade 16 has a pair of speaker grilles at each side of the keyboard. The grilles are the same height as the keyboard, though they’re only packing a pair of tweeters inside. A second set of speakers sits on the underside of the laptop. 

The system pulls air in through grilles on the bottom of the laptop and vents it out of a heatsink fin stack at the back. That fin stack is not only quite small but also only has a small amount of clearance between it and the display hinge. Moving as much heat as this system can produce makes for fans that are a little noisy while running at full blast, but they’re not shrill or annoying. They blow with more of a calm, breezy tone to them. 

Altogether, the Blade 16 2025 is an impressively built machine, considering its size and weight alongside the fact it’s packing in an RTX 5090. But the tight confines certainly raise concerns about the performance potential.

Razer Blade 16 2025: Keyboard, trackpad

The Razer Blade’s keyboard is a mixed bag. On the one hand, Razer has stabilized its keycaps somewhat well, and they have a clean, poppy travel. Unfortunately, Razer has gone the route of the Dell XPS line of late, opting for keycaps that are flat and perfectly square. There’s at least a bit more space between keys to provide a little tactile sense of where one key ends and the next begins, but I still find it hard to type away with my fingers centered.

As a result, I find I hang up after a typo and take just enough time to correct my position that I can’t sustain a typing speed much above 100 words per minute in Monkeytype. If I’m lucky and don’t make (or notice) my mistakes, I can hit 110-115 words per minute, but I didn’t feel comfortable going beyond that. 

The keyboard’s layout is a little curious. Razer took advantage of the laptop’s extra space, but only slightly. It added a single extra column at the right edge of the keyboard with a few shortcut keys. This may be handy for those that use them, but it makes finding the Delete and arrow keys just a little more tedious. Razer also had an opportunity to use full-size arrow keys without needing to shrink the right Shift key too much but didn’t take advantage of that extra space. 

And this being a Razer machine, the keyboard naturally has full, per-key RGB backlighting that’s highly customizable in Razer’s software. While the RGB lighting illuminates all of the primary legends on the keycaps, it doesn’t do so for any of the secondary legends. And for the function row, that means you’ll only get the F1-F12 legends lit up and not the helpful shortcuts tied to them. 

Razer’s trackpad is properly huge. It takes up almost all of the space available to it on the vertical axis, leaving just a narrow strip above and below. It’s also almost as wide as the alphanumeric keys on the keyboard. This is great for mousing around the system, as I almost never have to deal with repositioning my finger.

I have run into a couple small hiccups with multi-finger gestures and even more with very frequent palm rejection failures, with the trackpad registering unintended touches that are hard to avoid due to its size. But overall, its size is a benefit. The trackpad has a short and firm physical click. It’s pleasing to the touch, though it takes just enough force that I find I often fail to get it on the first attempt. 

Razer Blade 16 2025: Display, audio

The Blade 16 offers an excellent display. It’s exceedingly sharp with a 2560×1600 resolution on a 16-inch panel, and that can spin up to 240Hz for ultra-fast motion. Combine that with the fact that it’s an OLED panel, and you get not only the speed of the refresh but also the quick pixel response time. The display could hit 411 nits of fullscreen brightness, plenty for most environments except bright outdoors.

Razer claims this is an anti-glare display. And it is, to a degree. I can clearly see reflections in it, so don’t expect a matte quality. But outside, in the daylight, the glare is slightly subdued. The display’s brightness combines with pitch blacks for infinite contrast, and the screen can deliver 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space alongside a high degree of color accuracy (average dE1976 of 0.69 and max dE1976 of 1.44).

The speakers can get pretty loud, but at max volume, they’re overbearing and distort some, especially with strong bass, and they produce a bit of resonance in the laptop chassis. At lower volumes, they put out pretty clean and clear sound with bright treble and pronounced mids. Bass is a little weak, but not entirely absent, as it can be on many laptops.

