It’s back-to-school season and we have plenty of college laptops to recommend university students getting back into their scholarly cycle. But a majority of those laptops are distinctly lacking one major capability: Gaming.
Just because you’ll be spending a lot of your time attending classes, studying for exams, taking notes, and writing papers, doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally simmer down with relaxation time. Everyone deserves a break, and taking a moment to breathe and enjoy your favorite hobbies is guaranteed to enhance your performance when it is time to hunker down and get serious with your studies.
But what’s the purpose of purchasing two separate laptops when you could just invest in one that can do both? Meet the Razer Blade 14, a laptop that is not only light and portable, but boasts surprisingly long-lasting battery life with powerful specs for gaming.
The Razer Blade 14 is a great gaming laptop for college
The Razer Blade 14 is built with an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage and a 14-inch QHD+ 240Hz 2560 x 1600-pixel display. It’s currently available for $2,699.99 on Razer’s website, which is admittedly pretty expensive. We have an alternative recommendation if that’s going above and beyond your budget, but first let us get into why the Razer Blade 14 is a great choice.
Longevity is a necessity when picking out a college laptop. Classes can last a full day and there’s nothing worse than a computer dying on you mid-lecture. During the Laptop Mag battery test, which entails continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits, it lasted 8 hours and 35 minutes. We typically want more than eight hours when testing laptops designed for productivity, and the Razer Blade 14 is a champion when it isn’t gaming.
Coming in at 4.1 pounds and measuring 12.23 x 8.97 x 0.7 inches, this 14-inch laptop is lightweight and durable. I love its alluring minimalist design and when pushing against its frame, I could feel no part of its metal chassis give way. This is important when bringing it on the go, as you’ll want to be able to fit it in your bag and survive turbulence.
Unfortunately, it can get pretty hot while it isn’t even gaming, reaching to 102 degrees fahrenheit at the underside near the hinge. This is pretty far above our 95-degree threshold, but as long as you aren’t writing papers on your lap, you’ll be fine.
It also has a gorgeous display with compelling color depth and high peak brightness, keeping it vivid and bright even while out in sunlight, or in this case, a classroom window where the sun is peeking through. Reproducing 114.3% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and an average of 465 nits of brightness, it boasts one of the best displays we’ve seen on a modern gaming laptop.
The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is a cheaper alternative
As mentioned earlier, the Razer Blade 14 is great but costly. $2,699 for a college laptop will seem unreasonable to those who are already investing large sums of cash into their classes and potentially housing. If you feel seen by this last statement, we can happily recommend the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, an incredibly powerful yet affordable alternative for those in need of a great gaming laptop.
The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro model we tested is available for $1,449 at Lenovo’s website and comes with a AMD Ryzen 7 7745HX processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage and a 16-inch, 2560 x 1600 IPS display at 165Hz refresh rate. It has a great keyboard, sturdy hinge and awesome performance in both gaming and productivity, but its 4 hours and 38 minutes of battery life will give some pause.
We generally recommend at least eight hours of battery life if you’re planning on purchasing a college laptop, but if you anticipate longevity won’t be an issue for you, the Legion 5 Pro is an excellent choice. At the very least, it’s a little cooler with its hottest point during non-gaming tests hitting 96.5 degrees.
Bottom line
We recommend the Razer Blade 14 for anyone in need of a college laptop that can balance gaming and schoolwork. With excellent productivity metrics, a sturdy metal chassis, long-lasting battery life and high frames per second while gaming, it’s a great all-rounder for those who can afford it. Alongside the excellent brightness and compelling color reproduction, it’s hard to say no to what Razer has crafted.
But if you’d rather do without the $2,699 price point, we recommend the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. It’s an equally powerful gaming laptop in its performance metrics, but it suffers from nearly half the longevity. Battery life is vital when choosing a laptop, so we only suggest the Legion 5 Pro if you anticipate that won’t be an issue. Otherwise, the Razer Blade 14 is the best gaming laptop for college students.
