Razer Blade Stealth Review

Having reviewed most a dozen Razer laptops in the past few years of which this is our fifth Blade Stealth, it'south always a delight to find what'due south new and what's been improved on newer iterations.

The new Razer Blade Stealth uses a new design with new hardware. All models come with an Intel Core i7-8565U processor and a thirteen.3-inch 1080p display. The base model does not include detached graphics, it packs a 256GB SATA SSD and 8GB of RAM. The graphics model, the version nosotros received to review, has GeForce MX150 discrete graphics, a 256GB PCIe SSD, and 16GB of RAM. Both variants come with 53 Wh batteries, while in some regions there's an even college-specced model with a 4K display and a 512GB SSD.

Following up to our look at Intel Whiskey Lake CPU performance, it's now time to properly bank check out the laptop nosotros used for those benchmarks. Do annotation this laptop was released towards the terminate of 2022, and then it'south readily bachelor and it's an impressive piece of hardware that's worth looking at in particular.

Pricing wise, we're looking at $1,400 for the base model, $1,600 if y'all want the MX150, and $ane,900 if you likewise want the 4K affect display. As tends to be the example with Razer laptops, it's pretty expensive.

The previous Blade Stealth looked pretty decent and improved upon the chunky older designs in many means, but this newer design steps things up some other notch. It uses a similar build to the xv-inch Razer Bract in that it's a squarer design with slimmer bezels around the display. It's at present at the betoken where the display dominates the lid expanse similar a lot of mod ultraportables. Nosotros're not at crazy screen to body ratios but even so, only the new Blade Stealth doesn't feel like in that location's wasted space effectually the screen.

Build quality has always been a killer attribute to Razer'south notebooks and that's however the case here.

The main chassis is a solid aluminium unibody with a black anodized finish, it'south simple, it feels actually sturdy and it looks fantastic. It'south a bit of a fingerprint magnet merely that'south the case with nearly blackness metal laptops.

While the overall footprint is smaller than before thanks to its slimmer bezels, it is ~1mm thicker than previous models which makes next to no difference. The key area of interest is the weight, which varies between 2.viii and 3.0 lbs depending on the model. That's not particularly light for an ultraportable in 2022 but it's not heavy either.

Looking at the ports and features, it's all standard matter for this motorcar. There'due south a Thunderbolt 3 port, a USB-C iii.1 port and ii USB 3.one Type-A ports plus a headphone jack. While there are more USB ports on this laptop than its predecessor, that's come at the expense of the full-sized HDMI port which is disappointing. To hook up a monitor you lot'll probable need some sort of HDMI or DisplayPort adapter.

The Blade Stealth besides has a basic 720p webcam in a higher place the brandish with Windows Hello support. There are speakers on either side of the keyboard that are fairly average as is the case with basically every laptop these days. The trackpad is expansive, accurate and responsive just like Razer's other trackpads. And the keyboard has a great tactile response to it, dainty and clicky for a laptop keyboard which is what I like to see. It's too not cramped and includes total sized arrow keys too as a range of handy functions mapped to the F-keys.

It wouldn't be a Razer production without some form of Chroma RGB lighting, only the new Blade Stealth includes it in a pretty limited form.

Rather than per-key RGB lighting for the keyboard similar previous Razer laptops, the Bract Stealth but has a single backlight zone that encompasses the entire keyboard. This limits the bachelor effects, but I don't remember per-fundamental RGB is all that necessary for an ultraportable and I'm sure this new single-zone design saves both space and bombardment.

The display, at least for the base and graphics models, is a 13.3-inch 1080p IPS at 60 Hz. Zip besides fancy, just your typical laptop-grade display. A key characteristic is that Razer is individually mill-calibrating every display, and they are boasting 100% sRGB coverage also, which is great news for those that want colour accuracy and decent colors for content creation.

This console is one of the better ones I've seen in laptops, boasting a dissimilarity ratio of 1300:1 and brightness up to 400 nits, which is above boilerplate in both regards. Color accuracy is proficient out of the box, besides. The white signal is perfect at 6500K and while that does autumn abroad somewhat over the greyscale range, in that location's no noticeable color tint.

