by Black Friday week has just begun and one of the best gaming laptops is already $800 off.
The Razer Blade 14, also known as “the most desirable gaming laptop” (opens in new tab)costs $1,999.99 on Amazon (opens in new tab). Price-wise it competes even more closely with our favorite gaming laptop, the Razer Blade 15. You lose an inch, but you gain a superbly designed laptop that makes up for its slightly lacking specs.
The Razer Blade 14 should be paired with an Nvidia RTX 3060, as our own Dave James describes in his review, not the RTX 3080 that comes with this deal. It might seem like a nice improvement, but given the grip of thermal throttling on laptop graphics cards, the jump in performance isn’t as big as it might seem. You lose everything once the laptop warms up – and it will warm up. Still, at this big discount, Razer’s ultrabook-like gaming laptop is the best deal out there right now.
The 2022 model features an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor, 16GB of storage and a 1TB SSD. The 165Hz 1440p display that comes with the RTX 3080 Razer Blade 14 will distort some of its performance compared to our 1080p tests. At 1080p, playing games at basically maximum quality settings, it could hit a strong 60 to 144 fps. At a slightly higher resolution, you’ll likely have to fiddle with quality settings and listen to fans trying to keep up with the increased demand.
That doesn’t kill the deal, though. The Razer Blade’s 14-inch screen hits a sweet spot of 1440p. The screen is small enough that the pixel density looks crisp without the performance penalty of a 4K screen. And it certainly helps maintain the 90-minute battery life, which isn’t particularly impressive than similarly equipped laptops, but it’s not abysmal either.
The Razer Blade 14, especially at this price point, gives you both the ability to play a variety of games and a laptop that reflects the sleek aesthetic strengths of a Macbook. You rarely get that in gaming laptops, a product category awash with segmented plastic designs. At MSRP you’re paying the premium for the aesthetics, but now you can get these at a price that better matches the actual hardware inside.
Black Friday gaming laptop deals (opens in new tab) Don’t often start out so strong. The Razer Blade 14 only fell to this low briefly in mid-October as an Amazon Lightning deal. Other than that, it always hovers above $2,000. At this price point it was already one of the best gaming laptops you could get, but at this price point it effectively moves up to first place.
