We came in with concerns about how a GTX 970M would perform on such a small and thin notebook, but we walked away genuinely impressed with the performance of the refreshed Blade 14. The model experiences no major throttling when gaming and is even able to consistently run at Turbo Boost speeds for the CPU and GPU. This in turn leads to high surface temperatures and very loud fan noise, so headphones are almost requisite. Outside of its solid performance, the aluminum chassis is rigid with a surprisingly easy-to-remove maintenance panel, especially for an ultrathin where internals are generally more difficult to access.

We criticized the first Blade 14 for its poor 900p TN panel and we're relieved to see a very high quality 3200 x 1800 IPS panel with a matte 1080p option on the 2015 refresh. Colors are accurate out-of-the-box with a bright backlight, though our glossy screen does make the touchscreen configuration more difficult to use outdoors. Native QHD+ gameplay on a GTX 970M is limited to Medium settings for most games, so the 1080p panel may be preferable to some. Nonetheless, the Blade 14 is an almost perfect solution for those who want a lightweight notebook that is as good for high-end gaming as it is for schoolwork and light traveling. We say almost perfect as battery life and weight are both not quite there yet when compared to standard Ultrabooks.

There are a number of omissions and missing features from the Blade 14, however, some of which are conspicuously absent. Where is the card reader or Gigabit Ethernet adapter? Why no DisplayPort or RAID 0 and why was the second M.2 slot removed for the 2015 refresh? Such features are common on larger gaming notebooks or even mainstream ones, so we would have liked to see more connectivity options on this $2000 to $2400 Razer.

Gamers should also note that unlike most other gaming notebooks out there, the Blade 14 has no internal 2.5-inch SATA III options. This essentially forces the owner to invest in a very high capacity and more expensive M.2 SSD to hold all those game installations without resorting to an external HDD. In a world where the latest Call of Duty is 41 GB, a 256 GB C drive won't cut it for very long.

The 2015 Razer Blade 14 is at its core the best lightweight 14-inch gaming notebook money can buy - just be prepared for the vanilla feature set. It currently has little competition in this size category for now as the only other notebook with the same 970M GPU is the Gigabyte P34W v3, which unfortunately suffers from moderate throttling issues. Users willing to stay thin but go bigger may find more value in the 15.6-inch 4K MSI GS60 Ghost series. Otherwise, the new Razer stands paramount in the 14-inch space.