Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box following on from our look at whiskey lake performance a couple of days ago it's now time to properly check out the laptop we used for those benchmarks the new Razer Blade stealth I guess at this point maybe there's an a super new device and that came out towards the end of 2018 but it's still an impressive piece of hardware that I think is worth looking at in detail so here's the basics the new Razer Blade stealth uses a new design with new hardware all models come with an Intel Core i7 85 65-year processor and a 13.3 inch 1080p display the base model does not include discrete graphics it packs a 256 gig SATA SSD and eight gigabytes of RAM the graphics model the version I received review has nvidia geforce MX 150 discreet graphics a 256 gig PCIe SSD and 16 gig of ram both come with 53 watt hour batteries in some regions there's an even higher spec model as well with the 4k display and a 512 gig SSD as for pricing we're looking at 1400 us for the base model 1600 bucks if you want the MX 150 and $1,900 if you also want the 4k touch display supose tends to be the case with Razer laptops it's pretty expensive the previous blade stealth from late 2017 or early 2018 looked pretty decent and improved upon the chunky older designs in many ways but it's this new design for late 2018 that really steps things up another knotch it uses a similar bill to the 15-inch razor blade in that it's a square a design with slimmer bezels around the display it's now at the point where the display is really dominating the lid area like a lot of modern ultra portables we're not at crazy screen to body ratios just yet but the new blade stealth doesn't feel like there's wasted space around the screen the build quality has always been the killer aspect to Reyes's notebooks and that's still the case here the main chassis is a solid aluminium unibody with a black anodized finish it's simple it feels really sturdy and it looks fantastic it's a bit of a fingerprint magnet but that's the case with most black metal laptops while the overall footprint is smaller with the new plaid still thanks to its slimmer bezels it is around one millimeter thicker than previous models which I guess next to no difference the key area of interest is the weight which varies between one point two eight and one point three eight kilograms depending on the model it's not especially light for an ultraportable in 2019 but it's not heavy either it's you know an average sort of weight for this class of system looking at the ports and features it's all standard affair for this machine there's a Thunderbolt three port a USB C 3.1 point and two USB 3.1 type-a ports plus a headphone jack while there are more USB ports on this laptop than its predecessor that's come at the expense of the full-sized HDMI port which is a little disappointing talk up a monitor you'll likely need some sort of HDMI or DisplayPort adapter now the blade stealth also has a basic 720p webcam above the display with Windows hello support those speakers on either side of the keyboard that are fairly mediocre as is the case with basically every laptop these days the trackpad is expensive accurate and responsive just like raises other trackpads and the keyboard has a great tactile response too it's nice and clicky for a laptop which is what I like to see it's also not cramped and includes full sized arrow keys as well as a range of handy functions mapped to the F keys it wouldn't be a razer product without some form of chroma RGB lighting but the new blade stealth includes it in a pretty limited form rather than perky RGB lighting for the keyboard like previous Razer laptops The Blade stealth has just a single backlight zone that encompasses the entire keyboard this does limit the available effects but I don't think perky RGB is actually all that necessary for an operable I'm sure this new single zone design actually saves both space and battery the display at least for the base and graphics models is a 13.3 inch 1080p IPS at 60 Hertz so nothing fancy here just your typical laptop great display the key feature here is rows are individually factory calibrating every display and they are boasting a hundred percent srgb coverage as well which is great news for those that want color accuracy and decent colors for content creation this panel is one of the better ones I've seen in laptops boasting a contrast ratio of 1300 to one and brightness up to 400 nits which is above average in both regards color accuracy is pretty good out of the box thanks to its factory calibration the white point is perfect at 6500 K and while that does fall away somewhat over the grayscale range there's no noticeable colored tint greyscale Delta ease of 2.04 on average are just slightly higher than what we class as very good while saturation delta ii of 1.25 and a color checker delta ii average of 1.5 5 are fantastic results this level of accuracy is well above average for a laptop and makes it a great display for content creators alright so let's talk about performance I'm gonna focus here on the graphics model in particular