I’ve got the new Razer Blade Stealth here, which only goes up to Nvidia MX150 graphics.
This does allow it to play less demanding games, but how much of an improvement can
we get by attaching an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti graphics card? Let’s find out.
This video is mostly just for fun, I’ve got the newest Razer Blade Stealth here for
review and I have a 2080 Ti, and was curious to see how they’d go together using an external
GPU enclosure.
The enclosure that I’m using is the Mantiz Venus which I’ve previously covered in another
video, basically you plug in your graphics card then connect the enclosure to a laptop
using Thunderbolt 3. My enclosure also provides enough power to charge the blade stealth over
thunderbolt, so I literally just need a single cable for this setup.
The Razer Blade Stealth that I’m testing with has an Intel i7-8565U Whiskeylake CPU,
so 4 cores 8 threads with pretty high boost clock speeds. There’s 16GB of LPDDR3 memory
running at 2133MHz in dual channel, and of course the Nvidia MX150 graphics, so it’s
capable of playing less demanding games like Overwatch, CSGO, Fortnite, or Dota 2 without
many issues, while more graphically intensive games are just not possible unless we use
external graphics, anyway let’s get into the benchmarks and see how these games run.
Fortnite was tested using the same replay, and at 1080p we can see that the MX150 graphics
in the blade are giving us acceptable results at low settings, and medium ran well enough
too, shown by the orange and red bars. If we run the 2080Ti through the laptop’s own
display, shown in the green bars, we get a massive performance boost, and then even further
gains when connecting to an external display plugged into the 2080Ti, shown in blue. This
is because when using the laptop’s own display there’s more overhead involved, the Thunderbolt
bandwidth needs to be used to send the display signal back to the laptop, whereas this is
not required with an external display. For this reason I’ve only tested with the external
display for the rest of the games for best performance.
At 1440p Fortnite was still seeing very good performance, it still ran quite well even
at epic settings with this higher resolution on our external monitor with the 2080 Ti.
Even 4K was playable at most setting levels, something that the MX150 has no chance of
doing.
CS:GO was tested with the Ulletical benchmark, and again we’ve got the built in MX150 graphics
in orange and red, and the 2080Ti with external screen for best performance shown in the blue
bars. There’s a massive difference at 1080p, even the 1% low from the 2080Ti is above the
average frame rates of the MX150. Stepping up to 1440p with the 2080Ti still provided
very high frame rates for this test and was easily playable, and then similar at 4K, still
very high frame rates in this test with over 300 FPS still possible at low settings.
Overwatch was tested in the practice range so that I can perform the same test run, and
once again the external 2080Ti is giving us massive performance improvements. Note the
low 1% low performance at epic settings though, with these settings there was noticeable stuttering
while playing. I’m not exactly sure what the issue was, the CPU was at 100% utilization
even at lower settings too. At 1440p this issue was seen between epic and high settings,
as identified by the poor 1% low results. The average frame rates are still high, but
again this did cause noticeable stuttering while playing. When testing with 4K the same
thing was seen, still nice average frame rates but the poor 1% lows make the higher settings
basically unplayable, illustrating that adding external graphics will not be a silver bullet
for all games as other components will start to limit us depending on the laptop in use.
Dota 2 was only tested at 1080p, and is an example of a test that’s more CPU bound.
Even with the 2080Ti installed I was often seeing 100% CPU utilization, indicating a
CPU bottleneck. This explains why we’re seeing much less of a performance difference
in this test between the built in MX150 and external 2080Ti graphics, although the gap
does widen as we use higher settings which are more graphically intensive.
Seeing the CPU pegged at 100% utilization was pretty common and it was running with
a 15 watt TDP most of the time, and expected based on the high end graphics that I’m
using, but even so we are able to get a massive performance improvement by attaching the 2080
Ti to the Razer Blade Stealth over Thunderbolt 3.
Is this solution practical? No not really, considering a typical external GPU enclosure
goes for around $200-$300 USD while the 2080Ti is around $1300 USD, and that combined cost
is about as much as the entire laptop that I’m testing with without even including
an external display, you can find updated pricing in the description. If you’ve got
money to burn and want a super portable laptop to connect up to your high power graphics
at home then it may make sense, but realistically I only see that working if you just want to
use the same machine and have access to the same Windows installation, because you could
definitely also just have a pretty capable gaming PC at home for that money too, making
this a pretty niche solution. Either way it was still fun to test out what we can get
out of a thin and light Razer Blade Stealth and top end 2080 Ti graphics.
Do you think we’ll ever see the 2080 Ti inside a laptop? Or will an external GPU enclosure
be the only option. Personally I doubt it given we never had the 1080 Ti in a laptop,
but I did just get a 9900K laptop so hey maybe anything is possible. As always let me know
your thoughts down in the comments, and if you’re new here don’t forget to subscribe
for future tech videos like this one.