Razer Blade 16 2025: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

You’ll get a serviceable webcam and microphone setup on the Blade 16. In good lighting conditions, the camera captures a decently sharp picture and avoids too much noise or poor exposure. If you’re just trying to rely on overhead lights, though, the picture will end up a fair bit grainier. 

The mics have somewhat unusual processing, even in a quiet room. This makes for a loud and present voice but has minor artifacts. The flipside of that processing is that background noise is almost obliterated. Even with a fan running at full speed underneath the desk I had the laptop on, the mics captured only my voice. Even more wild, I began snapping my fingers and clapping while I spoke into the mics, and they completely neutralized the snapping and clapping. Good if you want to be sure your voice is captured, but maybe not so good if you want someone to hear your clapping.

While the Blade 16 certainly has space for a fingerprint scanner, it doesn’t include one. The webcam does work with Windows Hello for quick facial recognition, though.

Razer Blade 16 2025: Connectivity

At first glance, the 2025 Razer Blade 16 might appear to have the same ports as its predecessor, albeit with a slight shift to their positioning (the SD card reader is now closer to other ports on the right side). But this model has upgraded ports. While its predecessor had a single Thunderbolt 4 port, the new Blade 16 has two USB4 ports. It keeps one on each side (a plus for flexibility), and they both support DisplayPort 1.4 and can receive 100 watts of PD charging in case you don’t want to bring the 1.77-pound charging brick with you everywhere. 

The laptop still has three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports — two on the left and one on the right — as well as a 3.5mm combo jack, HDMI 2.1 port, and full-size SD card reader. There’s a Kensington security lock slot as well. 

Interestingly, the USB-C ports may support DisplayPort, but only for video signals coming from the CPU’s integrated GPU. Since you’ll want to game on the discrete GPU, you’ll have to use the HDMI port to get the most out of the system’s performance. 

For wireless connections, the Blade 16 still supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, and both have proven reliable in my testing. 

Razer Blade 16 2025: Performance

This test unit of the Razer Blade 16 is geared up to be an extreme performer. But the chassis thinness doesn’t allow the same sort of heat management you might expect from big and beefy gaming laptops. So even though you’re getting some of the most premium internals you can for a laptop, you shouldn’t necessarily expect them to outpace rivals.

While we haven’t yet tested other RTX 5090-powered laptops, the Razer Blade 16 shows itself only worthy of competing with RTX 5080-powered laptops anyway. On many fronts, it struggles to contend with the $3,599 Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10, $3,299 Asus ROG Strix SCAR 16 (G635LW), $3,769 HP Omen Max 16, and $4,059 Lenovo Legion 9i (Gen 9). 

The Razer Blade 16 is a potent machine. Scores upwards of 8,000 points in PCMark 10 don’t come easily, but the Blade 16 managed it well. This holistic benchmark provides an idea of how well the system can handle all sorts of common workloads, and this kind of score leaves little doubt that the Blade 16 can keep up with much of what the average user will throw at it. That said, Razer is trailing the pack here. And as we dig into more targeted performance tests, it’ll become pretty clear why. 

In practice, the Blade 16 does manage everyday use well. But this can see the system handing off display management between the dGPU and iGPU, and it’s not seamless. It may be quick, but it tends to happen right in the middle of me doing something, so I frequently feel the momentary freeze of the display as it switches over.

The Razer Blade 16 may sport a high-end CPU, but it’s not leading the pack by any measure. Across Cinebench R15, R20, R23, and R24, the Razer Blade 16 and its AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU (which has a 4+8 core configuration) lag behind the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX (which has an 8+16 core configuration) found in three of these other laptops. Across the board, it falls short in single-core and multi-core performance. Only against the Legion 9i’s Core i9-14900HX does the Blade 16 score any wins, and even there it’s only in single-core performance.

This isn’t to say the Blade 16 is a weak system, but if you’re looking for the most raw power, these other systems generally have it beat. And sure enough, this raw CPU brunt bears out in Handbrake as well, where the Razer Blade 16 takes more than 50 percent longer to complete its encoding tasks next to the Intel Lunar Lake-equipped laptops and even falls over a minute behind the Lenovo Legion 9i Gen 9 with its older (though no slouch) Intel Core i9-14900HX.

