Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unbox today's video on the razor blade stealth shouldn't take too long as I'm only going to be covering a couple of aspects and that's for a very good reason this new model doesn't change a whole lot compared to its predecessor which I looked at in September last year rather than boring myself and new guys with details of things that haven't changed at all I'm just going to focus on the new goodies in this model for early 2018 the main upgrade is in the processor department where razors surprised everyone by moving to a KB Lake refresh Intel Core i7 8550 you wait that's not really surprised though is it anyway it's a decent performance upgrade from what we've seen in other laptops and it's something I'll go into more detail on shortly the battery capacity is still the same at 53.6 watt hours however with the new processor inside we may see a few changes to battery life razor also bumped the memory speed up from lpddr3 1866 to LP ddr3 2133 at the same 16 gig capacity every other aspect of the hard way is the same including the 13.3 inch 3200 by 1800 XO LCD killer networking gear and SSD options that range from 256 gig to 1 terabyte there are some very minor changes to the laptops dimensions but they fall into the sub 1 millimeter of range and the weight is basically unchanged as a result the beautiful metal chassis is pretty much identical to the version I reviewed back in September so for my full thoughts on that design check that video but as a quick recap it's really good with decent IO that includes Thunderbolt 3 and a full-sized HDMI port along with an individually RGB backlit keyboard with acceptable tactile fiedel and a great trackpad the display is also the same I did retest this unit just to make sure but there's really nothing new to report here aside from some minor adjustments to white balance and gamma correction before getting into the performance I will talk pricing because I know this will disappoint you the new Razer Blade stealth has launched at u.s. $100 more than the equivalent last gen model at launch moving from fourteen hundred dollars to fifteen hundred dollars for a chorus 7:16 gig of ram and or 256 gig SSD considering the new cpu is only slightly more expensive than the old one in terms of intel's cost to OEMs this seems a little unreasonable however it is still cheaper than equivalent high end laptops like the dell XPS 13 and HP spectre when you configure the models around the same in australia the pricing remains the same with the base model starting at 2200 ozzie dollar e-news that's actually a fair price with minimal australia tax which is nice for us locals so let's talk performance the key upgrade here is the intel core i7 8550 you which i've covered a couple of times before on the channel compared to previous seventh gen you seriously abused 8550 bumps up from two cores and four threads to four cores and eight threads in the same 15 watt power envelope which is a huge improvement for these sort of systems clock speeds for this chip removed from 1.8 gigahertz base to 4.0 gigahertz boost plus there's crappy integrated graphics sorry I mean UHD 620 graphics - what are the key things to note with the chorus 78552 is its configurable TDP allowing manufacturers to choose a power limit anywhere from 10 to 25 Watts depending on the cooling capabilities and battery requirements the Razer Blade stealth uses the default 15 Watts here which we also saw with the HP Spectre x-360 however unlike the spec - X - 60 the blade stealth actually has a reasonable cooler so it can sustain higher clock speeds in a typical Cinebench run core clocks are approximately 300 megahertz higher with the razor blade stealth and temperatures a bit more manageable as a result performance is almost always superior looking at the actual Cinebench results the razor blade stuff ends up 3% ahead of the spectre x360 in the multi-threaded workload and 9% faster we're looking at the single third test however the laptop does for 18% behind the dell XPS 13 in the multi-threaded test as the XPS 13 uses the maximum 25 watts see TDP upstate and as a result it sustains a bit higher clock speeds in x264 video encoding where once again 18% slower than the dell XPS 13 however we are at least 5% ahead of the HP spectre x360 and fall closer to what we backed with a 15 watt variant of this CPU in the Excel Monte Carlo workload the blade stealth beats the spectre x360 by 8% and outperforms the XPS 13 by 4% the blade stealth does sustain the maximum or core turbo frequency of 3.7 gigahertz for slightly longer than the same CPU in the XPS 13 which is why we're seeing the XPS 13 get narrowly beaten in this short workload Premiere is another great result for this blade stealth beating the spectre x360 by 13% with lumetri effects and outperforming the XPS 13 by 5% it's