Razer Blade Stealth (2019)
The Blade Stealth has a new CPU/GPU combo, but is this enough to make it a proper gaming ultrabook?PRICE From $2449
www2.razer.com/en-au/R
azer has always offered some of
the best looking laptops money
can buy, and the 2019 black-anodised
aluminium Razer Blade Stealth is no
exception. Returning to the 13-inch
form factor, we’re continually surprised
by how small modern ultrabooks can
be. Sliding in at a 1.48cm thickness, the
new stealth earns its Razer name and
the 30.5 x 21cm footprint and 1.28kg
weight mean this device is just about as
portable as a laptop can be.
Despite being so compact the Blade
Stealth manages to maintain a nicely
weighted keyboard with a decent travel
distance for an ultraportable. This
keyboard is skirted by a pair of subtle
speaker grills that combine with an
additional two undercarriage speakers to
create Dolby Atmos three dimensional
sound — which isn’t bad for personal
cinematic playback.
Razer seems to be paring back the
number of premium options on this year’s
Blade Stealth, offering just the one FullHD
display option locally and a maximum of
256GB of storage space. You do still have
a choice to make: whether you’d prefer the
base model with 8GB of RAM, a 256GB
SATA 3 SSD and an Intel UHD Graphics
620 GPU for $2449; or if you’re willing to
pay a few hundred more for 16GB of RAM,
a much faster 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD andGAMING LAPTOPRazer seems to be
paring back the number of
premium options on this
year’s Blade Stealth.
VERDICT:The idea of a
gaming ultrabook may seem far-
fetched, but Razer has pulled that off.
It’s no gaming powerhouse, but it’s a
fine laptop.9
- Solid performance boost
•Sleekdesign- Best used at low graphics settings
- Limited storage
an Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPU.
Those upgrades are well worth the
additional cost in our eyes, not just
because the additional RAM is great
for work efficiency (you can have way
more browser tabs open at once), but
also because that GPU isn’t too bad. The
Nvidia GeForce MX150 is between 40
and 50% less powerful than a GTX 1050
GPU in 3DMark benchmarks, so we’re
hesitant to call it a fully-fledged gaming
GPU. That said it does offer three times
the performance of the stock Intel UHD
Graphics 620, allowing you to play games
like Ghost Recon: Wildlands or Middle
Earth: Shadow of War at playable 30fps
averages if you drop the quality settings
right down or run them in 720p. Less
demanding titles like Overwatch, Rocket
League, or Fortnite will run really well
on this system, so if you only ever game
lightly then this is an awesome option.
The Blade Stealth also has an updated
Intel Core i7-8556U CPU. This Whisky
Lake chip was announced back in August
2018 and while it still uses a 14nm
die, it’s had a number of considerable
optimisations that make it more efficient.
It can also boost to a frequency of 4.6GHz
for extreme responsiveness in short
demanding tasks. This affords the new
Razer Blade Stealth a 50% boost in results
on demanding CPU tasks like HWBot’s1080p media encoding benchmark from
the 2018 Blade Stealth with 16GB of
RAM. The performance boost isn’t as
dramatic in longer and more diverse work
tasks, but we still saw a 5-20% uptick in
general work benchmarks.
The Razer Blade stealth is a
considerable upgrade from last year’s
model in terms of CPU and GPU
performance. Unfortunately you will have
to live with just 256GB of storage space,
but other than this there isn’t many ways
you can fault the Blade Stealth 2019.
JOEL BURGESSTECHREVIEWW