That CPU deficit comes back to bite the Razer Blade 16 again when it comes to less-demanding 1080p gaming. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the Blade was largely bound by its CPU, so even though it was the only system in this pack with an RTX 5090, it performed at the back of the pack. It was so CPU-bound, in fact, that bumping the resolution from 1080p to 1440p saw performance drop only to an average of 161 FPS.

Unfortunately, even as more weight is put on the GPU, the Razer Blade 16 doesn’t manage to speed away from the competition. Metro Exodus remains quite demanding even at 1080p. Here, the Razer Blade 16 is offering undeniably excellent performance, but it’s simply no more excellent than the other systems here, and the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10’s performance is good for an almost eight percent lead. 

Ray tracing appears to be a big equalizer for these systems. Running Cyberpunk 2077 at its Ultra preset without any ray-tracing effects, the Blade 16 again falls way behind. But with the RT Overdrive preset, all of the systems drop to within a frame or two of 40 FPS (except the Legion 9i, which was not tested with Cyberpunk 2077). 

3DMark’s Port Royale benchmark further shows this equalizing effect. Where the Blade 16 had been trailing in other tests, it’s back in the game when heavy ray-tracing effects are called for. It gets a minor lead over the ROG Strix Scar 16 and HP Omen Max 16, but it’s an incredibly marginal improvement over the RTX 4090 seen in the Lenovo Legion 9i. But more crucially, the Blade 16 still lags behind the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 and its RTX 5080. 

Razer Blade 16 2025: Battery life

To the Razer Blade 16’s credit, it at least does a good job managing its battery. Some gaming laptops struggle to wrangle their discrete GPUs when operating on battery power, and that can see them rip right through their battery. In my testing, the Blade 16 generally managed to disable the GPU and lean on the iGPU when it was away from its charger. That paid off in our battery test, running a local 4K video with the display set between 250 and 260 nits and the system in airplane mode, where the Blade 16 managed to run for a bit over 10 and a half hours. 

That performance saw the Razer Blade 16 almost double the runtimes of its competition here. Only two of these other machines managed to break 5 hours, and neither exceeded 6 hours. The Blade 16 even managed to hold up well in everyday use, generally making it through most of the day. On at least one occasion, I did notice the discrete GPU remaining active on battery power, but I was able to manually end applications that were using it, and then it deactivated. 

Despite having some of the most extreme-performance hardware you can find for a laptop today, I found the Razer Blade 16 frequently holding me up while trying to do simple things in Windows while operating on battery power. It frequently stalled out while trying to get into various settings menus, and casually browsing with videos running would occasionally see the video sputter or have the display freeze entirely (a not uncommon experience on laptop iGPUs).

Razer Blade 16 2025: Conclusion

Every time I’ve tested a high-end Razer Blade, I’ve seen it sacrifice performance in its pursuit of a slimmer, lighter design. That’s true again here, putting it at odds with the kind of high-performance parts you can configure the 2025 Blade 16 to include. The Blade 16’s RTX 5090 falling behind other systems running RTX 5080 and RTX 4090 GPUs is a bad look, especially when the Blade 16 hits such a lofty price to provide that RTX 5090. For those seeking extreme performance, the Blade 16 just doesn’t stand out as sensible. 

The lower-tier models of the Blade 16 may actually be where it begins to make sense. The Legion Pro 7i 16 Gen 10 that has harried the Blade 16 so thoroughly through our benchmarking suite has a base price of $2,849 and comes with an RTX 5070 Ti. The Blade 16, meanwhile, comes with an RTX 5070 for $2,799 (though the CPU also drops to a slightly slower Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU), or you can bump it to $2,999 to get an RTX 5070 Ti. With closer-matched internals and prices, the Blade’s slimmer design, lower weight, and longer battery life can help buoy its value next to the Lenovo system. And with any luck, the Blade 16’s thermal and power designs may be better able to cope with the lower-tier internals to actually run them at their full potential.