Greyscale deltaEs of ii.04 are simply slightly higher than what we form every bit 'very practiced', while a saturation deltaE of 1.25, and a ColorChecker deltaE boilerplate of 1.55 are fantastic results. This level of accuracy is well above average for a laptop and makes it a corking display for content creators.

Performance

Let's talk about performance. We're going to focus on the Blade Stealth with discrete graphics and workloads that specifically brand apply of the GPU to see how the MX150 makes an bear upon. Nosotros already covered the performance of the Core i7-8565U in a separate review. And then if y'all're interested in how CPU-only workloads perform, or how the base model will perform in general, check out our Whiskey Lake CPU review.

As a refresher, the Blade Stealth uses the quad-core i7-8565U which is Intel'due south new loftier-end Whiskey Lake CPU built on 14nm++. Commonly this CPU is configured to employ a 15W TDP, however Razer has chosen to utilize the cTDP up country of 25W, which allows the chip to run at higher sustained clock speeds.

The rated clock speeds for the 8565U are one.eight GHz base with a iv.6 GHz single-core Turbo and a 4.1 GHz all-core Turbo, but typically the 25W version of the flake hovers around 3.i GHz during sustained non-AVX workloads.

In CPU-heavy benchmarks the 25W 8565U is up to 33 per centum faster than the 15W 8565U, so that's something to consider when comparing the Razer Bract Stealth to other 8565U laptops that apply the standard 15W configuration. You won't see 33% gains in every app, curt workloads are largely unaffected and single-thread functioning is 4 to 7 pct higher, but for long encoding tasks information technology's a significant difference.

The 25W 8565U is too nearly 15% faster than the 25W Core i7-8550U, Intel's previous Kaby Lake Refresh CPU. And that margin increases to 20% on boilerplate over the 15W 8550U, with gains upwardly to 38% in some workloads.

That could definitely justify an upgrade over the 8550U depending on the arrangement y'all previously had. And of form, if you're coming from anything dual-core, similar a Core i7-7500U or older, wait gains of 62% on average.

Now let's explore what the MX150 brings to the table...

It's crucial to annotation this is not the '1D12' variant of the GeForce MX150, rather this is the fully fledged version. Razer specifies this is a "25W" MX150 and looking at GPU-Z confirms this is a regular 1D10 model. And then that's expert news, though I wish Nvidia wouldn't exist so disruptive with their GPU names.

The MX150 comes into play in anything that's GPU accelerated, so that includes popular applications similar Adobe Premiere. Here the MX150 has a noticeable impact on return times, both with and without Lumetri color processing effects.

With Lumetri effects, return times are more than than halved and you lot can as well come across that this fully fledged MX150 is several minutes faster than the 1D12 version. Even without Lumetri effects, our return benchmark was 30% faster thanks to the discrete GPU.

Photoshop'southward Smart Sharpen filter besides benefits significantly from GPU acceleration, once again cutting processing times by more than than half. Intel's integrated GPU in their 15W processors is extremely weak, the MX150 is easily more than than twice every bit powerful and that plays out in this scenario.

CompuBench is a great criterion for testing the compute functioning of these GPUs across a range of constructed tests, and looking at one of these results for optical flow once more shows the ability of the MX150.

It's around ii.6x faster than the UHD 620 integrated GPU, and it'due south as well a decent 23% ahead of the Vega 8 GPU in AMD'due south Ryzen 5 2500U. That said, I expect the Vega ten GPU in the Ryzen 7 2700U to provide like performance to the MX150, admitting with lower CPU performance than the 8565U.

In 3DMark we also see enormous gains when comparing the MX150 to the regular Intel iGPU, it's typical to meet more than than double the performance, especially looking at graphics scores where in Time Spy, for case, the MX150 approaches existence 3x as fast.

In terms of gaming this doesn't exactly turn an ultraportable into a gaming powerhouse but it certainly makes entry-level titles playable where they previously were non. Intel'south UHD 620 is only suitable for 2nd games and other simple things, whereas the MX150 is pretty capable at playing Fortnite, for example. You tin expect 1080p, 60 FPS gaming in Fortnite using low settings.

A few other things worth mentioning regarding functioning...

