Razer Blade Stealth review: A premium ultrabook that you can afford

This is what happens when Razer decides to make an ultrabook

So Razer now has an ultrabook. Suffice to say, the tech gods didn’t tell us that this was coming. And when we say ultrabook, a term we’re more used to associating with brands like Apple, Dell, and even ASUS, we mean it in every sense of the word. So yes, the Razer Blade Stealth is truly a compact, ultra-portable notebook, with a 12.5-inch display, a low-power 15 watt Intel Core i7-6500U processor, and no discrete mobile GPU. Oh, and it’s only 13.1mm at its thickest and weighs just 1.25kg.

Having said that, the Razer Blade Stealth still has another surprise up its sleeve. It may be Razer’s first ever ultrabook, but we’d be fools to believe that Razer had actually made a product you couldn’t actually game on. You’ll be able to game to your hearts content once you plug in the Razer Core external graphics enclosure, which can house cards as powerful as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X.

Unfortunately, Razer remains tight-lipped with regard to the local price and availability of the Razer Core, so our review will focus primarily on how the Razer Blade Stealth performs as an ultrabook. And make no mistake, dock or no dock, Razer fully intends to take the fight to the likes of the Dell XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Air.

Hardware

Razer may be best known for its fancy, illuminated peripherals – can we cram rainbow lights on everything? – but the company has also been making gaming notebooks for a while now. Since the first 17-inch Razer Blade was released in 2012, the company has trotted out the Razer Blade Pro, and also debuted more portable 14-inch versions of the original Blade notebook. Over the past few years, it has continued to update the Razer Blade each year with new features like a 4K touchscreen display, the latest graphics engines, and more recently, the sixth-generation Intel Skylake processors.

But the thing tying all these different Razer notebooks together – other than their uncomfortably high price – has been the fact that they’re all intended to provide an all-in-one gaming experience with powerful mobile processors and discrete GPUs. The Razer Blade Stealth changes things on both fronts. The company is making no bones about the fact that it thinks its base hardware configuration is quite competitive, and for what it’s worth, we’re rather inclined to agree. After all, it’s not too common to find an ultrabook with an Intel Core i7-6500U processor (2.5GHz, 4MB cache) as its baseline CPU that starts off at a supremely palatable S$1,499.

There are actually four different configurations available. You start off with a 2,560 x 1,440-pixel IGZO touchscreen panel, 8GB of dual-channel 1,866MHz LPDDR3 RAM, and a Samsung 128GB PCIe NVMe SSD, but our review unit was the middle-of-the-pack-model, which comes with a larger 256GB drive.

For those of you hoping for something more cutting-edge, there are two other higher-end models that come with 3,840 x 2,160-pixel IGZO touchscreen displays – these support 100% of the Adobe RGB color space – and either a 256GB or 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD.

We’ve included a table with the various setups and prices for easier reference. The CPU and RAM configurations remain unchanged throughout, and it is only the display and storage capacity that varies.

That’s all nice and well, but when you consider that the aforementioned Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Air fall a bit short of the Razer Blade Stealth in the sub-S$2,000 price bracket, it looks like Razer may just have hit a price-to-performance sweet spot. We’ll let the following table do the talking.

Of course, Razer is also making certain assumptions, for instance that its customers will prioritize a higher resolution display over, say, the MacBook Air’s larger 256GB SSD. But given how dated even 1080p displays look to our eyes, we’re not going to correct Razer on this one.

Design & Features

We’ll say this about the Razer Blade Stealth – for a notebook with a 12.5-inch display, it feels more solidly built than you might expect. For starters, it’s constructed entirely out of CNC-milled aircraft-grade aluminum, which successfully conveys a feeling of premium quality and ensures that there’s zero flex to the keyboard. You can even open the lid single-handedly without having to hold the notebook down with your other hand, which should tell you just how solid the base is.

There’s also no forgetting the gorgeous matte black finish that gives the notebook its stealthy look, until you activate the Chroma-illuminated keyboard that is. Black is really, well, the new black, and we wouldn’t want for the Blade Stealth to come in any other color. It’s also a Razer product, so it’s not like there was any real possibility of that happening in the first place.

However, while not quite a grease magnet, the notebook did pick up some blemishes in a short period of time, and the black lid will show off dust or other stains rather clearly. If you have sweaty palms or have your hands perpetually in a bag of chips, maybe don’t touch the notebook before wiping them down.

