The Razer Blade Stealth Review: Razer Takes On The Ultrabook
by Brett Howse on March 29, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Razer
- Skylake
- Razer Blade Stealth
- eGFX
- Razer Core
- Skylake-U
Design
From a distance, you would be hard pressed to tell the Razer Blade Stealth apart from the Razer Blade 14, if not for the fact that it’s a bit smaller. The Stealth is made out of the same CNC aluminum shell, with a matte black finish. The finish looks great, but it’s a bit of a fingerprint magnet, so keep a cloth handy. The top of the lid has Razer logo, which is really the one thing that moves away from the subtle look that the rest of the laptop has. With the matte black finish, and clean lines, the Stealth is as elegant as any Ultrabook around.
The left side has the Thunderbotl 3-enabled USB-C port for charging and docking, as well as a single USB 3.0 port and 3.5mm jack. The right side has a full-size HDMI port and the other USB 3.0 port. Other than those, the Stealth is devoid of openings or buttons on the outside.
It’s not too often we give much time to the underside of a notebook, but Razer is one of the few companies to do this right. The cooling intakes are found here, as well as some extremely sticky feet which run the entire width of the laptop. This gives the Stealth a very solid posture when sitting on a desk, and I know this is hard to believe, but that’s not always the case with every laptop.
Razer’s unique cooling solution puts the cooling exhaust vents in the hinge between the display and back of the laptop, which is the same cooling solution they offer on the larger Blade 14. This hides the exhaust vents for a cleaner look, although it can cause some heat build-up in the hinge itself. This isn’t as big of an issue in the Stealth as it is in the Blade 14, due to the much lower thermal output of the Stealth.
Opening the lid, you see a couple of things right off the bat. First, Razer has kept the same deck mounted speakers as the Blade 14, which is nice to see since most Ultrabooks end up putting the speakers on the bottom. You also see that the display bezels are quite large, and Razer could have easily put a 13.3-inch panel into this notebook. Thin bezels seem to be something only Dell and Microsoft want to offer. The larger bezels do allow Razer to fit a good size keyboard into the chassis, in addition to the side mounted speakers, and there is also plenty of room for the generous trackpad.
The keyboard in the Razer Blade Stealth is a typical Ultrabook keyboard, with shallow travel due to the limited thickness of the device. Anyone who is going to be writing a novel is going to want something with a bit more travel. It’s a common complaint but I understand there is only so much travel available when trying to keep the device as thin and light as possible. The resistance on the keys is decent, which helps a bit. Surprisingly, and once again likely due to Razer wanting to expand their customer base, the Razer font which is used on their other products is not on the Stealth. Instead you get a much more traditional look to the key faces. Razer’s trackpad is quite good, which a nice large smooth surface and accurate responses. The trackpad leverages Synaptics software for multi-touch.
Likely the most interesting aspect of the keyboard though is the backlighting. The Stealth is the first laptop to offer per-key RGB backlighting, and Razer uses their Chroma branding to distinguish this. This means you can change the key lighting to any of 16.7 million colors (red green blue, 256 levels per color) and the Razer Synapse software gives full customizability to this. There are several patterns you can choose from, including spectrum cycling to shift among all of the colors, breathing, wave, ripple, or just static. It also lets Razer do some funky things like being able to change the function key lighting when the function key is pressed. It’s a great effect, and being able to change the backlighting lets you customize the laptop to your own tastes, and considering the pricing on the laptop it’s a nice addition.
The design of the Stealth is pure Razer, and they’ve done a great job taking the look and feel of their larger laptops and scaling it down to the Ultrabook form factor. The CNC aluminum shell is solid, and the build quality is very nice. The entire package is just 13.1 mm or 0.52” thick, and weighs 1.25 kg or 2.75 lbs.
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nerd1 - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
Xps13 can be bought around 799 nowadaysBrokenCrayons - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
“For Gamers. By Gamers.”Interplay, is that you in there? What happened to Van Buren?
retrospooty - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
I never really got the need for a "gaming notebook". Gaming is far better, faster and cheaper on a desktop. Do alot of people really have the need to game when mobile? I would personally think most people, when out and about are doing whatever task they are out and about for, not worrying about gaming until they get home and have time for it. Is it just me? I guess if you travelled for work alot and wound up with extra time, but that screams niche market.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
Most mobile gaming I see happens on a phone and not on a laptop. There are most certainly a lot of people who spend time away from home due to work that might benefit from a gaming laptop, but this particular laptop isn't a gaming box without the not-so-mobile Razer Core and other external bits like a monitor, full sized keyboard, and mouse. The benefit in this to those sorts of people is that they only need to worry about one computer as opposed to a laptop and desktop. The Stealth's potential of using an external, desktop GPU offers some flexibility at an added cost. So yes, there's a point and yes its a niche market.The "but" in all of this is that the niche market might be larger than you think. People with no legitimate need for the capabilities the Stealth + Razer Core offers might still purchase such a setup or some other gaming laptop in order to have those capabilities. The expense could very well do nothing but address a psychological need that exists without reason purely inside the mind of the buyer. It happens pretty frequently in automotive markets where people buy much more capability than they need in order to be prepared to drive in weather or road conditions that happen for merely a day or two out of the year. They then willingly endure the liability of their purchase the other 363 days happily. Similarly a person with no need for a gaming laptop will be able to play games in a hotel room for a couple of days a year and deal with the cost and performance penalty of their purchase the rest of the time for little to no rational reason.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
There are people like me, that have LAN gaming parties. A laptop is so much more convenient. And I can play it at the laundromat when Im doing my laundry every weekend.I also live in a 1BD apartment. Space is at a premium, there is nowhere to put a nice computer desk for a desktop.
nerd1 - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
Laptop is more convenient but you cannot play any real game on this laptop.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - link
I never understood what makes something "real" or not. Even a nearly ten year old GMA 950 can run games, some of which were flagship releases in the past. Does the age of a game make it lose it's connection with reality? Is something only "real" if it's been released in the last few months because humans can't fathom the relationship of the past to the present?DarkXale - Wednesday, April 6, 2016 - link
Depends on the definition of real.CS? It can handle.
LoL? It can handle.
DOTA2? It can handle. (Even benchmarked here at +60FPS)
WoW? It can handle.
Civilization 5/BE? It can handle.
Football Manager? It can handle.
Rocket League? It can handle.
You'd probably want to stay clear of Battlefield 4 or Witcher 3 - but at this point we're talking exceptions, not a norm.
DarkXale - Wednesday, April 6, 2016 - link
I should point out that I chose these titles since they're generally where you tend to see the most /played being done -today-.rxzlmn - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
I don't think it's that uncommon for people to have jobs which require a decent amount of travelling. The main point is that it's easily transported from A to B, not that you can use it for gaming on the route itself. If you move, especially internationally, it makes sense. If you don't have a lot of space, it makes sense. If you want to have one main computer for both work and gaming, it makes sense (as a computer for work often has to be portable, i.e. bringing it to work places, meetings, on the plane, etc).I have a solid notebook that also happens to be powerful enough to run games, and nowadays the mobile GPU/CPUs are fast enough to run most games properly. Of course not with all the bells and whistles, but I can play most stuff on full HD and somewhat medium settings just fine, and my laptop only has a midrange mobile GPU.
Apart from myself opting for all the above mentioned benefits, I would also have to spend considerably more for a gaming capable desktop and a comparable non-gaming capable laptop together.