Razer Blade 14 Quartz Review: Powerful Gaming in a Punchy Pink Outfit

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I’ll be honest; I’m not normally one for pink. I wouldn’t drive a pink car, I don’t wear pink shirts, and you’re not likely to catch me rocking pink hair unless I lost a bet. But recently I saw a pair of Nike Air Force 1 shoes with pink Swoosh logos and pink soles, and you know what? I wanted those suckers so bad. 

My point is, some things just look good in pink. And that is absolutely the case for the shiny pink laptop that Razer loaned me. It’s the Quartz edition of the Razer Blade 14, and I’ve got to admit, I think it looks fabulous. 

But that sassy new pink livery isn’t the only thing that’s new — the Blade 14 has received a refresh for 2022, bringing system-wide improvements to an already fantastic portable gaming laptop. 

The Blade 14 isn’t cheap, but the term “you get what you pay for” absolutely applies here. This laptop is fast, efficient, and highly portable for such a powerhouse gaming rig. 

Razer Blade 14 Quartz (2022) Technical Specifications

• AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX Processor (8-Cores /16-Threads, Up to 4.9 GHz max boost) 
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (8GB GDDR6 VRAM)
• 14-inch QHD 165Hz, 2560 x 1440 resolution display
• FreeSync Premium VRR
• Up to 100% DCI-P3 (factory calibrated)
• 1TB SSD (M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 x4)
• 16 GB DDR5-4800MHz (Fixed onboard)
• Twin-fan vapor chamber cooling
• Per-key RGB Powered by Razer Chroma, N-Key rollover keyboard
• 1080p webcam (Windows Hello capable)
• Windows 11 Home
• Ports: 2x USB Type-A, 2x USB-C, full size HDMI 2.1, audio jack

A Pink Powerhouse

If you usually struggle with decisions, let me make this simple for you right now. The Razer Blade 14 configuration with the 3070 Ti is arguably the best of the bunch. 

There’s a faster 3080 Ti option, but when you consider the diminishing returns you typically see with high-end GPUs (they’re not significantly faster), along with the fact that it’s almost $1,000 more, I would absolutely consider the 3070 Ti to be the best value for your money. 

The AMD Ryzen 6900HX processor is an 8-core, 16 thread CPU with stacks of performance — more than enough for gaming at 1440p resolutions. And yet it maintains excellent efficiency when performing simpler tasks (like writing this review, during which it ran so cool the system fans were completely off).

The NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti is a monster of a GPU, capable of munching its way through almost any game you throw at it when running at the native 1440p resolution of the built-in display. I had a blast playing Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy with all the graphics and ray tracing effects dialed up, while maintaining a smooth 80FPS.

That graphics card is even capable enough to render games at full 4K, if plugged into a 4K TV or monitor via the handy full-size HDMI port on the side. It’s so compact it fits easily within my media center setup, so it makes a perfect living room gaming PC or media device. 

Improved Cooling

Of course, cooling is key for high-end gaming on such a portable device. The large vapor chamber in the Razer Blade 14 is effective enough to help the laptop extract the best out of the 3070 Ti — by far the hottest component — without significant thermal throttling (i.e. when a PC slows down to prevent overheating).

But the cooling situation isn’t perfect. I noticed the lower deck getting uncomfortably hot during extended gaming sessions, particularly around the middle of the keyboard and the spacebar. The surface above the keyboard, which lacks ventilation, also gets scalding hot and you really have to be careful if picking up the laptop while a game is running. 

Even the palm rests get a little too warm for my liking. In future models, I’d love to see Razer work on insulating the main touch surfaces from the heat radiating from within the Razer Blade’s all-metal chassis.

On the plus side, Razer has thankfully refined its fan design to keep noise to a minimum in the 2022 model, and I can certainly vouch for its acoustics being less intrusive than most gaming laptops I’ve tested recently. If you prefer to take manual control of the cooling system, this and other hardware settings are handled via the Razer Synapse 3 app, which does a better job of laying out your options in a clean, intuitive way than the software included with many other major gaming laptop brands.

Made for Gaming

The Razer Blade 14 retains the same display as last year, but that’s not a bad thing because it’s excellent. 1440p is the perfect resolution for a display of this size, and the 165Hz refresh rate is the sweet spot for delivery silky smooth gameplay without going overkill for the sake of the marketing numbers. 

AMD FreeSync Premium keeps the refresh rate in perfect sync with your games, so inputs feel fast and responsive and there’s no noticeable evidence of blur or judder. 

These specs are perfect for a gaming laptop, and pairs especially well with the RTX 3070 Ti. Razer says that every laptop receives individual factory calibration, so I didn’t have to tweak the display settings at all; it was perfect right out of the box. 

And with up to a 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, the Razer Blade 14 can even double up as a productivity workstation for content creators or visual professionals (so long as you don’t require more than 16GBs of RAM, which is soldered in and not upgradeable). 

Should You Buy the Razer Blade 14 Quartz?

The 2022 Razer Blade 14 is more iterative than revolutionary, but its many incremental refinements come together to make for what is quite possibly the best 14-inch gaming laptop available. 

The speed and efficiency of the Ryzen CPU pairs perfectly with the raw gaming performance of the RTX 3070 Ti,  for a laptop that’s super powerful without being overkill for the sake of it. And Razer has really mastered its iconically minimalist, timeless laptop design. Even the Quartz model, a pretty bold color, somehow looks classy. 

If you have around $2,500 to spend on a compact gaming laptop, the Razer Blade 14 should definitely be on your shortlist.