Then there’s Razer’s signature triple-headed snake logo on the lid itself. The logo glows a bright green when the notebook is powered on, but there’s the option to turn the lights off in Razer’s Synapse software, perhaps for when you want to appear a little less obnoxious. With that said, the logo is still quite striking – it is bright green after all – even with the LEDs powered off. For better or for worse, it’s probably the most attention-grabbing aspect of the Blade Stealth’s minimalist design. It also sports a glossy finish, which may appear cheaply done to some (now that we think about it, it looks a bit like someone slapped a sticker on the lid) but that’s really a matter of personal opinion.

The astute among you will also have noticed that it’s a little on the large side for a notebook with a 12.5-inch display. It measures 321 x 206 x 13.1mm, which is bigger than the Dell XPS 13’s ultra-compact 304 x 200 x 15mm frame. That’s largely due to the large bezels around the display and Razer’s desire to include a full-sized Chroma keyboard. As it turns out, the thick bezels, which can look a bit dated on an otherwise sleek notebook, are there for a reason.

According to Razer, it decided to pick function over form when selecting a display for the Blade Stealth. This means that instead of focusing on shrinking the bezel like Dell did with its InfinityEdge displays, Razer wanted the freedom to implement a 4K display that covers 100% of the Adobe RGB color space (in simplified terms, this is the range of colors that a monitor or other device can display). That wasn’t the end of the Dell comparisons however, and Razer went on to point out that the 3,200 x 1,800-pixel display on the XPS 13 can only display 72% of the Adobe RGB color space.

But those are all abstract figures, and it still doesn’t quite explain why Razer couldn’t implement thinner bezels. Would a 4K display not fit in there? Ultimately, we think it may have something to do with engineering costs and the need to keep the Blade Stealth affordable. For what it’s worth, we’ve used both machines, and there didn’t appear to be any significant difference between the displays. Granted, we didn’t get the chance to place them side by side for comparisons, but the key takeaway is that Razer’s screen didn’t take our breath away with eye-popping colors or anything like that (the 4K display may prove more impressive, but we didn’t get to see it). Furthermore, despite the ultra-thin bezels on the XPS 13, we didn’t feel like the image quality was lacking in any way.

Still, don’t get us wrong. We’re not saying that the Razer Blade Stealth has a bad display (quite the contrary in fact). Our review unit came with a 2,560 x 1,440-pixel IGZO touchscreen panel, which is actually fairly bright and vibrant, with really deep blacks. Viewing angles were also excellent, and we were able to continue to watch Daredevil even while sitting at quite a large off angle. The display took to walls of black-on-white text and National Geographic photo galleries with gusto, and there’s little to complain about. Nevertheless, we feel the need to make an obligatory note about screen reflection – this is a glossy display, so yes, you might need to turn up the brightness to mitigate reflections.

Is there anything special about this IGZO display, you ask? In a nutshell, IGZO theoretically enables higher resolution displays, lower power consumption, and higher refresh rates. It is also not a panel type like IPS or OLED. Instead, it is a backplane technology – the materials and designs used for the thin-film transistors that turn individual pixels on and off – comprising a transparent, semiconducting compound that uses Indium Gallium Zinc oxide as the semiconductor in place of amorphous silicon (a-Si). IGZO transistors are smaller than their counterparts that use a-Si, so Razer has been able to easily scale up the display resolution and squeeze more pixels in. The smaller size also means that the layer of IGZO transistors doesn’t block as much of the backlight as a-Si would for the same pixel densities, which means that lower brightness levels, and hence less power, is required for a certain output. Finally, the higher electron mobility of these transistors also theoretically enables higher refresh rates and faster pixel switching, but the Blade Stealth still has a regular 60Hz display.

The Blade Stealth uses a Killer Wireless-AC 1535 module, which offers a maximum throughput of up to 867Mbps over two spatial streams. But the best part is that it supports MU-MIMO, although you'll still need a compatible router and other MU-MIMO devices to take full advantage of the benefits (MU-MIMO lets the router serve multiple devices all at once, which translates into shorter wait times).

And now for the port connectivity options, which is what really makes the Blade Stealth so special. The Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port is located on the left edge, alongside a green-colored USB 3.0 port and 3.5mm audio jack. The Thunderbolt 3 also doubles as the charging port, and it’s where you would plug in the Razer Core dock if and when you decide to get one when it becomes available. This is also the first notebook and dock pairing to support AMD’s XConnect, a technology that allows you to switch between discrete and integrated graphics on-the-go, and even add or remove an external graphics card without needing to reboot the notebook.

