// PC GAMER — GAMING
Razer Blade 16 (2026) review
The Razer Blade 16 is still the most desirable gaming laptop money can buy. Unfortunately, these days you'll need even more cash on hand if you want to walk away with a top-spec model. It's still remarkably civilised, seriously quick, and equipped with one of the best OLED panels on the market. But the price increase means it's even further out of reach for most of us mortals, which keeps me from handing out another 90% score.
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My, how the world can change in a year. The previous version of the Razer Blade 16 shot to the top of our best gaming laptop guide upon its release in 2025, thanks to its fantastic chassis design, great performance, and battery-powered gaming abilities, among other virtues. Yes, it was hugely expensive. But thanks to a stunning all round package, it was worth the money if you had the cash to splash.
Now I sit with the Razer Blade 16 (2026) in front of me—and on the surface, not a whole lot has changed. I've been provided with an RTX 5090-equipped config with 32 GB of DDR5, a 2 TB SSD, and a 240 Hz 16-inch OLED display, all wrapped up in the same chassis as the old model. So far, so brilliant. The major change to this refresh, though, is the addition of one of Intel's Panther Lake-based laptop processors, the Core Ultra 9 386H.
It's a very speedy gaming CPU, and a worthy addition to the Blade 16's armoury. But the thing I'm struggling with, as I'm sure you might have already guessed, is the price. Prepare yourself, folks. This particular Blade 16 costs, and there's no getting round it, $4,900/£4,800.
That's $400 more than the previous RTX 5090-equipped Blade, and, as usual, you can largely blame the memory crisis. But for this sort of price, I'm not quite as convinced by the Blade 16 as I used to be. It's still a sumptuous, fabulous machine, and I'd have one in a heartbeat if I had all the money in the world. But I'd also have a gold-plated Lamborghini and a spare room made of chocolate, while I'm at it.
Which is to say, it's become more difficult to justify the Blade 16's value for this sort of moolah. It's super-portable for a 16-inch machine, and that's worth a lot. It's a wonderfully-premium object, too, with a fantastic screen. And it gets good battery life, all the while running relatively quietly if you drop it down into Balanced mode. It's very… civilised. And I love that.
But spending nearly five grand on an RTX 5090 gaming laptop that can be soundly beaten in the performance stakes by the often-cheaper, RTX 5080-toting Lenovo Legion Pro 7i? The idea of it stops me in my tracks. Is the Razer better in many other ways? Undoubtedly. But the price to performance delta is now skewed, and that gives me the odd doubt.
There are cheaper, lesser-GPUed models of the Blade 16 available, and if I was buying one with my own money, that's where I'd be looking. The Razer Blade 16 is an astonishing piece of engineering, and rarely have I wanted a gaming laptop more. But crucially, I think its MSRP across the range is now substantial enough to keep me awake at night—and as a result, I've got to knock it down by a peg or two.
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