- You know what there needs to be more of
premium looking and feeling Windows laptops.
Have gone into like a Best Buy or any other
electronic store and just wandered into
their Windows laptop section?
The slight glimmer of metal here and there
but mostly cheap looking plastic devices
that are either clunky or just feel overpriced.
And, that's not to say that there isn't some
that have good internal hardware at least,
but if you want something with decent power
but yet also looks like it wasn't styled by
a four year old with a crayon you're pretty limited.
Now, if you want something that checks all those boxes
I think I found a few options.
One of them is the Razer Blade Stealth.
(funky music)
Now, Razer sent me their Razer Blade Stealth
and let's get it out of the way now.
I'm in no way being paid by them nor did I
guarantee any type of review, et cetera.
I also even have to give it back.
So, there's that.
But, I have been using it at local cafes
to do my writing and my research.
And, I have to say there has not been one day
that I've done that that someone hasn't,
a stranger, has not come up to me and gone,
"That's a cool looking laptop."
And you know what, it is a cool looking laptop.
It does still feature that green light up
snake logo that all Razer laptops have
that is a bit gamerish, to me, if we're honest.
But, there's something about that black aluminum
body in such a small form factor that just looks sexy.
It only weighs 2.8 pounds.
It has a 12.5 inch screen, which also makes it
pretty light and compact.
That screen, by the way, has an optional 4K resolution
touch screen, which is what I have here
that is pretty damn crisp and something that is
pretty hard to find on laptops let alone UltraBooks.
Or, you can also have the 2.5K base non-touch screen option
to save a decent chunk of money.
The keyboard also is beautiful.
It has Razer's Chroma feature that allows you to
select from a variety of different color combinations
like the wave, static colors, which you could chose
any color of the rainbow, spectrum cycling,
which essentially goes through every color
in the rainbow, fire, et cetera.
It's all super fun and unique and always turns heads.
But, this keyboard is actually beautiful
in a non-aesthetic way.
It has a fantastic clickiness to it
that feels identical to its bigger brother
the Razer Blade, and it's just great for typing.
Something about the travel in the keys,
their responsiveness it's hard to describe.
It's just satisfying unlike any other keyboard I've used.
Moving down to the track pad, this is usually
the part where I say how much I hate Windows track pads
and coming from a Mac track pad to a Windows track pad
is really hard to do.
I don't know why that is.
They just aren't very accurate, they kind of suck.
I end up using a USB mouse pretty much every time.
With the Stealth, however, it actually has
a decent track pad, again for Windows, but it's pretty good.
Firstly, it has no physical buttons, which my,
more expensive, Razer Blade still has
that annoys me slightly, and yet it still
has a clickable track pad.
The combo of these two things alone makes it
so much nicer to use.
You can right click by pushing down with
two fingers instead of one.
You can click anywhere on the track pad
to select things.
You can use gestures to make windows come up,
all that fun stuff.
It's just so much better.
It still isn't the most precise track pad
of which I've never found a Windows computer
that has one, so there's that.
But, it's a better track pad than most,
including my more expensive Razer Blade
that I'm in no way jealous about, at all.
Now, performance-wise it's not going to work
for any crazy gaming, like most UltraBooks,
laptops that are this thin and light.
The emphasis more is on portability.
Now, it can run anything else you throw at it
that isn't hardcore games, no problem,
thanks to the decent chunk of RAM,
the latest Intel Kaby Lake Processors,
and the Intel HD 620 integrated GPU.
But, if you want a portable gaming machine
you'd be best to look elsewhere.
That is, unless you don't mind sitting
still for your gaming.
The Razor Blade Stealth on Razer's site
is pretty obviously paired with another
piece of hardware that they are famous for,
the Razer Core.
The Core, if you aren't familiar with my
how-to-use an external EGPU video I did with it,
which you can click the link below for.
It's essentially a housing that you can place
a full size desktop GPU in, plug it in
via Thunderbolt and the laptop can use
the GPU as if it was internally installed
making it way more powerful in the graphics department.
To demonstrate what I mean I bought the NVIDIA
1080Ti new crazy GPU and put it into the Core
and then plugged it and ran a few benchmarks
and here's what happened.
