New Razer Blade 14 arrives with Ryzen 9 7940HS and RTX 4070

theverge.com:

By Monica Chin, a senior reviewer covering laptops and other gadgets. Monica was a writer for Tom's Guide and Business Insider before joining The Verge in 2020.

There’s been much speculation about which chips will power the next Razer Blade 14, one of very few premium options in the portable 14-inch gaming space. This morning, those chips were finally revealed. The processor will be AMD’s Ryzen 9 7940HS with eight cores, 16 threads, 24MB cache, and 35-54W TDP. The GPUs will be Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 and RTX 4070.

Pricing is… well, it’s high. The RTX 4060 model will be $2,399, while the base RTX 4070 model will be $2,699.99. Both will have 16GB of DDR5 RAM. There will also be a fancy mercury (white) model for $2,799.99, which will include 32GB of DDR5 RAM as well as the 4070. All three of the models mentioned will have 1TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage.

Razer and AMD have provided some performance estimates, and those include surprisingly little about power consumption — they basically just mentioned that the Blade would get up to 10 hours of video playback to a charge, which is not a massive jump from previous years. That’s interesting because power consumption, rather than raw frame rates, has historically been the big advantage that AMD has over Intel.

Nevertheless, Razer and AMD shared a number of performance benchmarks comparing a 14-inch Blade system to a Zephyrus M16 with a Core i9-13900H. It claims that the Ryzen system will deliver better performance on a number of games, including Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Final Fantasy XIV, including a 12 percent increase in World of Tanks Encore and a 13 percent increase in Borderlands 3 performance. (It does also admit that the Blade was two percent slower