GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
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Razer is giving its Blade 16 gaming laptop a speed and battery boost for 2026. The high-end gaming laptop keeps the same thin chassis and RTX 50-series GPU options as last year’s model, but it’s now making the switch from AMD to an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H “Panther Lake” chip, and corresponding faster RAM. The new Blade 16 is available now directly from Razer, starting at $3,499.99 with an RTX 5080 GPU, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. The top-end RTX 5090 model gets 2TB of storage and costs $4,499.99. According to Razer’s specs sheet, a cheaper Blade 16 with RTX 5070 Ti will be priced and released at a later time.
Razer claims its new laptop is up to 60 percent more power efficient while sporting 33 percent more processing cores (its Intel chip is 16-core instead of last year’s 12-core AMD). But Razer also put in LPDDR5X-9600MHz RAM for an outright speed boost over the 2025 model’s 8000MHz memory. The claimed “fastest available memory” is of course soldered into the board just like the 2025 model.
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1 / 6 Razer really loves to make the Blade 16 look as thin as possible, using just the right angles. Image: Razer
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