Razer Blade Stealth
THE BLADE STEALTH HAS A NEW CPU/GPU COMBO, BUT IS THIS ENOUGH TO MAKE IT A PROPER GAMING ULTRABOOK?
RAZER HAS ALWAYS offered some of the best looking laptops money can buy, and the 2019 black-anodised aluminium Razer Blade Stealth is no exception. Returning to the 13-inch form factor, we’re continually surprised by how small modern ultrabooks can be. Sliding in at a 1.48cm thickness, the new stealth earns its Razer name and the 30.5 x 21cm footprint and 1.28kg weight mean this device is just about as portable as a laptop can be.
Despite being so compact the Blade Stealth manages to maintain a nicely weighted keyboard that has a decent travel distance for an ultraportable. This keyboard is skirted by a pair of subtle speaker grills that combine with an additional two undercarriage speakers to create Dolby Atmos three dimensional sound – which isn’t bad for personal cinematic playback.
Razer seems to be paring back the number of premium options on this year’s Blade Stealth, offering just the one FullHD display option locally and a maximum of 256GB of storage space. You do still have a choice to make: whether you’d prefer the base model with 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SATA 3 SSD and an Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU for $2,449; or if you’re willing to pay a few hundred more for 16GB of RAM, a much faster 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD and an Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPU.
The Nvidia GeForce MX150 is between 40 and 50% less powerful than a GTX 1050 GPU in 3DMark benchmarks, so we’re hesitant to call it a fully-fledged gaming GPU. That said it does offer three times the performance of the stock Intel UHD Graphics 620, allowing you to play games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands or Middle Earth: Shadow of War at playable 30fps averages if you drop the quality settings right down or run them in 720p. Less demanding titles like Overwatch, Rocket League, or Fortnite will run really well on this system, so if you only ever game lightly then this is an awesome option.
The Blade Stealth also has an updated Intel Core i7-8556U CPU. This Whisky Lake chip was announced back in August 2018 and while it still uses a 14nm die, it’s had a number of considerable optimisations that make it more efficient. It can also boost to a frequency of 4.6GHz for extreme responsiveness in short demanding tasks. This affords the new Razer Blade Stealth a 50% boost in results on demanding CPU tasks like HWBot’s 1080p media encoding benchmark from the 2018 Blade Stealth with 16GB of RAM. The performance boost isn’t as dramatic in longer and more diverse work tasks, but we still saw a 5-20% uptick in general work benchmarks.
The 53Wh Li-Ion battery will last about four hours and 20 minutes in performance mode with demanding tasks; you can stretch this out if you use a balanced power mode.
The Razer Blade stealth is an impressive upgrade from last year’s model in terms of CPU and GPU performance. Unfortunately you will have to live with just 256GB of storage space.
[ JOEL BURGESS ]
THIS KEYBOARD IS SKIRTED BY A PAIR OF SUBTLE SPEAKER GRILLS THAT COMBINE WITH AN ADDITIONAL TWO UNDERCARRIAGE SPEAKERS TO CREATE DOLBY ATMOS THREE DIMENSIONAL SOUND — WHICH ISN’T BAD FOR PERSONAL CINEMATIC PLAYBACK.