Razer Blade Stealth 13 (2020)
There’s nothing quite like the Razer Blade Stealth 13, but you can’t help wondering if there’s a reason for that
PRICE 4K, £1,750 (£2,100 inc VAT) from razer.com
Razer has made its name by producing slim and sleek gaming laptops, and the Razer Blade Stealth 13 is slimmest and sleekest of them all. At 15.3mm thin from front to back, and weighing 1.48kg, this is a laptop you can throw into the bag without a second thought. While that’s true of all ultraportables, here you can knock up a sales report on the way to work and enjoy a spot of
Doom Eternal on the way back.
That’s because Razer finds room inside for a GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics chip, and a glance at the
Metro: Last Light graph opposite show its benefits compared to integrated graphics (it’s also a chunk faster than the GeForce GTX 1650 in last year’s edition of the Stealth 13).
As with all Razer laptops, the Stealth 13 is a minimalist, smartlooking thing, albeit only available in matte black; also note the logo is subtly stencilled on the lid rather than backlit in green as it is on other Razer machines. The laptop’s lid and sides are flat and sharp-edged, while even the un de rs ide is tidily finished in the same matte-black aluminium. A couple of rubber strips run the full width of the chassis at the front and the rear, with two grilles for the system’s fans to suck in cool air.
In keeping with the simple aesthetic, connectivity is limited, although the Stealth 13 is more practical than most. There’s one USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port on the left edge and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port on the right, plus a pair of USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 ports for legacy peripherals on either side. If you use wired headphones, note the 3.5mm jack on the left, but I suspect that most people will take advantage of the Bluetooth 5 support – wireless network connectivity stretches to the Wi-Fi 6 standard.
“With the Stealth 13, you can knock up a sales report on the way to work and enjoy a spot of Doom
Eternal on the way back”
Speed test
In other ways, the Stealth 13 is less advanced. All three models come with the quad-core Intel Core i7-1065G7, a chip that’s far from the fastest in Intel’s current mobile range, and they all include 16GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD. There are other “Stealth 13” options on the Razer website, but these are last year’s models.
The CPU and RAM configuration goes a long way to explaining why the
Stealth’s performance is similar to last year’s model in CPU benchmarks and our in-house 4K tests, which focus on image and video conversion rather than gaming.
The GTX 1650 Ti delivers a big boost in games, with the Stealth 13 earning a big lead over “normal” ultraportables in real-world games and synthetic graphics tests alike. For instance, it scored 152fps in the off-screen 1080p GFXBench Car Chase test, compared to 65fps for the Dell XPS 13 ( see issue 313, p83). It was a similar story in Dirt: Showdown, with 107fps at 720p while the Dell spluttered to 58fps.
I also played a few AAA titles on the Stealth. It has enough juice to return 60fps at 1080p without having to knock down quality settings to medium or low. It will struggle at 4K, but even if you choose this screen option there’s no need to play at its top resolution: you see little benefit over 1080p at normal viewing distances on a 13.3in screen.
Alas, battery life from the 53.1Wh unit is disappointing. Even with the Battery Saver profile selected and the display refresh rate dropped to 40Hz, it only lasted 5hrs 13mins in our video-rundown test.
Display choice
With the same core components in all three models of the new Stealth 13,