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I have long been a Razer Blade fan. A fan blade, if you will. The sleek matte black aesthetic, all gaming MacBook chic and understated style meant the Blade 15 and latterly the Blade 14 have been my go-to gaming laptop objects of desire. That was, until the last generation. Razer has been resting on its laurels, and I said so when I made the obvious point that Razer’s Blade gaming laptops had lost their edge just about this time last year.
While overall I’ve been more or less okay with the company essentially retaining the same look for its lineup for many generations of machine—that aesthetic is one of the main reasons I’ve been so enamoured with them—they have, like me, gotten rather more portly over the years.
The past few years of Razer Blade 16 laptops were just too chonk. While that might have been absolutely necessary to deliver the sort of cooling the RTX 4090 in laptop form needed, it remained the same right down the stack. Put alongside the sadly defunct Blade 15 and I would bet real cash money that most people would believe the thinner 15-inch machine was the more modern one thanks to the extra girth of the 16-incher.
And it made it heavy to lug around with you and essentially it kinda wasn’t sparking the same joy anymore. Couple that with Asus taking direct aim at Razer with its Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus G16 laptops getting entirely new, all-metal chassis and looking sweeeeet, and suddenly they weren’t the machines I would recommend or actually want, regardless of price. And price has always been a premium thing with Razer.
Model no: RZ09-05289EN4
CPU: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
GPU: Nvidia RTX 5090 (175 W)
RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5-8000
Storage: 2 TB PCIe 4.0 SSD
Screen size: 16-inch OLED
Refresh rate: 240 Hz
Resolution: 2560 x 1600
Battery: 90 Whr
Dimensions: 14.9 ~ 17.4 x 250.5 x 355 mm | 0.59 ~ 0.69 x 9.86 x 13.98 inches
Weight: 2.14 kg | 4.71 lbs
Price: $4,500 | £3,900
It’s 2025 and things have changed. I had a hint about what Razer was planning when someone from the company rang me last year, referencing the article I’d written complaining about the relative state of the Blades in the last generation. Now, I’m not conceited enough to think anyone at Razer takes a blind bit of notice about what I say, but thankfully it seems someone in the company thought the same way as me.
The new Blade 16 is noticeably thinner than its predecessor, effectively sitting at the same height off the desktop as the old Blade 15 I loved so well. Considering the unit I have in front of me is the top-spec RTX 5090-toting beast, that’s some impressive effort. Razer suggests it’s about a 30% reduction in overall volume in terms of the chassis versus the previous Blade 16 and it’s obvious the moment you pick it up.
The engineers have been smart about where this reduction happens, too. The area around the most heat-generating area, the CPU and GPU, has been kept broader than the rest of the chassis, giving a more stepped design than previous Blades. Where once the unibody laptop was pretty uniform in size, there is a “thermal hood” around the hefty cooling areas and fans, which allows it to deliver decent cooling while retaining a slim look around the rest of the machine.
Razer’s calling it a revolutionary cooling system, but it is essentially still a couple of fans and a chonky ol’ heatsink covering the main components. It is reportedly covering 57% of the laptop’s mainboard now and, while not necessarily revolutionary per se, it is still very, very effective. Just using it here as my main office machine, plugged into a secondary 4K panel via one of the USB4 ports, it’s mostly silent or at least a lot quieter than my desktop.
Sure, it gets loud when you’re running it in-game on Performance mode in Razer’s Synapse software, but not to the extent that I ever wanted to clap headphones on my bonce to drown out any sort of turbine whine. The fan noise is noticeable, but I don’t feel as distracting as previous Blades and can certainly be mitigated with different power modes. Such is the gaming power inside this thing that pulling back on the performance a little can still deliver great frame rates and a very quiet machine.
Which I guess is where the RTX 5090 comes in. This is the first gaming laptop I’ve tested with an RTX 50-series chip inside it, and therefore the first with the top RTX Blackwell GPU, too. I’ve covered the beefy graphics chip inside this laptop in my RTX 5090 mobile GPU review, and in short it’s absolutely prioritising experience over performance.
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As ever in recent times, Nvidia’s mobile and desktop GPUs don’t exactly match, so this RTX 5090 is more akin to an RTX 5080 desktop card. This GB203 GPU is a 10,496 CUDA core chip, while the desktop equivalent is a 10,752 core one. So, ‘weaker’ even than an RTX 5080, but this is the power and thermally constrained world of the laptop GPU, so you can forgive that when we’re talking about a 150 W versus 360 W graphics card.
