Razer Book 13
Razer wants you to hit the books with its first work-focused Ultrabook.
While we’ve often considered the Blade Stealth 13 to be Razer’s productivity-focused laptop, it’s always been offered with a discreet gaming-capable GPU, which was an unnecessary expense for anyone looking exclusively for a work laptop. But Razer is finally branching out into the ‘strictly business’ space with the new Book 13 line by ditching the discrete GPU and slashing the price. It’s a solid move, but with Apple and Dell both offering price cuts on their Ultrabook offerings this year, the Book 13’s starting price of $2,199 isn’t as competitive as we’d hoped.
For that starting price you’ll get a non-touch 13.4-inch 16-by-10 display at FullHD+ 60Hz, an Intel Core i5-1135G7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, which is a couple of hundred dollars less than Dell’s XPS 13, but a few hundred more than a similarly specced MacBook Air. If you want the more powerful Intel Core i7-1165G7 under the hood and touchscreen capabilities you’re lookin at $2,999, while the top of the line UHD+ display will cost you $3,799.
The 11th generation Intel processors offer pretty standard generational performance bumps over last year’s ultrabooks, so both these devices will be more than capable of tackling demanding workloads. There are still some 10th generation laptop chips that’ll outperform these processors on premium gaming laptops, but the difference isn’t that big and the 11th Gen chips use a lot less power.
While it might rely on an integrated GPU, the Razer Book 13 managed to snag one of Intel’s Iris Xe processors on both the i5 and i7 units. As we’ve discussed in earlier reviews, the Iris Xe actually holds its own when it comes to gaming. The device is capable of getting playable (30fps+) averages on The Division 2, Total War Saga: Troy, F1 2020, and Sid Meier’s Civilization VI when running at FullHD+ resolutions on low graphic settings.
The keyboard is a little more compact than we’d like and while the keys had a good level of resistance, they are slightly too small and skew to the right.
In our testing we got seven hours and 40 minutes in PCMark 10’s Work battery benchmark and nine hours and 41 minutes in 1080p movie playback, which is pretty good if you compare it to devices from last year. It’s just hard to think of 10 hours as good battery life now that Apple’s MacBooks get close to double that while outperforming anything we’ve seen from Intel so far in 2021.
A great first crack from Razer, but the Book 13 lacks bonus features to put it ahead of the competition.
Joel Burgess