CES 2025: Razer

It’s been a really long time since I covered Razer at CES and this year with my return after a two year absence, I booked an appointment with the company that loves RGB to see what they had in store for the upcoming year.

The first product was their notebook cooler known as Razer Laptop Cooling Pad. Shipping January 30th of this year. Featuring a large center fan, this laptop cooler dynamically adjusts its fan speed based on how hot your laptop is. It has a few different inserts to ensure compatibility amongst a variety of laptops. But what’s really interesting is that paired up with a Razer Blade, it can unlock even better performance.

With the ability to keep laptops cool, Razer created a profile that pushes performance even more since the heat that gets whisked away means you can push a laptop even further without being thermal throttled. This is only available for Razer laptops though, but if you own one and pick up the Laptop Cooling Pad, you could have the ability to gain some more performance out of it.

The Laptop Cooling Pad also features a USB hub allowing an extra three connections to it and there are some remappable buttons as well.

$150 is the price of the Laptop Cooling Pad and as mentioned earlier, it’ll be available starting January 30th with pre-orders available today.

For those who have a handheld gaming device, Razer is producing a dock that could be a nice addition to your portable gaming setup. The Razer Handheld Dock Chroma features a multi-angle backplate that can be used to tilt your Steam Deck or Rog Ally for example in various positions.

The dock is capable of 100W of pass through charging so handhelds that need a lot of juice can use this to charge and play.

I/O includes three USB-A ports, an Ethernet port capable of 1GB of bandwidth, one USB-C port, and an HDMI 2.0 port. All combined to give a lot of nice expansion capabilities for a hand held and the ability to output it to a big screen.

As the name implies, there’s RGB Chroma lighting on the bottom of the dock so if you want to add a bit of color to where the Dock is sitting, you can do so and control it via Razer’s Synapse software.

Price on the dock is $80 and like the cooling pad, it’ll start shipping on January 30th.

Razer always has some concept product that they show at CES and this year is no exception. Project Arielle is their mesh chair with both cooling and heating capabilities. Like a car seat, you can turn on heating or cooling with a built-in fan to make you more comfortable.

The chairs feature a chroma strip around the back and the demo units had it glow orange when the heat was on and blue when the cooling option was selected. Selecting the opposite temperature made the light slowly change over to the other color and indicated the relative temperature as it changed. Razer purposely made the temperate change more gradual as to not make the person sitting in the chair feel uncomfortable on sudden changes in temperature.

I have to say, sitting in them with both the heating and cooling options on was pretty comfortable. For cooling, I felt a slight breeze blowing up my back providing a nice feeling of cooling air behind me. The warm setting was slightly warm and not unbearably hot like how some car seats can get. It was set to a more milder temperature I think, so there’s a good possibility that it can get quite warm if need be.

Another interesting project is Project AVA. Seems every company is diving into the AI arena and Razer is doing so as well. Project AVA is a service that monitors your gameplay and provides a digital coach. AVA will advise you on things like what to buy, what an enemy might do, or some tactics you might want to use. It’s both reactive and proactive in that you can ask it questions and it will answer you or it will provide feedback as you’re playing without any prompting.

One of the examples shown was a player fighting a boss in Black Myth: Wukong and AVA advising the player when to dodge, when to attack and so forth. At the end of your session it also provides some information about your play.

I was standing next to the server that was running it and it was kind of funny to hear the fans of the machine ramp up when the player asked AVA some questions. It sounds like this is a service that Razer will initially provide, but we’ll see if this one gets off the ground as not all projects that Razer participates in make it to market.

Razer’s bringing out their own game streaming solution to let you stream from your own PC to an iOS, Android, or Windows hand held device. I’ve done this a lot at home using Steam Link or a combination of Moonlight and Sunshine and that’s exactly what Razer is using. They are modifying the open source Sunshine and Moonlight projects into their own Razer streaming platform.

You might ask why they are doing this instead of just using Moonlight and Sunshine. Well, it does take a little bit of knowledge to set up Sunshine and Razer is looking to make it a lot easier. The clients for the devices will also have a more streamlined and aesthetically pleasing look to them.

I asked about clients for say Linus or Steam Deck, but they don’t have any plans for them yet. I also asked if we can just use any Moonlight client since the Steam Deck and other platforms have those available on them to connect to Razer’s solution. The rep didn’t know if that was possible, but technically it should work. If I get an official word, I’ll update this article, but I think it would be a nice stop gap for devices that won’t have the Razer software initially if that was possible.

For those interested in laptops, Razer has reduced their Razer Blade 16’s weight by a significant margin and it still houses a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 inside. With their next Razer Blade weighing in at just over 4 lbs, the thing was super light to hold and was really thin. Yet, it’s got a beefy video card inside.

It will come with soldered on ram unfortunately and it will be an AMD system using the newly announced X3D CPUs by team Red. Since it’s soldered on, Razer will offer configurations with 16, 32, and 64GB of ram. The Razer Blade 16 will also benefit from the cooling pad mentioned earlier so if you want to have a sustained play at the highest graphical power draw, you can pair it up with that.

No pricing was announced, but they said we will be pleasantly surprised.

Finally, Razer showed off their next generation Chroma technology and it incorporates lights in the entire room. We’re talking lights in the ceiling, walls, and so on. The demo room had an RGB light strip bordering the screen on the wall, light strips on each side, and then some hanging RGB lights from the ceiling. The desktop was set up with various Razer RGB products as well.

Using Dune Awakening to demonstrate, when a person got into the Ornithopters, there was a small band of white light that ran through various parts of the room. Taking a flame thrower out, when the player fired the weapon at some enemies, the whole room lit up with yellow and red lighting and dissipated as the flame was extinguished. It was a truly visual experience to behold.

Combine the visual effects with the tactile effects like the chair and gamepad rumbling, you get a pretty immersive experience.

Implementation into games, I was told, was pretty easy for developers and the SDK that Razer will provide in the future should let others toy around with it as well. While the room was decked out in lights, you can start out small and add more effects as you go along. I would love to see something like this for retro games.

Razer has some fun and innovative products at CES and as always their projects have a nice unique spin that hopefully makes it to market one day.