a bit of a surprise there but those are the results I found however looking at Photoshop with the iris blur effect the blade stealth is 5 percent behind the XPS 13 and equal to the spectre x360 blender it's probably not a workload you'd usually run on an ultraportable but the results are interesting nonetheless here the blade stealth is 6 percent faster than the spectre x360 but 16 percent behind the XPS 13 MATLAB favors higher clock speeds and high quick boost speeds here the blade stealth delivers roughly the same performance as the XPS 13 and a narrow 3 percent more than the spectre x360 among laptops there's not a lot of variance between these results and of course we are talking about run times in the milliseconds the blade stealth also performs well in 3dmark delivering 9 percent more performance than the spectre x360 and around 4 percent less than the XPS 13 in a GPU limited sky diver test you won't want to play many tiles on the integrated UHD 620 graphics though there is a clear difference in performance between different models depending on their cooling solutions perhaps the worst results for the blade stealth are the Pacey mark tests which fall behind both the spectre x360 and the Dell XPS 13 as a more general system benchmark it's disappointing to see the blade Styles not perform a bit better here especially considering the other workloads we benchmark with on average the blade stealth is 4 percent faster than the HP spectre x360 though this is skewed slightly by the PC mark results in longer workloads particularly encoding the blade stealth holds in decent 9 percent performance lean and that's the product of its superior cooler under the same TDP the results compared to the Dell XPS 13 err inter stick falling 3% behind on average that this does balloon to 11% in longer workloads as the razor blade stealth boosts higher for longer in short workloads it actually outperforms the XPS 13 on average in these shorter tests of course it's also worth discussing how the razor blade stealth with the I 78550 you compares to the previous model with the i7 7500 you on average we see a 30% performance improvement which is huge for a single intelligent with better performance seen in shorter workloads there are still very impressive gains in longer and multi-threaded workloads like a lot of ultraportable manufacturers Razer has opted to use a samsung PM 961 PCIe nvme SSD which is a top-end drive capable of outstanding performance sequential reads and writes are well above 1 gigabyte per second while ran performance is very good falling towards the top of the charts the battery life is the next thing I want to examine and like I mentioned earlier the new player stealth keeps the same 54 what our cell as the previous model which is a standard size for a 13 inch laptop battery life appears to be roughly on par with the old model as you can see in this couple of benchmarks the result is average battery life not particularly impressive but also not unusable either it does get soundly beaten by both the HP Spectre x-360 and the dell XPS 13 though which is disappointing considering the similar hardware in both laptops my final thoughts on the blade stealth are similar to the last time I reviewed this laptop I quite liked it the build quality is excellent and complemented well by the RGB keyboard and trackpad the display is good with a nice high resolution and it's not as hamstrung by bezels as previous models it's also great to see the improved performance the Intel Core i7 8550 provides and unlike some other laptops I've reviewed roses cooling solution can keep the 15 watt CPU performing as expected there's no doubting this is a premium laptop and that's reflected by the $1,500 u.s. price tag however razer does give you top end hardware for that price the 8550 u + 16 gig of ram are standard as is the high resolution display while other laptops cut back with their cheaper entry-level models directly comparing the stealth the other premium laptop shows it's fairly priced which might surprise some of you when the base cost is so high my only real concern with the blade stealth continues to be the battery life you can get better results from similar laptops such as the outstanding dou X base 13 aside from that the blade staff gets my ticket approval provided you don't fall foul of the occasional QA issues razer has had with this unit over the past few years didn't have any problems with my reviewing it but I have seen a couple of user reviews out there that mention a few defects that can be shipped from the factory that's it for this review as always we have amazon links to the blades tails and other ultra portable laptops in the description check those out if you're interested if you feel like supporting us directly we have a patreon page at patreon.com slash hardware unboxed and i'll catch you next time