The new Razer Blade Stealth is now the most powerful ultrabook money can buy.
Razer, manufacturer of high-end, thin-and-light gaming laptops, also makes an ultrabook. Unlike the Razer Blade, Blade Pro, or the newly-announced Blade Studio – which costs over four grand – the Razer Blade Stealth is not really a gaming machine. It’s more like a MacBook Air in gaming fancy dress.
Well, that’s not entirely fair. You’ve always been able to pair the Blade Stealth with a Razer Core external GPU dock and a full-sized graphics card, but that’s not entirely portable. Then, late last year, Razer refreshed the Blade Stealth with an Nvidia MX150 discrete GPU. That’s not exactly a beefy chip, but it’s more than capable of playing esports titles at a decent clip.
Today, though, the Razer Blade Stealth looks a little different. As part of its latest refresh – to include the 10th generation Intel Core i7 processors – Razer has also managed to cram a proper discrete GPU into the Blade Stealth: the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1650.
Anyone who’s following the GPU market knows that the GTX 1650 is still the bottom of Nvidia’s product tree. It’s a general improvement over the last generation’s GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti, based on its latest Turing architecture, but it doesn’t include dedicated RTX cores for real-time ray tracing. Those only kick in on the RTX 2060 and above. But for a thin-and-light laptop that’s only 15.3 mm deep and weighs around 1.4 kg? A GTX 1650 is huge. A GTX 1650 is a monster of an upgrade.
Otherwise, on the spec front, the new Blade Stealth comes with a 10th gen Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, a 512 GB PCIe M.2 SSD, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a light-up Chroma keyboard.
Three variants of the latest Razer Blade Stealth are available. Two of them come in classic Razer black and green; one with a 1080p non-touch display, and the other with a 4K touch-enabled panel. The third is in a stylish chrome and silver colour, called “Mercury White”, which is only available with a 1080p non-touch screen, a 256 GB SSD, and without that all-important GTX 1650 GPU.
The biggest shame is that you can’t get the most grown-up colour – “Mercury White” – with that GTX 1650 graphics card. Why can’t people who want stylish, professional-looking laptops also have a discrete GPU, Razer?
No information on pricing is available yet, but given the previous generation started at £1300 with no GPU, and £1500 with that weedy MX150 on-board? The new Razer Blade Stealth with GTX 1650 will probably cost more.
