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Razer Blade Stealth 13 (2019) - Expensive But Still Worth It?

2019-01-28
what everyone ever hear with hardware connects and this is the new razor blade stealth more particularly the 2019 edition now the word stealth really does reflect the product design razors going for in the first place because when you look at this notebook from every possible angle it doesn't show anything aggressive but rather it's very low profile but it packs some interesting specs under the hood so what are we talking well for starters it's got the latest whiskey leak cpu from Intel in this case the core i7 85/60 you it's a quad core design with eight threads you've also got sixteen gigabytes of RAM a 256 gigabyte nvme SSD and an nvidia geforce MX 150 discrete GPU while we're at it racer is offering two other models of the blade stealth I happen to have the mid-tier version but the max they offer is a graphics 4k model that costs $1,900 now we're slowly starting to see brands implement this type of graphics card into their ultrabooks just to give a little bit of boost in terms of performance but is it really worth spending $1,600 on something like this stealth let's find out but first a quick message from our sponsor the new OC ZTR 200 from Toshiba is a great value SSD if you're considering upgrading your hard drive and get a nice boost in performance with cutting-edge 3d flash memory and ultra reliable controller with built-in power management available in different capacities check it out below now as some of you know I recently switched my primary editing notebook to the razor blade 15 base I actually did a full review on it so if you're interested in checking that out I'll leave a link right over here but basically our CEA's coverage was mostly edited and rendered on that notebook and it did not crash or once which I'm very grateful for and my overall experience with a notebook has been pretty amazing so far now the new stuff is a complete design overhaul from the previous generation if you recall that model featured rounded corners thick bezels and it just wasn't a try the design the 2019 version looks a lot like a mini Blade 15 with the boxy design around the edges the super thin bezels with a webcam placed at the right location kudos racer now the logo at the front doesn't come back lit like the 15-inch but rather razor has implemented this tone-on-tone logo that looks sleek at certain angles I don't think you'll have any issues bringing this to an office meeting or something because it does look discreet and I like that Razer hasn't sacrificed build quality with the new stealth as well the chassis is still constructed out of cnc anodized aluminum and it feels amazing seriously this is one of the best-built ultrabooks that have tested so far port selection is respectable so on the right hand side you get a Type C Thunderbolt 3 port and a USB 3.1 type-a port switching to the left there is a standard USB 3.1 type-c connector which does not support Thunderbolt so keep that in mind there is another USB 3.1 type 8 port and a headphone / mic jack the notebook does charge via USB type-c and you can plug it into either one of these ports the lack of an SD card reader is a bummer though moving on to the display it features a 13.3 inch 1080p IPS panel at 60 Hertz and the screen is matte it supports 100% of the srgb color spectrum and I thoroughly enjoyed my time browsing the web and doing some other casual things like watching the latest season or the Grand Tour the color reproduction is excellent you really can't complain about it the brightness levels could be improved a little bit since I did have some trouble of doing content outdoors but it is adequate enough to get the job done now this whole reduction vessels have not only reduced the form factor of the new stealth but it's actually quite smaller than the previous generation which is awesome now this whole bezel approach is expected to be a 20-19 thing so you know every notebook that's coming out in the market whether that's gaming oriented or not has to have minimal bezels because it's starting to become the norm and I don't think I have anything to complain about that because it sort of immerses you to the content that you're consuming now what do I have to mention that razor does offer a 4k display option with the Razer Blade stealth and I think that's utterly pointless because 4k on a 13 point Finnish display is first of all very difficult to drive with the given hardware configuration that we have and it also affects battery life and you know if you want to actually view content you have to scale the display to 150 percent or a little bit higher just so you can see things because it's so small so I'd highly recommend staying away from that model because you know it's just pointless moving on to the keyboard and the layout hasn't changed that much from the previous generation except this time you do lose the perky chroma lighting instead it comes with a unified Lenny solution that does cost some bleed around the keys on the positive side these secondary keys are backlit so that's nice are the keys do x''b it at respectable amount of travel distance it's certainly not as good as Lenovo's or HP's offerings but you know what it gets a job done now if you recall my review of the Razer Blade 15 base model I did talk about the arrow keys positioned awkwardly it's the same case for the Razer Blade stuff they're the same size as the rest the keys and I've run into many instances where I would accidentally you know hit the left or the right shift key instead of the front arrow key so it it's a little bit confusing certainly get some time used to but yeah I'm just overall not a fan of this keyboard layout especially on the right hand side now another interesting or I guess a rather weird implementation is a power button it's actually a physical key and not something that's separated from the keyboard layout so yeah I mean I wish I had I wish if Razer implemented a dedicated power button just like what's found on the previous generation stealth model the trackpad is really good the glass surface is very smooth from navigating around they still use Windows position drivers so you'll be able to take advantage of all those gestures baked into Windows 10 so that's nice there are two front-facing speakers on the new stealth and they're positioned appropriately for the best audio projection now in terms of audio quality it's actually amazing for an ultrabook there's fantastic definition in the higher ends I will mention