Ryzen 7040HS-powered Razer Blade 14 appears built to take on Apple and Intel
AMD and Razer, just like with the 2022 Razer Blade 14, are collaborating on a new gaming laptop featuring a Ryzen series CPU. With the new 2023 Razer Blade 14, Razer seems to have gone above and beyond in constructing a gaming laptop that surpasses its predecessor in nearly every way.
It looks like the two manufacturers are teaming and coming Intel and Apple, looking to surpass the former in terms of CPU performance and the latter as a well-balanced and powerful laptop. And judging from the specs we’ve seen so far, it seems that it could come close to those lofty goals.
The 2023 Razer Blade 14 is outfitted with the AMD Ryzen 7040HS, which outperforms the Intel Core i9 13900H in benchmark tests and the Apple M2 Pro chip in application performance. It’s also equipped with either the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or 4070 GPU, a more powerful graphics card than the RTX 3070 Ti from the last gen, allowing it to perform far better in testing with several graphically intense AAA PC titles.
Taking on powerful chips by Intel and Apple
AMD’s Ryzen 7040HS CPU was created to power some of the best light and thin laptops, with up to 8-cores and 16-threads, up to 5.2Hz max boost, and built-in AMD Radeon 700M integrated graphics. The AMD Ryzen 7040HS also claims to have up to nine hours of battery life, though that metric needs to be tested. The chip is powered by Zen 4 tech, which on average has a 13% faster IPC than Zen 3. It also features XDNA AI architecture, which supports AI workloads and provides a host of AI tools to video chat applications while remaining power efficient.
According to performance testing from AMD, the Ryzen 7040HS outperformed the Intel Core i9 13900H CPU in both benchmark test scores and most tests comparing performance in the best PC games – some by as high as a 15% difference. The only exception is Cyberpunk 2077, which loses to the Core i9 by 2%. What makes this even more impressive if true is that during testing, the Core i9 was housed in a .90-inch thick 16-inch laptop while the Ryzen 7040HS was housed in a .70-inch thick 14-inch laptop.
In a similar vein according to AMD’s data, the Ryzen 7040HS also beats out another competitor, Apple’s M2 Pro chip, in application performance. This includes programs like Blender and Adobe Photoshop and benchmarks like Cinebench R23 and Passmark CPUMark. This is in line with what AMD has been stating for a while now, that it plans to directly take on the M2 Pro.
The Razer Blade 14 is more powerful than ever
The latest refresh of the Razer Blade 14 for 2023 seems to be in the running for best gaming laptop title, powered by this impressive AMD Ryzen 7040HS chip.
Razer brags about the Razer Blade 14 (2023)’s improved performance from the Razer Blade 14 (2022), which is a 33% increase in power. To top that off, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU it’s equipped with, as shown by Razer’s own testing, delivers a marketed performance increase over the 2022 model’s RTX 3070 Ti in PC titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Razer Blade 14 (2023) also boasts a display with a ridiculously high 240Hz refresh rate, 3ms response time, 16:10 QHD+ resolution, and 500 nits of brightness. It also room for RAM expansion, which is a dual-channel slotted memory, up to 64GB. And, it has quite a solid port selection with two USB Type-C ports, USB Type-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, a Kensington port, an audio combo jack, and a privacy shutter for the webcam.
The laptop weighs in at just above four pounds, with a thickness of .71-inch, an aluminum chassis, and dual speakers on either side of the RGB-lit anti-ghosting and N-key rollover keyboard.
It’ll launch in three versions, starting at $2,399.99 (about £1,920 / AU$3,555) for the RTX 4060 and 16GB of RAM model, $2,699.99 (about £2,160 / AU$4,000) for the RTX 4070 and 16GB of RAM model, and $2,799.99 (about £2,239 / AU$4,148) for the RTX 4070 and 32GB of RAM model. All three versions have 1TB of storage, the same display, and the same AMD processor. However, only the most expensive version has the choice of Mercury or Blade colors.