and workloads that specifically make use of the GPU to see how the MX 115 makes an impact because I already covered the performance of the cry 785 65 you in a separate video so if you're interested in how CPU only workloads perform or how the base model will perform in general check out my whiskey' like CPU review as a refresher though the razor blade stealth uses the quad core i7 85 65 u which is Intel's a new high-end whiskey like CPU built on 40 nanometer plus plus normally the CPU is configured to use a 15 watt TDP however razor has chosen to use the C TDP upstate of 25 Watts which allows the chip to run at higher sustained clock speeds the rated clock speeds for the 85 65 u r 1.8 gigahertz base with a 4.6 gigahertz single core turbo and a 4 point 1 gigahertz all core turbo but typically the 25 watt version of the chip hovers around 3.1 gigahertz during sustained non-avian swallowed in cpu heavy benchmarks the 25 watt 85 65 U is up to 33% faster than the 15 watt 85 65 years so that's something to consider when comparing the razorblade stuff to other 85 65 u laptops that use the standard 15 watt configuration you won't see 33% gains in every app short workloads allowed to be unaffected and single thread performance is more like 4 to 7 percent higher but for long encoding tasks it is a significant difference the 25 watt 85 65 u is also about 15 percent faster than the 25 watt Corey 78550 Intel's previous generation cable a refresh CPU and that margin increases to 20 percent on average over the 15 watt a 550 with gains up to 38 percent in some workloads that could definitely justify an upgrade over the 85 52 depending on the system you previously had and of course if you're coming from anything jool call like a core i7 7,500 year older expect gains of 62% on average so that's the CPU taken care of let's explore what the MX 150 brings to the table it's crucial to note here that this isn't the one day 12 variant of the MX 150 this is the fully fledged version Razer specifies this is a 25 watt MX 150 and looking at gpu-z confirms that this is the regular one day 10 model so that's good news though I wish NVIDIA would be I guess a little clearer with their naming schemes he may be calling that one day 12 model vmx 140 or something would have made a bit more sense anyway the MX 150 comes into play in anything that's cheap you accelerators that includes popular applications like Adobe Premiere here the MX 150 has a noticeable impact on render times both with and without lumetri color processing effects with lumetri effects render times are more than halved and you can also see here that this fully fledged MX 150 is several minutes faster than the one day 12 version in our encoding benchmark even without limitary effects Orinda benchmark was 30% faster thanks to the discrete GPU Photoshop smart sharpen filter also benefits significantly from GPU acceleration again cutting processing time spun more than half Intel's integrated GPU in their 15 what processes is extremely weak the MX 150 easily is more than twice as powerful and that players out here Compu bench is a great benchmark for testing the compute performance of these GPUs across a range of synthetic tests and looking at one of these results for optical flow again shows the power of the MX 150 is around 2.6 times faster than the UHD 620 integrated GPU and it's also a decent 23 percent ahead of the Vega 8 GPU in AMD's risin 5 2500 you that said I expect the Vega 10 GPU in the risin 7 2700 you to provide similar performance the MX 150 in this test I'll be it with lower CPU performance than the 85 65 you in 3d mark as well we see enormous gains when comparing in MX 150 to the regular Intel I GPU it's difficult to see more than double the performance especially looking at graphics cores where in time spy for example the MX 150 approach has been three times as fast in terms of gaming this doesn't exactly turn an ultraportable into a gaming house but it certainly makes entry-level titles playable where there previously weren't Intel's UHD 620 is really only suitable for 2d games and other simple things like that whereas the MX 150 is pretty capable at playing fortnight for example you can expect 1080p 60fps game in fortnight using low settings so a few other things to mention here the Razer Blade stealth has two power modes bounced and low power throughout this review we use the bounce mode but enabling the low power mode it limits the CPU to a TDP of around 8 watts so performance is significantly reduced that could come in handy though to extend battery life the cooler is always a contentious issue with Razer laptops because they tend to run hot and loud but this is only somewhat the case with the Razer Blade stealth CPU temperatures were relatively ok hovering around the 75 degrees Celsius mark which isn't all that hot for a laptop however the cooler is audible during heavy load my recommendation here would be to use the manual fan speed control to turn down the fan speed to around 3000 rpm although that depends on the conditions when doing this I saw temperatures rise by around 7 degrees Celsius but this