In the Firestrike 3D mark test the Blade Stealth
by itself got a paltry score of 456,
with the Core and the GTX 1080Ti in it
it scored a pretty hefty 11,208.
While rendering out footage in Premiere
the Razor Blade Stealth did it in about 42 minutes
to render a four minute 4.6K footage out at
Youtube's preset of 4K.
With the Core and that 1080Ti it took 18 minutes
to render the same footage.
As you can see from the physics test in FireStrike
benchmark, which is mainly a CPU intensive thing
the Kaby Lake Dual Core Processors handled that just fine.
But, the graphics intensive parts of the test,
which are definitely not meant for an UltraBook
it gets creamed.
With the addition of the Core however,
pretty respectable frame rates that are actually
comparable to my Razor Blade that runs pretty much
any game I've tried to play with no problem.
The Core does cost an extra $500, though.
400 if you buy it with the Stealth, because
you can get an extra $100 off for that.
But, then you also have to by the graphics card.
Now, you can get a nine series card around the web
for maybe about $200 depending on the card
all the way up to $700 if you plan to buy
something like this 1080Ti graphics card
that was just announced.
The battery life is definitely better than
the Razer Blade, which makes a lot of sense
considering the lack of a dedicated GPU
like the 1060 that it's in the Blade,
but it lasted me about a good six and a half hours or so
which is better than about the four and a half
that I usually get with the Blade, which isn't bad.
Might even be slightly better than the HP Spectre
according to a lot of places online,
and not as good, quite, as the Dell XPS 13.
And, it's not even fair to mention MacBooks
because they're battery life is just
kind of always crazy.
As far as pricing is concerned the least expensive
configuration for the laptop comes with an i5 processor,
eight gigs of RAM, 2.5K non-touch screen display,
128 gigs of storage and it cost 899, which is
super cheap for a laptop that looks and feels
like it costs a lot more.
The other two models available at the moment
each have the Kaby lake i7 processor, 4K touchscreen
displays, 16 gigs of RAM, and are available
in 512 gigs, or one terabyte of storage,
which is 1500 and 1900 respectively.
Now, those prices are all sort of right on par
with the other really cool premium UltraBooks
in this category: the HP Spectre, for example,
and the Dell XPS 13.
Now, each of those laptops also kind of have
some things that maybe the Blade Stealth doesn't.
The Spectre has the two-in-one kind of format
and it also has a pen, and it's also a premium feeling
laptop in it's own right.
The Dell XPS 13 has that really nice Infinity Edge
screen that's just really sexy when you see it.
But regardless neither of them quite feel
as premium and as well built and as solid
as say the Blade Stealth.
And, on top of that, there's always that
uniqueness factor too, that people have to
always ask you, "What laptop company is that?"
And, the addition of the Core is a unique
differentiator, but you could potentially
go find a cheaper EGPU and use it with the XPS
or the Spectre, for example, because they both
have Thunderbolt and that's a big pre-requisite
for using a EGPU.
But, in doing that you need to expect that
there will be at least a few headaches
with trying to get them to work since
they are not supported by those manufacturers
and they're not really meant to be used with an EGPU.
Which makes the real benefit of the Core and the Stealth
combo the fact that they are properly supported
by the manufacturer and so you will always
be able to get them to work and call them if you can't.
Not to mention, the core is kind of
just as sexy as the Stealth.
Now, I love the Stealth, honestly, but I need
to edit footage everywhere, planes,
trains, random countries.
And, to carry around that Core and an external monitor
as well, because you need an external monitor
for the graphics card to work properly
for the most part, it's just not really feasible for me.
So, the bigger brother, normal Blade, between the two
is probably a better option for me.
When you want a really nice feeling premium
UltraBook that is easy to carry around,
has a great keyboard, screen, is really snappy
at doing your everyday stuff, even maybe just
not so much at gaming, that's fine,
but then also has that option for you to
then sit it down, plug in a Core and a monitor
and you can use it for your gaming experience
then I would highly recommend at least putting
the Stealth on your list of options to check out.
(funky music)