A second USB 3.0 port and full-sized HDMI port are located on the other side. We like how Razer has managed to include the HDMI port, because it could just as easily have dispensed with it since notebook has a Thunderbolt 3 port that supports video output over DVI, HDMI, and VGA (via adapters) anyway.

The speakers are the final feather in the cap of the Razer Blade Stealth. Even though this is ostensibly a 12.5-inch notebook, Razer has managed to cram good-sized ones on either side of the keyboard. Upward-facing speakers have the best possible orientation, so your tunes or movies don’t end up blasting into the table. However, speaker performance was quite a mixed bag. While they could go fairly loud and managed not to sound too thin or harsh, clarity was a bit lacking and there was some distortion at the high frequencies even with the volume slider set in the middle.

Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

The Chroma keyboard deserves its own section because of the sheer number of things you can do with it. But ironically enough, the keyboard is simultaneously one of the best, and also one of the weakest aspects of the Razer Blade Stealth.

For one, key travel feels awfully shallow, even for an ultrabook of this size. Furthermore, even the detachable keyboards of the HP Elite x2 1012 G1 and Microsoft Surface Pro 4 felt like they had greater depth to them. The chiclet keys are also set so close to the surface that it became difficult to differentiate between individual keys while touch typing, which resulted in a fair bit of typographical errors. We’re thankful for the full-sized keyboard, but the combination of shallow key travel and flat keys means that it may require a bit of getting used to. If you intend to do a lot of typing on your notebook, this is something to take note of.

But now on to the good stuff. The Razer Blade Stealth is the first notebook to support per-key RGB illumination. This means that you can customize what color every single key glows, or how it dazzles, flashes, and pops, should you feel so inclined. If that sounds a bit excessive, that’s because it is. And it doesn’t matter that probably only a few folks will take the time to paint their own personalized rainbow – we simply relish the fact that the option is there.

To start matters off, opening up Razer’s Synapse software gives access to a few basic options, like the ability switch between custom profiles that you downloaded from the Chroma Workshop or created on your own. For some quick effects, you can take your pick of six different illumination modes, including things like spectrum cycling, reactive, breathing, ripple, and wave. Wave is our favorite if we may say so – with the lights off, the keyboard transforms into a veritable Bifrost.

There’s also the option to disable the Razer logo lighting on the lid, and set the brightness levels for when the notebook is powered or running off its battery. It goes without saying that all these fancy lights are a drain on the battery, so you’d do best to turn them down (or off) if you want to conserve some juice. Alternatively, if you absolutely must have some illumination (because the night is dark and full of terrors), Razer says that setting the keyboard to a solid red, green, or blue color will help save battery as well.

But click on the Chroma configurator option, and that’s where the fun begins. The user interface can look a little overwhelming at first, but Razer has helped to smooth things over with certain key presets for different game genres, among them FPS, MOBA, and RTS. These settings group the keys into clusters most likely used by the different genres. For instance, the FPS preset singles out the WASD cluster, the R key, and numbers 1 through 5 for customization, while the rest of the keyboard is lumped together as one huge cluster.

If you’d like to create your own effects, there’s a list of pre-defined clusters ready to allow you to quickly select things like the arrow or number keys. But if you’re shooting for something outlandish or quirky, you can select individual keys and add effects to them in the Effects Layers panel.

This panel stacks various lighting effects as layers, with the topmost layer taking priority over layers on the bottom. Here’s a shot of our own settings, modeled after the FPS preset. The WASD cluster, R key, and select number keys all have their own static color, while the rest of the keyboard is set to cycle through the entire color spectrum. In this case, the three static layers sit on top of the spectrum cycling layer because if the order was reversed, the whole keyboard would simply be set to spectrum cycling.

Each effect also comes with its own control panel. The options for static colors are simple, just pick something from the color palette and you’re done. But when it comes to the settings for the wave effect, you have access to an array of mind-boggling options like width (how wide the wave is), angle (the direction the wave is flowing in), and the colors that the wave “stops”, or crests, at.

Seriously, unless you’re a staid utilitarian, what’s not to like?

Performance Benchmarks

We tested the Razer Blade Stealth with our usual suite of ultrabook benchmarks. Even though it could be considered a gaming product, we omitted additional tests that we run on gaming systems because without the Razer Core dock, the Blade Stealth is a bona fide ultrabook. For comparisons, we included the two competitors that Razer singled out – the Dell XPS 13 and the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air (early 2015 model) – in addition to a slew of ultrabooks from our most recent shootout.

