The keyboard has undergone some notable changes. The keys have a travel distance of 1.5 mm, giving them a tactile and mechanical feel. The drive feels heavy, although I like the added precision it increases. Razer also adds five macro keys to the right side below the power button and under the “two-way” RGB backlight. This means that pressing and holding a function or shift key will light up the auxiliary function of each key. Yes, yes, but I have to admit it is neat. The spacious glass touchpad is also great. In the past, I had problems with wrong attention and palm rejection, but it was all eliminated.
Razer used to offer two display options, one of which was a 4K panel, but now there is only one option: an OLED 240 Hz screen with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels. Interestingly, with the RTX 5090, it feels like the first display that can produce better frame rates at high resolution.
When it comes to image quality, the OLED panel is great. It’s impressive in terms of color saturation (100% SRGB, 94% AdoberGB) and color accuracy (0.42 for Delta-E). Its top is 381 nits, which is not the brightest display in the world, but that’s what you get with OLED. In both SDR and HDR, the Razer previously offered by Mini-LED displays are brighter, but the OLED’s high contrast and fast response time make it unparalleled. I haven’t tested it myself, but the 2025 version of the Rog Zephyrus G16 claims to hit 500 nits with an OLED panel.
Photo: Luke Larsen
My only complaint about the Blade 16 screen is that it’s very shiny. I often find myself increasing the brightness of overcoming my reflections. It can be distracting in the wrong lighting.
The six-speaker audio system is good. It most challenged most other gaming laptops on the market, and even provided some bass for the mix, enough to watch YouTube videos or even movies. It still doesn’t compete with Apple’s Macbook Pro. The 1080p webcam is enough for video calls, but won’t impress your colleagues. Even in decent lighting, I found the images very noisy.
Multi-frame generation
My configuration for the Razer Blade 16 has an RTX 5090 laptop GPU internally and comes with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. This will cost you $4,500. You read the correct one. Part of the high price is due to the forced choice of 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage. The Razer is no longer selling the 16 GB model. The starting configuration starts at $3,000, Ryzen AI 9 365, RTX 5070 TI, 32GB RAM and 1TB of storage. The Blade series has never been cheap, but it is difficult to swallow this price. You can still buy older models, but even these models start at $2,400.
This is also the first time that Razer only provides AMD for CPUs on Blade 16 only. This feels very important. No one can say that Intel is the more advanced option. It’s not as powerful as the “desktop replacement” chip used in last year’s Intel model, but here are a lot of features to suit your gaming needs.
