Razer Blade Stealth

The Review

 By Yanai Levy, Nov 2020

Jack of All Trades

This laptop is very expensive. You could buy a gaming desktop for a similar price and have multiple times the performance, and in the same vein, a productivity laptop can be had for hundreds less. However, if you need both, and need it with you on the go, this laptop does every task more than acceptably, in a size that fits in a messenger bag. No other laptop on the market can do it all as well as the Blade Stealth.

The Fine Line

For the causal gamer, but serious worker, there are few laptop options on the market. Perhaps the best of them is the Razer Blade Stealth. This laptop came into its own in the latter half of 2020, finally packing the punch it needed to be considered a gaming laptop without sacrificing much in the ergonomics or design departments. The design is a unibody construction from sandblasted aluminum, shrouded in a matte black. Overall, the blocky but sleek design looks modern and subtle enough for a boardroom, but not so boring to look out of place at a gaming LAN party.

Graphical Prowess

For a 13.3” laptop, it can’t be beat for combined graphics and processing. Almost all its competitors, such as the Dell XPS 13, HP Spectre x360, and the Apple Macbook Pro rely on graphics integrated into their processors, and while that’s fine for watching Netflix, the moment you add gaming or content creation into the mix, the Blade Stealth runs circles around them. This is chiefly due to its use of an Nvidia GTX 1650ti graphics card which is approximately three times faster than the solutions in the aforementioned laptops. While this graphics card is not near the top of Nvidia’s product stack, it is not in the bottom tier thin-and-light specific stack either. In terms of standout features within its weight and size class, this laptop’s greatest strength is its graphical power.

The Other Foot

That extra power comes at a few clear costs. The Dell XPS 13 for example, tops the battery life of the Blade by more than 70 percent, at 17.5 hours of video playback compared to about 10 on the Blade. It does so more quietly as well, and in a lighter design. The cooling hardware required to keep the Blade’s more powerful internals is both louder and heavier compared to the pedestrian solutions in the other ultrabooks. Though it isn’t as light or quiet as those laptops, it is far from a big, heavy gaming laptop and will easily fit in a normal sleeve or backpack.  

Touchy-feely

All points of interaction with the Blade are excellent. The build quality is superb, and the laptop does not bend or creak anywhere. The screen hinge is smooth and passes the one finger lift test easily. It feels every bit of its admittedly high price. The keyboard is snappy and responsive, with a well-thought-out layout, besides the squished arrow keys. It also features vibrant RGB lighting, with endless color and brightness effects through the Razer Synapse software. The software control also means that if you want to appear respectable in a business meeting, you can set the key lighting to white, or simply off. The touchpad is huge, occupying almost as much of the bottom shell as the gargantuan example on the MacBooks, and with windows precision drivers it responds well and rejects palm touches easily. The speakers, however, are nothing to write home about. They are adequately loud, with good highs, but nonexistent bass and muddy middle tones. They are par for the course on small windows laptops, with the MacBook lineup jeering from their lofty audio quality position.

A Feast for the Eyes

All the other laptops mentioned earlier also have good keyboards and touchpads, but their screens are not in the same league. The screen on the Blade is an IPS panel, which allows for great brightness, colors, and viewing angles, but not the great black levels that could be accomplished with a VA or OLED panel. The star of the show is the 120hz refresh rate, meaning the screen refreshes its content twice as many times per second as the other laptops. This makes the experience of using it feel fluid and tight even when scrolling twitter or launching Microsoft apps. That alone gives the Blade a huge advantage for anyone who values snappiness and smoothness of experience, and it is something the others simply cannot match for now. It is worth pointing out however, that the screen is not quite up to gaming snuff in terms of its response times, which reviewers put between 20-30 milliseconds. While it is still leagues above a 60hz screen, the delay is noticeable if you have experience with purpose-built gaming displays, where response times top out around 3 milliseconds.

No Missed Connections

Port selection is another high point, with two USB-C ports supporting the thunderbolt standard, as well as being able to carry display signals, and two full size USB-A ports accompanying them. Both USB-C ports can be used for charging, to make sure whichever side the charger comes from is accessible. This is a good compromise on ports for an age where most other laptops have ditched anything but the USB-C ports. An HDMI or even Mini-DisplayPort addition would have been welcome, and made this the connectivity king of the Ultrabooks, but settling for an adapter hooked up to one of the two supported ports is not a bitter pill.

The Red Team Advantage

Where this laptop could have more decisively taken the hearts of gamers and content creators would be if it included one of the recent AMD Ryzen 7 or 9 processors in place of it’s 10th Generation Intel i7. Adding the extra grunt of 8 cores instead of 4, would have really made this a pint-sized beast for photo and video editing. In multi-threaded workloads, the AMD offerings beat this intel processor by up to 70 percent, and the higher sustained processor speeds and IPC would be boons in gaming. This laptop can play most current games on low settings at respectable framerates and handles esports titles at very nice framerates. A shot of AMD processor adrenalin could be just the thing it needed to push it into real gaming laptop status.

So?

If you are considering a Razer Blade Stealth, and you can stomach its fifteen-hundred dollar plus price tag, this is a great laptop. If you can’t wait for the next generation of processors from team red or blue, this is the most well-rounded all-purpose laptop around in a small form factor. Don’t expect amazing battery life or a video game crushing monster, but for a little of everything, this laptop is unbeatable at the time of writing.