1. Razer Blade 15
The latest spin of the Razer Blade 15 once again improves on one of the best gaming laptops ever made. It has the same gorgeous CNC-milled aluminum chassis as its predecessor, only this time it can house one of Nvidia’s latest RTX 30-series GPUs and an Intel 12th Gen Core i9 CPU.
We’ve played with the Razer Blade 15 Advanced with a 10th Gen Intel chip and RTX 3080 (95W) GPU inside it. And we fell in love all over again. We’ve also since then tried out the larger Razer Blade 17 with an RTX 3080 Ti humming away inside it, alongside one of those tasty 12th Gen chips and still stand bewildered by what will fit inside such a compact and neat chassis.
That said, you will get some throttling because of that slimline design, and even on the larger Blade 17 the battery life can be a little slim, but you’re still getting outstanding performance from a beautiful machine.
The Blade 15 isn’t the lightest gaming laptop you can buy, but five pounds is still way better than plenty of traditional gaming laptops, while also offering similar performance and specs. That heft helps make it feel solid too. It also means the Blade 15 travels well in your backpack. An excellent choice for the gamer on the go… or if you don’t have the real estate for a full-blown gaming desktop and monitor.
Keyboard snobs will be happy to see a larger shift and half-height arrow keys. The Blade 15 Advanced offers per-key RGB lighting over the Base Model’s zonal lighting. Typing feels great, and I’ve always liked the feel of the Blade’s keycaps. The trackpad can be frustrating at times, but you’re going to want to use a mouse with this gorgeous machine anyway, so it’s not the end of the world.
One of the best things about the Blade 15 is the number of configurations Razer offers. From the RTX 3060 Base Edition to the RTX 3080 Ti Advanced with a 144Hz 4K panel, there’s something for almost everyone. It’s one of the most beautiful gaming laptops around and still one of the most powerful.
Whatever config you pick, we think the Razer Blade 15 is the overall best gaming laptop on the market right now, though you will be paying a premium for the now-classic design.
2. Asus ROG Zephyrus G14
The new version of the Zephyrus G14 for 2022 impresses us once again with its well-balanced specs list and excellent gaming performance. Seriously, this thing shreds through frames up to its 120Hz refresh rate, and it’s great for much more than gaming, too.
We checked out the version with AMD’s RX 6800S under the hood, though there is an option for an RX 6700S, for a chunk less cash. Arguably, that cheaper option sounds a bit better to us, as the high-end one can get a little pricey and close in on the expensive but excellent Razer Blade 14. It’s not helped much by its 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM in that regard, though we do love having all that speedy memory raring to go for whatever you can throw at it.
At its heart is the AMD Ryzen 6900HS. That’s one of the top chips from AMD’s Ryzen 6000-series, but not its best and brightest—though you’re really fighting over boost clocks and not much else when it comes to the tippy top of the red team’s mobile processors anyways. It delivers eight cores and 16 threads of the Zen 3+ architecture, capable of boosting to 4.9GHz (which it actually does on occasion), so that’s more than acceptable by me.
That GPU and CPU combo makes quick work of our benchmarking suite, however, and I have to say I’m heartily impressed with the G14’s gaming performance overall. That’s even without turning to the more aggressive Turbo preset—I tested everything with the standard Performance mode. It’s able to top the framerate of RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 mobile chips pretty much across the board, and while it does slip below the RTX 3080 Ti in the Razer Blade 17, that’s a much larger laptop with a much larger price tag.
One of my favorite things about the G14 is in the name—it’s a 14-inch laptop. The blend of screen real estate and compact size is a great inbetween of bulkier 15- and 17-inch designs, and not quite as compromised as a 13-inch model can feel. But the big thing with the 2022 model is that 14-inch size has been fitted out with a larger 16:10 aspect ratio than previous models’ 16:9 panels.
When it’s running smoothly, the G14’s high refresh and high-resolution panel also looks fantastic. Being such a bright and colorful IPS display on this model, you really get to soak in every detail.
One of the downsides with this machine is the battery life, which really isn’t the best while gaming—less than an hour while actually playing. You’ll get more when playing videos or doing something boring like working, but we do expect a bit more from a modern laptop. It’s not a deal-breaker, but definitely something you’ll want to bear in mind.
The G14 has lost that quality of being surprisingly cheap for what you get, too, even if you do get stellar performance out of it.
Perhaps one reason for that is the inclusion of 32GB of DDR5 RAM—16GB of that is soldered to the board, and the other 16GB attached via removable SO-DIMM from the underside of the laptop. That’s not cheap memory. DDR5 prices have hardly settled down since the memory standard was introduced last year, and 32GB is a bounty of high-performance memory by comparison to most gaming PCs today.
Overall, though, the G14 experience is a pretty easy and straightforward one. I didn’t run into any major issues with it over the couple of weeks I’ve had it, and for the few negatives I have with the design, Asus has offset them with heaps of positives. The cheaper models may be a better bet than the one we reviewed, however. The same chassis and great design but with a slightly more amicable price tag.