laptop was much quieter and overall that was a better experience in my opinion I think raises default fan curve is far too aggressive and it could annoy people that buy this laptop and don't realize there is a manual fan slider to keep things a bit quieter the graphics model comes with a 256 gigabyte light on ca3 PCIe nvme SSD which performs pretty well especially in random workloads it doesn't have the outright fastest sequential performance I've seen but this is still a fast drive and should provide a noticeable performance upgrade compared to the side up Drive in the base model one of the other important areas for laptops is battery life however because we haven't been benchmarking many other ultra portables lately we don't have a good selection of battery data to compare the blade stealth with other recent laptop release so if you want detailed Bachelor life information I recommend reading other reviews however from what I have been testing I would describe the Batchelor as above average for what it's worth it's been pretty good but again don't really have any comparison data to compare the blade stuff to other laptops so that's all the data are willing to go through in this review time to give some overall thoughts on the razor blade stealth between 19 firstly I think the overall hardware package is very impressive the design is excellent as it always is but that's being complimented this time around with top and hardware for what is possible in this sort of ultra portable chassis design we're getting a 25 watt version of the cry 780 565 you so it will outperform most other laptops that choose to use the 15 watt configuration or a stuck on cable ache refresh on top of that we're also getting a fully fledged MX 150 discrete GPU so razor has matched a powerful CPU with a powerful GPU for this form factor for the first time previous model is kinda left the GPU behind with resin instead pushing their core v to external GPU for those that want to do some gaming this new model I guess it isn't exactly a gaming powerhouse but it's now suitable for fortnight or overwatch type gaming without any external GPU boxes the displays also very impressive delivering great color accuracy out of the box making it suitable for creative workloads you're also getting Thunderbolt 3 plus full size USB a great trackpad and what seems to be decent batch life it's a really neat package overall most of the concerns I have with the hardware are pretty minor the fan is too aggressive by default spinning up louder than necessary for some workloads full size HDMI has been removed and you're only getting a 256 gig SSD in the models without a 4k display though as it's MDOT to drive it should be used upgradeable the other concern for some buyers will be the price 1,400 US dollars for the base model without discrete graphics is a lot to pay yes you do get the 25 watt core i7 85 65 you but there's just eight gigabytes of RAM and a 256 gig SATA SSD here masseuse offers the 15 watt 85 65 u plus 16 gig of ram and a 512 gig SSD for $1200 in the Zenbook 14 ux 433 fa so you'd have to really want the extra CPU performance to justify spending $200 more while also sacrificing more RAM and more storage and I don't think they'll be worth it for most people then there's the $1,600 graphics model the one I reviewed in some ways I can see this price being justified not a lot of systems offer a 25 watt quad core plus a full MX 150 GPU in this sort of form factor and at least you're getting 16 gigabytes of RAM here as well when you consider that a lot of laptops advertisers having an i7 85 65 U and MX 150 will have the 15 watt CPU configuration and the slower one d12 MX 150 I do think there's some merit in spending more money for the outright best performance yes it's expensive but least for that price you really are getting great hardware though I'd still really like to see this model come with at least a 512 gig SSD at this price with that said again if you don't need that extra performance you could be perfectly satisfied with the MX 151 D 12 and even say a last gen cry 78550 you this combination will end up 20 to 30 percent slower than the new razor blade stealth but you can find similar form factor laptops with that combination that are more than 30 percent cheaper using I guess a soos as another example here of course it's not unusual for top-end products with the fastest hardware to offer less than optimal bang for buck there's always a premium associated with getting the fastest or best products the question is whether you're willing to pay that premium or whether you'd be satisfied with the multitude of other options on the market and that's something that I guess I really can't answer for you so that's it for this review of the razor blade stuff if you're interested in buying a new ultra portable there are links in the description below to a selection of products we've talked about in this review so you can check current pricing you can also subscribe to more Hardware unbox reviews consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our discord community and I'll catch you in the next one