Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here
And this is the newest Razer Blade Stealth. This is running the 8th generation
CPUs from Intel, Kaby Lake-R, so it's a quad-core CPU and I did a review of the
previous version of this, the, I guess the 7th generation
Fantastic device, I feel like they had updated a lot of stuff
that people wanted, and this is just kind of revision
that's just a little bit better.
Now, I want to clarify one thing before I go too much further into this review
A lot of people think that this device is a gaming laptop
I know most of you don't, but there's a surprising number of people that are like,
"Hey! Does this thing play games?"
It is not meant to be a gaming laptop
It's made by Razer. Razer makes gaming peripherals and gaming stuff,
but this is not a dedicated gaming laptop
Not to say that it can't play games like, by itself
It can't. It's running some like non-gaming internals
But you can plug up an external GPU if you do want to play games
which I'll explain further down the line
But just to clarify, this is not a dedicated gaming laptop.
Okay, so let's talk about things that haven't changed.
The build quality hasn't changed
Nothing actually from the exterior has changed that much
The one biggest difference is that this model is the gunmetal grey version
So they still make the regular black one with the green Razer logo
and RGB lights and stuff, but this one's gunmetal grey, and I like this one more
Maybe because I've seen the black one so often
But this one's just a cleaner design to me.
The logo is more subtle and everything just looks a little more muted
The one thing that is a good thing or bad thing is that RGB's on the
keyboard that are on the regular Razer Blade Stealth
are not present on the gunmetal gray version
They only light up in white.
The keyboard, the trackpad, basically everything is exactly the same on the exterior
It's a good keyboard, good trackpad
They updated the trackpad in the previous version to use the Windows Precision drivers
which is just way better
And the screen options aren't changed
This one here is running at 3200 by 1800 screen, IGZO panel
It's not the brightest thing ever but it's fairly bright, and it has a pretty good color gamut
lt also is a touch screen if that's your thing.
If you really like the colored RGB keyboard from the black model
But you want to clean finish, like this, you can always get a skin from dbrand,
just cover it up and it'll mute the logo and protect your laptop
The ports aren't changed. There's got two USB 3.0's and HDMI and then your Thunderbolt 3.
Now this Thunderbolt 3 port is for power like you powered up through here
and also supports four lanes of PCIe
so if you connect an external GPU to this thing, it gets full bandwidth
The one thing that's a little bit different between this one
and the previous generation of gunmetal grey is that
This one's a little bit darker, so this is the other one, the earlier 2017 one
It's really hard to tell from this camera, but this new one is slightly darker than this one
You know what? There's also another difference
On the inside, the little Intel stickers, the 8th generation
one is like a quarter of the size of the old version
Now, I've seen some other eighth generation laptops that had a regular-sized sticker
So I don't know why this little one exists
I know this is really important right? You guys should be aware of all the little details
about this laptop
Okay, the internals have changed a little. The layout is just a little bit different from previous
generations. The RAM is still soldered on and the SSD is still removable,
but they've actually used a much faster drive this year
Which is nice. Now, in terms of coil whine, my unit here does not have coil whine
I have seen a lot of reports of people getting Razer Blade Stealth's with
coil whine issues. All the review units I've ever had
didn't have it so I can't really comment on it
But this one yet again does not have it. Performance is excellent
This one's running the i7 and 16 gigs of RAM
and these new Kaby Lake-R chips are quad-core CPUs that get
really fast for short bursts. They benchmarked really well. The built-in GPU is still pretty weak
You're still not gonna be able to play some amazing games on or anything
You can play some light games
But even moderately demanding games are gonna make it choke
So if you want to play games, you either get something completely different like a gaming laptop
Or you're gonna have to connect an external GPU to this thing
Thermals under load are fine and same thing with fan noise
It doesn't get super loud or anything and we connected to an external GPU
Temperatures are also good. The external GPU
handles most of the graphical stuff so the laptop stays cool
Now if this is the type of setup you want
so it's like a thin and light Ultrabook combined with a external GPU
There's a lot of companies that do this kind of thing, but I still think the best company is Razer
They were the first people to do it so they probably have a little bit more like experience with it
But the connection is rock-solid, and it's just it just works really really well,
and I'm running the first generation Core still
They have a newer version that has an updated Thunderbolt 3 controller,
and you can connect external devices that work on a different pipeline
But I mean the performance is going to be identical to the first generation, but yes
If this is what you're looking for, I cannot recommend a better setup than these two. Now
Now, it's still not a hundred percent efficient.
There's some issues with using Thunderbolt 3 GPUs, but for the most part
They're pretty good. Now, if you want to learn more about them
I've done a video that kind of details this whole process a little bit more
I'll link that below. Okay, the performance and video editing is not as good as you might expect
This is a quad-core CPU, but it's a 15 watt CPU. There are quad-core CPUs like gaming laptops
that are 45 watt CPUs
And those are just able to maintain a higher clock speed for
just longer periods of time this can hit 4 gigahertz for a little
burst and then it'll drop down to its base clock and when you're video editing
That's just not ideal. So you can get stuff done if you're working with 1080p footage
or just not video editing very frequently
Sure, it can kind of work especially with an external GPU,
but if you want something that's just more long-term
Are you working with higher res footage? Go with something like a quad core gaming laptop
Those just do much better for edits.
Okay, battery life has not changed. I'm still getting seven hours on this thing
I know with the Kaby Lake-R's, it's supposed to be slightly more efficient
I'm still getting seven hours, and I think it comes from the screen.
The IGZO panel looks nice and the colors pop
But it just uses a little more juice
It is still like, for the most part, of full day batteries
So I'm not too worried about it
If I had to nitpick on some things on, if I, I mean I do like this laptop a lot
but if it just had to be that guy that just
hated on something, it would probably be
The speaker's. They're not bad
They're like really well positioned, but they don't sound amazing
they sound very like you know, run-of-the-mill Ultrabook
There are thin and light Ultrabooks like the MacBook's that just sound amazing
And it would be really cool if a Razer could stick something like those into here
Then this thing would be like really really cool, but yeah,
not amazing speakers. The other thing is the backlighting on the function key
So like F2, F3. It also controls volume down and volume up, but in complete darkness
You can't see the secondary controls because they just don't light up,
and it doesn't bother me because I rarely work in complete darkness
But for people that require that, yeah, can't control brightness and stuff unless you know exactly
which keys do what, but that's basically it.
Those are some minor complaints about this really good laptop
They did a really good job that last revision, and it's just even better now with the 8th gen CPUs
I'm gonna talk about one last thing. It's customer support
because I talked about in my previous videos with other devices
Razer's customer support is, I would consider a pretty mediocre
They're not a laptop company, right? They were originally a peripheral company,
and they got into the laptop game
And they do a good job at it
But their customer support is lacking, and they don't have stuff like next-day support
So if you have something with your laptop some companies like Dell and HP
They'll send a technician to your house or your work
And they'll kind of try to fix it
Razer doesn't have that, you have to send it back to them
So that's a bit of a bummer. It depends on what you want or need if your laptop support
I mean if it's really important to you, then you might want to look elsewhere,
But they make great laptops
And I think especially their Stealth line is
thumbs up, all around.
Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video!
Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it.
See you guys next time!