Copyright XDA Developers
Gaming laptops come in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit different needs. However, on average, gaming laptops tend to feature larger screen sizes and thicker chassis. After all, gaming laptop components put out a lot of heat, require robust cooling solutions, and you want a larger screen to be able to see more detail in your games. But despite all that, I always find myself gravitating toward smaller, lighter gaming laptops. And in 2025, I had one goal: to find a worthy slim, light, 14-inch gaming laptop that could compete with the Razer Blade 14 (2024) that stole my heart early last year. My small gaming laptop dream The search for a good 14-inch gaming laptop When it comes to my personal tech choices, I tend to skew toward more portable options rather than just powerhouse machines. Especially when it comes to laptops and handheld gaming PCs. If tech is supposed to be portable, I want to be able to carry it and use it with ease, whether I'm sitting on my couch, trapped under a cat, or if I'm on the road. So, while 18-inch desktop replacement gaming laptops are powerhouse machines that I love to take out for a test drive during the review process, I can't ever see myself owning one. I'm much more likely to pick up a slim 16-inch laptop, but my all-time favorites are often in the 14-inch form factor. But there aren't a lot of gaming laptops in the 14-inch format, for pretty solid reasons. It's hard to pack a lot of gaming power into a small laptop chassis, especially a thin and light one with decent non-gaming battery life. It's practically asking for a laptop to bend the rules of physics. That doesn't stop me from wanting one, however. 14-inch laptop options are limited They don't make a lot of small form-factor gaming laptops for good reason The Razer Blade 14 (2024) was the laptop I kept going back to last year. Partially because it was my one AMD Hawk Point laptop, so it was useful for long-term testing. But also because its 14-inch chassis was small and light enough that carting it around for game nights with friends was easy. In 2025, I wasn't quite so lucky. The RTX 50-series got delayed, so we didn't even see the full slate of available laptops until the summer. While the 2025 Razer Blade 14 was a worthy contender, it just didn't have the battery life to make it feel like a great replacement over the 2024 model. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) was just a component upgrade over last year's model, as was the HP Omen Transcend 14 (2025), which meant HP kept that divisive keyboard design from last year's model. So neither was particularly compelling, either. Luckily for me, Acer decided to make the bonkers choice to combine Intel's Lunar Lake chipset with an RTX 5070 in the Predator 14 AI. Not only was this a unique design choice, but it was a gamble that paid off in spades. The Triton 14 AI boasts impressive battery life for a gaming laptop, complemented by solid gaming performance, despite its ultra-slim, 3.5-pound chassis. Plus, it can play my favorite go-to games at over 60FPS at high graphics settings and its full 2880x1800 resolution. While it's not a powerhouse laptop, it's more than powerful enough for the games I tend to play day to day. And it's more than portable enough to be a fantastic choice for game nights or for work, since I can get a good 8 to 10 hours of non-gaming battery life on a single charge. Assuming I don't need to run the display at full brightness. It's a nearly perfect laptop I only have one complaint, and it's pretty minor When it comes down to it, I'm kind of a pain when it comes to technology. I love to use business laptops for gaming, and I love to try and take gaming laptops on planes to get some work done. In many ways, I'm better off with a handheld gaming PC or using an ultrabook as a gaming laptop now that iGPUs are powerful enough for some light gaming. But I've still got to break out GIMP for editing work photos, and I do play the occasional game that's just a bit too rough for integrated GPUs to handle well. While poor optimization is definitely not the fault of a laptop, it does mean I need to be a little particular about my choice of gaming platform if I'm booting up Monster Hunter Wilds or settling in to finally play some Cyberpunk 2077 so I can get out of the tutorial zone. The Triton 14 AI isn't a cheap laptop. Its starting price is $2,499, but that's not too much more expensive than most ultra-slim RTX 5070 laptops. Its only real weakness is its edgeless touchpad, but even then. It's got lights and haptics to identify the extreme edges of the touchpad, which makes it an improvement over the Dell version. While the Triton 14 AI isn't the perfect laptop for everyone, it is an incredibly complete package as far as performance, gaming power, battery life, display quality, and form factor go. It's even got decent built-in audio. The Triton 14 AI has plenty to recommend it, but it's also just the ideal gaming laptop for me personally. Sure, there are more powerful gaming laptops out there, but there's none that is quite as portable as the Triton 14 AI.
