Razer has just unveiled their most ambitious gaming laptop to date, introducing the redesigned 2025 Blade 16 at CES 2025. What caught my attention isn’t just its impressive thinness at 0.59 inches, but also Razer’s surprising partnership with AMD – marking the first time we’re seeing a Ryzen processor in a Blade laptop.
The star of the show is undoubtedly the combination of NVIDIA’s latest GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU (packing a whopping 24GB GDDR7 VRAM) and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. As someone who’s reviewed multiple gaming laptops, this partnership is particularly interesting since Razer has traditionally stuck with Intel processors for their premium lineup.
The display looks promising too – they’ve gone with a QHD+ OLED panel running at 240Hz with a lightning-quick 0.2ms response time. For gamers, this means butter-smooth gameplay with minimal motion blur, while content creators will appreciate the Calman Verified colour profiles covering multiple colour spaces including DCI-P3.
Cooling has always been a challenge for thin gaming laptops, and Razer seems to have tackled this with a redesigned vapor chamber system. The new cooling solution covers 57% of the motherboard and features extremely thin 0.5mm exhaust fins. It’ll be interesting to see how this performs under heavy gaming loads, especially considering the power-hungry components inside.
The keyboard has received some meaningful upgrades, including deeper 1.5mm key travel and five programmable macro keys. There’s also a dedicated Copilot key for quick access to AI features – something we’re seeing more frequently in premium laptops. Audio hasn’t been overlooked either, with a new 6-speaker system tuned by THX that should provide better sound than previous models.
Speaking of AI, this laptop (and almost all tech products these days) seems built around it. The AMD processor includes a Neural Processing Unit capable of 50 TOPS, enabling features like live translations and enhanced Windows Studio Effects. Combined with NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 and NIM microservices, it’s clear that AI capabilities are becoming as important as raw gaming performance.
The 2025 Blade 16 is expected to hit stores in Q1 2025. While pricing hasn’t been announced yet, based on previous Blade launches, I’d expect this premium gaming laptop to command a premium price tag but might be slightly cheaper due to AMD processors being used rather than Intel ones.
For gamers and content creators wanting a powerful yet portable machine, this new Blade 16 looks promising on paper. However, we’ll have to wait for hands-on testing to see how well it handles thermal management and battery life – two crucial factors for any gaming laptop, especially one this thin.