Something’s got to give, right? What doesn’t, however, is the level of VRAM jammed into this machine. The RTX 5090 mobile comes with 24 GB of GDDR7, making it the first GPU to use the 3 GB modules which could give us more memory on lower-end cards, too. Compare all of that to the RTX 4090 of the previous Ada generation and we’ve got another six SMs worth of CUDA cores, and therefore more Tensor Cores and RT Cores, too. Then there’s another 8 GB of video memory for all those creator, high-resolution gaming, and AI workloads out there.
Alongside that top RTX Blackwell GPU is AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, replete with Radeon 890M iGPU, 32 GB of soldered DDR5-8000, and a 2 TB SSD. The soldered RAM means it can minimize its thickness, but also means you’re stuck with whatever you selected at checkout for the rest of the laptop’s life. Thankfully 32 GB is the minimum, though there are some strange SKUs when you try and select a 64 GB model on the Razer website, where if you want that much RAM you’re limited to an RTX 5080 and Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU. Like I say, odd.
And then there’s that screen. The one thing I truly loved about the last-gen Blade 16 was the glorious 16-inch 240 Hz OLED panel it sported, and thankfully it is still every bit as good in the 2025 model. It’s bright, vibrant, and super sharp. In short, the best laptop screen out there, although I will say the version in the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is right up there, too, so Razer certainly doesn’t have it all its own way this go around.
It’s dishing up the fps without making me want to stuff thermal paste in my ear-holes
That Aorus Master is an interesting comparison, too, because as I noted in my previous testing of the mobile RTX 5090 GPU it’s not notably faster in gaming terms compared to the previous generation of laptop chips. Obviously you have the silky frame smoothing of Multi Frame Gen to call on with the RTX 50-series, but that is about it for pushing things forward in terms of frame rates.
Which means that again we’re in the situation where the RTX 5090 in this svelte chassis is, understandably, being limited because of the thermal confines it finds itself in and when an RTX 5080 isn’t it can match or even outperform the theoretical top Nvidia GPU. Now, I was certainly one to give Nvidia shit for this situation last time out, but my position on it is different with this series of cards.
Having the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 machines side-by-side, I would absolutely rather have the experience of gaming on the Blade 16 over the Gigabyte. The Aorus Master 16 has to push its GPU all the way in order to be able to hit those RTX 5090-level frame rates, and that means it’s chugging down all the juice, pushing up the clocks, and making a hell of a racket to get there. The Blade 16 isn’t quiet, but it’s dishing up the fps without making me want to stuff thermal paste in my ear-holes.
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And though you can limit both machines to a performance and fan noise level that makes them far more pleasant to use in polite company, you have to pull the RTX 5080 down further, to the point where the RTX 5090 definitely has a frame rate lead.
All that said, there will be bigger, fatter, more powerful RTX 5090 gaming laptops, such as the expected big boi Asus Scar laptops, that will certainly provide more gaming grunt out of the top RTX Blackwell chip. This Razer Blade 16 is not going to top the tables in terms of frame rates once the other RTX 5090 machines hit our testing labs.
But is still going to be the one that I want.
For all that I want high frame rates, and silky smooth gaming performance, when it comes to gaming laptops I want the experience to be good, too. That’s arguably the most important thing for laptops over desktops, and historically the actual gaming experience of high-performance notebooks has not been great. I’ve been using an RTX 4090-powered Lenovo machine for the odd bit of gaming around a mates’ place and its fan noise has been driving us both to distraction, but you put up with it because that’s been the norm.
But it doesn’t have to be this time around. The RTX Blackwell architecture is more efficient and smarter with its clock speeds and that makes it more effective when you’re asking it to be a bit more parsimonious about power. I would happily sacrifice a handful of fps for the ability to run a game quietly and well over loudly and just a bit better.
Gaming on battery? Yes, you read that right
This is also where Multi Frame Gen almost makes more sense in gaming laptops, especially for high-end GPUs. That extra MFG frosting means you can still have top graphics settings in games even when you pull back on the power and fan curves. It’s also kinda needed when you hit CPU-limited games where the Ryzen AI 9 chip starts to become a bottleneck for the powerful GPU.
And it does happen, just look at the Baldur’s Gate 3 benchmark further up the page 👆 That’s in the city during Act 3 and the AMD chip cannot cope as well as the Intel processors in either the Gigabyte or Lenovo machines. But I’ll take that, because the HX 370 APU helps in other areas, most obviously in its stellar iGPU and the overall chip’s efficiency.
