I've spent weeks testing the best little gaming laptops and there's only one they're going to have to prise from my cold, dead hands

I've spent a good few weeks now agonising over which of these two notebooks can claim the crown of best 14-inch gaming laptop—should it be the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 claiming the title for the second year running, or does the redesigned Razer Blade 14 do enough to topple the incumbent champ?

Honestly, from when I first started playing with the new Blade 14 my mind was made up. It's slimmer than last year's machine, cheaper, and a whole lot quieter than the frankly annoyingly noisy Zephyrus G14. But that's not to say there hasn't been some conflicting thoughts going around in my head.

Because, on paper, it's really not so cut and dried a result. In the US, the Asus laptop is $100 cheaper, and that's for the version with the RTX 5070 Ti GPU—the Blade 14, by contrast, can only be configured with either an RTX 5060 or RTX 5070. The G14 is also sporting the best mobile APU that AMD has ever created: the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with it's excellent Radeon 890M integrated graphics.

The Blade 14 is also an AMD-powered device, but it uses the weaker Ryzen AI 9 365 with the same sort of iGPU as the last-gen APUs.

So... it's got a lesser spec and it's more expensive. "How can you be recommending this gaming laptop with just 8 GB of VRAM over the clearly superior Zephyrus?!" This is the question I imagine being screamed at this page right now, but bear with me and I shall explain.

If you want a gaming laptop with a ton of graphical grunt first and foremost, then a 14-inch machine isn't for you. This form factor is about having a genuinely portable notebook that will play games on the go. It's about the experience, not the raw numbers. While you will get higher frame rates out of the Asus compared with the Razer—though given the slight silicon differences between the two GPUs, not by much—there is a cost to be paid. And it will be paid by your ears.

The new Zephyrus has this uncomfortable two-tone nature to its fan noise which is hugely distracting and the only way to mitigate it outside of some really good noise cancelling headphones, is to use the manual configuration options to pull back on performance. And at that point, getting to the same fan sound as the quieter Blade 14, you're then running your RTX 5070 Ti at the same frame rate as an RTX 5070.

I also just straight prefer the design of the Blade 14, too. The sleek matte black MacBook aesthetic has long been a draw for the Razer laptops, and with this new, thinner chassis that's even more pronounced. It's a lovely thing, with a gorgeous OLED screen, a decent keyboard, and great battery life, too.

For me, it's the best compact gaming laptop around.

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