that the base is a little bit on the minimal side it's very under powering so you're not gonna feel the drop at when you're listening to music or something like that but honestly for just getting stuff done and just listening to a few casual Tunes this is phenomenal moving on to the most interesting part performance now one thing to keep note of is that these stuff isn't a fully loaded gaming notebook think of it as a hybrid between gaming and portable in a 13.3 inch form factor naturally you should keep your expectations low so first up by Ren Cinebench r15 I got a multi-core score of 658 and a single core score of 189 I need to mention that the single core performance on the razor blade stealth is phenomenal it actually is a lot better than my 15-inch razor blade base model because clock speeds can hit easily up to four point five gigahertz and I've clearly witnessed that as I was monitoring the clock speeds video editing is not the best in terms of rendering but a playback at half-hour solution was actually pretty smooth with 4k jh5 footage it's also pretty odd to even with hardware encoding enabled the system took well over 40 minutes to render the video so I think it's more of an optimization issue of the kids when I looked at the stats or when I looked when I was monitoring CPU resources the CPU was not fully utilized but rather the integrated GPU and the MX 150 were at 100% so I feel like Adobe has to somehow optimize that again it's really odd but I wouldn't use this notebook for video editing because the rendering performance is pretty terrible but for photo editing and other casual stuff it's it's amazing moving on to gaming performance and I'm gonna kick things off with fortnight because it's quite the popular game right now so a 1080p set to low settings to stealth averaged around 70 frames per second battlefield one attendee piece set to low averaged around 50 6.9 frames per second so it's relatively playable over watch a 1080p set to low averaged around 124 frames per second doom at 1080p set to low averaged on 45.6 frames per second so it's it's okay it's definitely not the best experience now in terms of temperatures the CPU a built around 40 C and the clock speeds were hovering on 1.8 to 3 gigahertz in certain scenarios a few cores clocked all the way up to four point five gigahertz so it's well within the spec now under load the CPU hovered around 70 C but by default the system locked all the cores at roughly 3 gigahertz which is very respectable for an ultrabook if you ask me I even monitored clock speeds while rendering a 4k video using Adobe Media encoder and frequencies were reaching 4.5 gigahertz as I mentioned earlier without a problem so that's awesome the system also does a really good job dissipating the heat so most the exhaust is right at the back so it doesn't actually feel you don't you won't be able to feel the heat while they're gaming on it fan noise is also respectable what's really awesome is doing idle scenarios the fans actually completely stop spinning which is kind of amazing because you basically won't be able to hear anything but when you're actually gaming on it you're gonna be hearing them ramp up eventually and you can't control the fan speed through Razer synapse and lastly I do want to talk about battery life so the new stealth features a 53 point 1 watt hour battery and it lasted for um 6 hours and 48 minutes around 7 hours under my light load test which consists of refreshing a webpage for 15 seconds and then during my heavy load test which consists of running real bench on a loop until the battery completely died the system last was around 2 hours so it's not definitely not the best battery life on an ultrabook I've seen other ultra books featuring 11 plus hours on just my light load test so definitely keep that in mind battery life is not the Stealth's Forte on the positive side the included AC adapter is very compact so he can easily toss us in your backpack and you won't even feel the weight because it doesn't take that much space alright so concluding thoughts on the new Razer Blade stealth guys I really like this laptop I mean for one the design is very discreet and you know if I were a student that I would absolutely rocking this you know to classes and whatnot but after looking the price tag I wouldn't pay $69 for a notebook of this caliber because for perspective to put things in perspective the Razer Blade 15 base bottle cause the exact same price but you're getting better specs the GTX 1060 max-q you know a an hn a core i7 6 core 12 farad CPU and better specs like to spend overall specs with that regard however do keep in mind that this is the mid-tier version with the MX 150 GPU razor does offer the standard stealth with just the integrated graphics for three hundred dollars less so if you feel like that's a compelling option then it's a great buy provided that you really know what you're getting into because obviously you have your own priorities if you're looking for a notebook with best gaming performance the stealth is completely out of line you really shouldn't go for it but if you're someone who's looking for a clean laptop that can just can't work done like you know basic stuff like web browsing or content consuming whatnot then I would actually recommend the base model style over the mid-tier version because I don't think the MX 150 GP is going to come of that big big of a use in that regard now if you compare the stuff to something like the XPS 13 or HP Spectre x-360 or even lenovo's x1 carbon the benefit of considering the stealth is that you're getting the MX 150 discrete GPU provided that it's adequate enough for your needs I think customer support is also something that needs to be considered since Razer isn't really well known for that compared to dealt for instance and so that about wraps up my experience using the Razer Blade stealth guys let me know what you guys think about the Razer Blade stealth and the fact that you know Razer was able to implement an MX 150 GPU what you guys think about it because I know it's not a fantastic gaming GPU and you know it's definitely not as close to a GTX 1050 or whatnot but do you think it's worth implementing on an ultrabook especially for a notebook of this size let me know in the comments down below I'm Eva with hundred connects thank you so much for watching make sure to make sure to check out some relevant content over here subscribe to our boot sequence channel I'm signing off and I'll see you guys in the next one
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