Which also comes into play when we’re talking about gaming on the 90 Whr battery of the Blade 16. Gaming on battery? Yes, you read that right. Normally I’d just give this a passing reference in a gaming laptop review, because historically it’s just not been a thing. If you got 45 minutes of gaming done at an acceptable frame rate on a high-end laptop of a previous generation you’d be lucky.
Which is why no-one bothered. But you can now with Blackwell, such is the extra efficiency and smart clock and power gating the chips are capable of. The gaming performance away from the plug is further improved by the far-too-aggressive settings the Nvidia App will apply to games if you optimise the enhanced BatteryBoost feature, but there’s also a scene-aware algorithm which is able to figure out what’s happening on the screen and pull the frame rate down from the new BatteryBoost target of 60 fps, down to 30 fps when there’s not a lot going on.
Think dialogue screens, times when you’re digging around your inventory, or noodling around in the skill tree for half an hour.
All told, these enhancements meant I got comfortably over two hours of gaming out of the Blade 16’s RTX 5090, and was having such a blast bodding about in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 at that level that I didn’t even bother plugging in the power cable sat next to me on my desktop.
It’s honestly a great experience, and I’d even go as far as to say that it’s comfortably the best gaming laptop I’ve ever used. I’ve spent a long time playing around with this machine now, from gaming to productivity, from battery to plugged into the wall, and it’s always delivered. With that Radeon 890M iGPU, too, I can shut off the thirsty RTX 5090 altogether when I’m playing less intensive games, such as Football Manager. Which is good, because that scene-aware algo thinks everything FM is low action, and I couldn’t get it to budge beyond 30 fps with BatteryBoost enabled.
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The overall package with the Blade 16 is outstanding, making it pretty much the do-anything laptop that I would want it to be had I shelled out that much cash for the privilege. The soldered RAM is maybe a bit of a bummer, but there is a spare M.2 slot easily accessible to upgrade the storage down the line should you want. The massive trackpad is excellent and as responsive as you could wish, and the newly extended travel on the keyboard makes it a pleasure to type on. I’m also impressed with the port selection on either side of the machine, too, and can I just give another shout out to that gorgeous screen? Yum.
Buy if…
✅ You want the absolute best gaming laptop around right now: The RTX 5090 isn’t at its fastest in the Blade 16 chassis, but it’s going to give you the best gaming laptop experience.
✅ You want a laptop for all occasions: Want to play the latest games at home? The Blade 16 will nail it. Want to play them away from the plug on the battery? Sure, it can do that, too. Want to use it as your daily driver working laptop? It’s got almost all-day battery life to get you there, too.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You’re looking for a value proposition: In certain territories, the Blade 16 is cheaper than previous generations, but it’s still a premium-priced product, and the RTX 5090 version especially is an expensive luxury.
❌ You’re happy with noise-cancelling headsets: If you just want the highest frame rates and hang the aural sense of it, then there will be faster, and likely cheaper, RTX 5090 gaming laptops released this year. But they will certainly be loud.
I only have the smallest of niggles really, like it would have been nice to have a fingerprint scanner for Windows Hello, even if the webcam is capable, and it would be good if I was a millionaire. Yes, we have to circle back to that thorny issue of pricing. Now, Razer has said it was going to be more reasonable about pricing in this generation, and while that is certainly the case in the UK where this top Blade 16 is fully £500 cheaper than the equivalent was at launch for an RTX 4090 version, it’s $200 more expensive in the US.
At $4,500 it is a HUGE amount of money to spend on a device, and it’s hard not to think about the sort of desktop gaming rig you could build with that. And while that RTX 5090 is a stunner, and able to be happily managed by both the cooling (even if it does still hold it back compared to what larger laptops will be able to achieve), it is absolutely going to be an unnecessary luxury for all but the most well-endowed of bank accounts.
The RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 versions are going to be where it’s at for the Blade 16, and they will still deliver all the efficient goodness of RTX Blackwell, in the same svelte package. But if money truly is no object to you—and congrats if so—then this should be the gaming laptop you ought to covet. It’s certainly the only one that’s genuinely made me consider it as a genuine desktop replacement. And I love me a desktop PC.
The real test, however, is going to be what Asus does with its Zephyrus G16 and G14 in this generation. Bring it on, because I am absolutely here for a battle of the gaming laptop heavyweights.
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Kurt Indovina
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