Here’s a list of all the benchmarks used:

• PCMark 8
• 3DMark (2013)
• Tomb Raider
• Far Cry 2

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PCMark 8

Note: The Storage benchmarks reflected here are version 1.0 scores. We also ran version 2.0 – which has been updated to better support NVMe SSDs – and got a higher score of 4936. The Razer Blade Stealth uses an NVMe PCIe SSD.

We also ran the updated Adobe benchmark with Adobe After Effects CC installed, and obtained a score of 3166.

PCMark 8 puts test systems through a variety of workloads in order to provide an objective measure of comparison for performance in real-world applications. The Razer Blade Stealth turned out quite a strong performance in all the benchmarks, and it was the notebook that came closest to rivalling the Acer Aspire R13. It had the largest lead over the other notebooks in the Home and Work benchmarks, which are arguably the lightest benchmarks as they test a system’s ability carry out a variety of basic computational tasks and office workloads.

It was around 8 percent quicker than the Dell XPS 13 in PCMark 8 Home, and also had a similar lead in the Work benchmark. And while the MacBook Air may look like the worst performer, bear in mind that this is 2015’s configuration. Apple has since updated it with 8GB of RAM, which should help it in tasks that consume more memory, like the Adobe applications benchmark.

The Blade Stealth didn’t do quite as well in the Storage benchmark, but that was probably due to the fact that version 1.0 of the benchmark doesn’t quite take into account the unique behavior of NVMe drives. As we noted in our review of the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, an NVMe drive doesn’t automatically translate into faster performance because they run on an entirely new software stack. In a nutshell, the entire process works differently from AHCI drives, and certain new implementations can end up leading to reduced performance in the benchmark. The Dell XPS 13 uses an NVMe SSD as well, and it ended up performing very similarly to the Razer Blade Stealth.

With that said, Razer’s ultrabook sports near identical specifications as the other ultrabooks here. Other than the Apple MacBook Air, all the notebooks have the same Intel Core i7-6500U processor and 8GB of RAM. So while the numbers may look rather different on paper, you’re not likely to notice any glaring differences in actual use.

Ultimately, the Razer Blade Stealth proved more than adequate at handling the demands of everyday computing. We’re in the habit of opening an inordinate amount of tabs in Google Chrome, and the Blade Stealth handled everything without a hitch. At the same time, we also launched multiple programs, including things like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Adobe Photoshop CS6 and After Effects CC. Even then, the notebook remained responsive and application switching was fluid with no delays.

3DMark (2013)

This may be a Razer notebook, but it still lacks any discrete mobile GPU and instead relies on an Intel HD Graphics 520 iGPU for graphics processing. This means that it’s not going to be any better at running games than the other notebooks with the same iGPU.

Unsurprisingly, its performance was very similar to the other ultrabooks, although it did end up behind its competitors. In both 3DMark Fire Strike and Cloud Gate, it was around 5 percent slower than the Acer Aspire R13, which was among the top performers among the notebooks equipped with the Intel HD Graphics 520.

Strangely enough, the Apple MacBook Air’s Intel HD Graphics 6000 outdid everything else in Fire Strike, but that was only by a small margin, and it ended up falling behind in Cloud Gate, where it was around 5 percent slower than the Razer Blade Stealth. All in all, there was little to differentiate the Intel HD Graphics 520-equipped notebooks here.

Far Cry 2

The Razer Blade Stealth managed to edge out the other ultrabooks in Far Cry 2. But as in 3DMark, because most of them share the same iGPU, they all ended up within a few frames of each other. At Medium settings, the Razer ultrabook was around 9 percent faster than the slowest Intel HD Graphics 520 notebook, the Lenovo Yoga 900.

Tomb Raider

Razer’s ultrabook managed the same in Tomb Raider, where it inched to a small lead over the HP Envy, which had the next best performance. At High settings, it was just over 12% faster than 2015’s Apple MacBook Air, and around 5% quicker than the Dell XPS 13.

However, it’s still the case that none of the tested notebooks were able to output enough frames to allow for a smooth, playable experience, so Tomb Raider is better taken as a relative measure of graphics performance rather than an indication of gaming prowess.

Battery Life & Power Consumption

Unfortunately, battery life is one of the Razer Blade Stealth’s weaknesses. In PCMark Home’s built-in battery life test, the Blade Stealth lasted only 197 minutes (with the Chroma keyboard turned off too), behind even the HP Envy, which had a similar-sized 45Wh battery. On the other hand, the MacBook Air continued its class-leading performance with an impressive 323 minutes of battery life, beating out even the Lenovo Yoga 900, which had a larger 66Wh battery versus the Air’s 54Wh pack.