The Razer Bract Stealth has 2 operation modes, balanced and depression power. Throughout this review we've used the balanced mode. When enabling the low power mode information technology limits the CPU to a TDP of around 8W, then performance is significantly reduced. That could come in handy to extend bombardment life though.

The libation is always a contentious effect with Razer laptops because they tend to run hot and loud. But this is but somewhat the example with the Blade Stealth. CPU temperatures were relatively okay, hovering around the 75C mark which isn't that hot for a laptop. Nevertheless the cooler is audible during heavy load.

My recommendation would be to use the manual fan speed control to pass up the fan speed to effectually 3000 RPM, although that depends on the atmospheric condition. When doing this I saw temperatures rise by around 7C but the laptop was much quieter and overall that was a better feel in my opinion. I recall Razer'south default fan bend is besides aggressive and it could annoy people that buy this laptop and don't realize there is a transmission fan slider.

The GeForce-equipped model comes with a 256GB Liteon CA3 PCIe NVMe SSD which performs well, peculiarly in random workloads. It doesn't have the fastest sequential performance I've seen, but this is still a fast drive and should provide a noticeable performance upgrade compared to the SATA drive in the base model.

Another important expanse for laptops is battery life, nevertheless because we haven't been benchmarking many ultraportables lately we don't have a skilful selection of battery information to compare the Blade Stealth confronting. If you want detailed bombardment life information we recommend reading other reviews. From what I have been testing, I'd describe the battery life equally higher up average for what it's worth.

Who Is It For?

The new Razer Bract Stealth offers an impressive overall package. The design is fantabulous, but that'south been complemented this time around with meridian-stop hardware for what is possible in this sort of ultraportable chassis design. Nosotros're getting the 25W version of the Core i7-8565U, and so it will outperform well-nigh other laptops that use the 15W configuration, or are stuck on Kaby Lake Refresh.

We're also getting a fully fledged MX150 detached GPU, so Razer has matched a powerful CPU with a powerful GPU for this form gene. Previous models left the GPU a lilliputian behind, with Razer pushing their Core V2 external GPU solution for those wanting to practise some gaming. This new model is not a gaming powerhouse, merely it's now suitable for Fortnite or Overwatch-type gaming without any external boxes.

The display is also impressive, delivering keen color accuracy out of the box, making it suitable for creative applications. You're also getting Thunderbolt iii plus full-sized USB, a not bad trackpad and what seems to be decent battery life. It'due south a really neat package overall.

Virtually of the concerns I take with the hardware package are pocket-size. The fan is also aggressive by default, though that can be adjusted. Full-sized HDMI has been removed. And you're only getting a 256GB SSD in the models without a 4K display, though because it'due south an M.2 bulldoze it should exist upgradeable.

The other concern for some buyers will be the price. $1,400 for the base model without discrete graphics sets a big premium. Aye, you get the 25W Core i7-8565U, but there's just 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SATA SSD. Asus offers the 15W 8565U plus 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for $1,200 in the ZenBook 14 UX433FA. And so y'all'd accept to actually want the actress CPU performance to justify spending more while also sacrificing RAM and storage capacity. The RAM in item hurts the Blade'south chances to fight off value competitors.

And so in that location's the $i,600 graphics model, the one we reviewed. In some ways I can encounter this price being justified, not a lot of systems offering a 25W quad-core plus a full MX150 GPU in this sort of class gene. And you're getting 16GB of RAM. When you consider that a lot of laptops advertised equally having an i7-8565U and MX150 will have the 15W CPU configuration and the slower 1D12 MX150, I practice think there'due south some merit in spending more money for the outright all-time performance.

Of course, if y'all require less operation, you lot may be perfectly satisfied with the MX150 1D12 and fifty-fifty, say, a previous gen i7-8550U. This combination will end up 20 to xxx percent slower than the Bract Stealth, but you lot can find like form factor laptops with that combination that are more than thirty percent cheaper.

It'due south not unusual for height-end products with the fastest hardware to offer less than optimal bang for buck; at that place's always a premium associated with getting the fastest or best products. The question is whether you're willing to pay actress, or whether you'd be satisfied with the multitude of other options on the market.

Every bit a premium ultrabook, the Razer Blade Stealth delivers once once more.