When it came to general use, the battery level on the Razer ultrabook was down to 45% after slightly over three hours of light web surfing at 40 percent brightness. It takes slightly over 2 and a half hours to recharge over the Thunderbolt 3 port, which also feels a bit on the slow side. The Blade Stealth may be intended to be an ultra-portable notebook, but its battery performance casts some doubt on that status.

Unsurprisingly, the HP Envy is also slightly more power efficient than the Razer Blade Stealth. However, the Blade Stealth actually only consumes slightly more power than the Acer and Dell notebooks, and it looks like the pair’s larger batteries helped them last longer.

Portability

Our portability index takes into account battery life, weight, and volume to provide a measure of how easy a notebook is to carry around relative to other compared systems. The higher the figure the better, and the Razer Blade Stealth came in just behind its two main rivals, the Apple MacBook Air and the Dell XPS 13. Razer has done a good job in making the notebook quite compact and slim, but it was ultimately dragged down by its subpar battery life.

Given that portability – and consequently the ability to work untethered to a power point – is a key factor in choosing an ultrabook, the Blade Stealth’s less-than impressive battery life may be a deal breaker for some. Again, it depends on your usage habits. Battery life is not abysmal, and may very well be enough for most users, but those who demand truly outstanding battery life will come away disappointed.

A portable ultrabook for Razer fans, and the occasional leprechaun

All in all, the Razer Blade Stealth may appeal the most to existing Razer fans. It draws on the design heritage of previous Blade notebooks, which have been reasonably attractive machines in their own right, and Razer has managed to blend minimalism quite effectively with the Chroma keyboard. So while this means that it can reasonably appeal to folks that aren’t already enamored with the Razer brand, we suspect that the Razer logo on the lid may not be every one’s cup of tea.

That aside, it’s important to remember that the Blade Stealth isn’t exactly a standalone ultrabook like the other models we’ve compared it with. While it works perfectly fine on its own, its trump card is still the fact that it will work out-of-the-box with the Razer Core external graphics enclosure. Furthermore, although the Core dock can theoretically be used to boost the performance of any laptop with a Thunderbolt 3 port – this still requires work on the manufacturer’s part to enable support for external graphics – there’s nothing quite like getting a laptop that matches the aesthetics of the dock perfectly.

In fact, the Razer Blade Stealth may be better characterized as one half of a two-part gaming system. The Core dock stays put on your desk, while the notebook serves your mobile computing needs and lets you hook it up to the dock for a proper gaming experience.

With that said, the Razer Blade Stealth goes on sale locally from 3 May, even though Razer has still not released any information about the local pricing or availability of the Core dock. That says a lot about how Razer is intending to market the Blade Stealth. Even if it’s missing its other half, it’s an optional half, and Razer fully intends for the Blade Stealth to stand on its own and take on the ultrabook market.

As we mentioned before, Razer is doing this with a combination of attractive pricing and competitive specifications. We’ve reproduced the pricing table from earlier for easier reference here.

Our review unit is the S$1,799 model, and it sits at something like a price-to-performance sweet spot. For an extra S$300 over the base model, you get a larger 256GB PCIe SSD, and a processor, RAM, and display configuration that quite handily rivals its competitors at the same price point. You even get a touchscreen display, which is a really nice bonus.

And then there’s that Chroma keyboard, which we simply love. Nevertheless, it’s entirely possible that the gratuitous, bordering on frivolous, lighting could very well be the one thing that turns people off an otherwise great notebook. There are also other drawbacks, like the shallow key travel distance that might make it a poor choice for anyone who is going to be doing a lot of typing, and the slightly below average battery life.

These weaknesses temper what was a pleasant overall experience with the notebook. The Razer Blade Stealth is a good notebook, but it ultimately doesn’t feel quite as refined as products like the Dell XPS 13. We’d recommend it, but with a few caveats attached. So if you’re looking for an affordable, high-performing product with a bit of spunk, the Razer Blade Stealth is right up your alley. More so if you dig the idea that the notebook can be transformed into a bonafide gaming machine if you don't mind spending more on the optional Core dock (when it's made available) and the graphics card to match your needs.  It is truly a strong alternative to many of its competitors, but if you want a more serious, polished ultrabook and have the budget for it, you might be better off looking elsewhere.

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