The Razer Blade Stealth is everything you could possibly want from an ultraportable laptop. It’s lightweight, packs a punch and is well worth showing off to the other less fortunate travellers on your morning commute. This Kaby Lake-powered beast is a MacBook Pro equal in many ways, but does it leave Apple’s latest lagging behind?
The second in Razer’s Stealth line is a surefire winner. This 12.5in Ultrabook is gorgeously slim at just 43mm from top to base, and it weighs a mere 1.29Kg. A departure from the old chunky Razer laptops of old, this is a laptop that’s just as happy in the office as it is in the living room.
It’s a tough, rugged-feeling laptop as well, with its all-metal aluminium chassis barely flexing a millimetre when I attempted to twist it and bend it.
Chroma keyboard and touchpad
It’s the awe-inspiring Chroma keyboard that really catches the eye, though. While other manufacturers have scrambled to shoehorn keyboards able to display a mere three or four colours, Razer has gone above and beyond. Each and every individual key on the Razer Blade Stealth’s keyboard can produce an incredible 17 million colours. I don’t say this very often in reviews, but this is one keyboard that drew admiring glances from whomever happened to catch sight of it.
Each key is incredibly bright, so bright in fact, that I’d recommend toning down the brightness when you’re in a dark room to save you from eye strain. You can do that in the cloud-based Synapse driver software, but that’s not the only thing you can adjust.
Fancy a burst of rainbow colours as you type? You can do that. And in a sly dig at Apple’s lost Function key row, holding down the Function key turns off all the keyboard lights, highlighting all F-keys in a bright white gleam. It’s marvellous little touches like these that almost made me go out and buy one for myself.
And yet, for all the gimmicks, the keyboard itself is perfectly usable. The layout is wonderfully spacious despite the small footprint and although key travel is just a touch too shallow for my taste (it’s eerily similar to Apple’s butterfly switch keyboard on its latest MacBook Pro), this is not an insurmountable problem.
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Its sizeable touchpad is also worth an honourable mention. It takes up plenty of space below the keyboard, and has a wonderfully smooth glass surface. My fingers glided across it without any glaring issues, and clicks felt just as responsive as you’d expect from a laptop so exquisitely appointed in every other area. There are no discrete left and right mouse buttons here, but the Razer Blade Stealth’s touchpad is among the best and again, perfectly competent.
Display and speakers
The Stealth’s 12.5in, 2,560 x 1,440 display, like the rest of the laptop is top-drawer. The Quad HD IGZO panel delivers 96.9% sRGB colour gamut coverage, and produces some wonderfully radiant images. Contrast is brilliant at 1,073:1, and while a peak brightness of 316cd/m2 isn’t as blindingly bright as theMacBook Pro 13’s 542cd/m2, it will serve you well outdoors so long as you aren’t sitting in direct sunlight.
It’s not only the visuals that impress, though. The stereo speakers that run along either side of the keyboard pack a punch, too, with a hefty, bassy kick. Charles Bradley’s "Dusty Blue" trumpet clamour sounded remarkably crisp with wonderful clarity and warmth. Sound does get a little tinny and distorted at high volumes, although not distractingly so.
Performance and battery life
And, for the money, the internal specifications are similarly impressive. For just shy of £1,000 you get the 128GB Quad HD model, with a dual-core, seventh-generation Kaby Lake Intel Core i7-7500U processor and 8GB of RAM. Up your budget to £1,950 and the specification jumps to a 4K screen, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. My particular configuration had a 512GB SSD, QHD display and 16GB of memory, which will set you back £1,250.
Kaby Lake shows a significant performance improvement over its Skylake-configured forebears, and in our taxing 4K benchmark test the laptop scored a creditable 55. It’s incredibly capable of performing everyday tasks and will serve you well with those more demanding jobs when you need a little extra juice, too. It’s no faster than the 13in Touch Bar i5 MacBook Pro, achieving the same benchmarking result, but its lower price means the Stealth delivers superior bang per buck.
It’s not the quietest laptop, though, and every so often you’ll hear the fans kick in. While they’re more of a gentle hum than a deafening boom, the pessimist in me worries there may be some thermal-efficiency issues with Kaby Lake, although it may just boil down to Razer’s configuration.
Despite Razer’s gaming heritage, this isn’t a laptop of that sort. There are no fancy dedicated graphics chips of any kind nestled within, so you’ll have to make do with the integrated Intel HD Graphics 620 for your light gaming needs.
But as long as you don’t force it to run anything above its station, it’ll serve you well for a little light gaming here and there. Minecraft, while hardly the flashiest graphic pageant, ran without any hiccups even at max render distance, never dipping below 30fps. Codemasters’ Dirt: Showdown ran at a 40fps average on medium settings, with the resolution bumped down to 1080p.
And battery life is decent if not spectacular. The Razer Blade Stealth lasted 6hrs 29mins away from the wall socket in our continuous video-playback test. This will be more than enough juice for a lengthy plane journey, but you’ll have to plug it in pretty sharpish once you disembark. Of course, this isn’t a scratch on the MacBook Pro’s near ten-hour battery life, but it’s far from a disaster.
Ports and connections
The Stealth’s slender frame makes it tricky to harbour a generous abundance of ports. There’s a USB 3 Type-C port for charging and fast data transfer, two regular USB 3 ports and a full-sized HDMI 2 port for hooking up to an external display. That’s a tad more generous than the MacBook Pro 13’s four Thunderbolt 3 ports.
As for communications, there’s no Ethernet port for wired internet connectivity, but the laptop is equipped with the full array of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, with 3x3 802.11ac wireless and Bluetooth 4.1.
Verdict
Razer’s Blade Stealth is the definitive Windows 10 ultraportable. It’s the best 2016 MacBook Pro Windows equivalent yet, and the obvious choice once you bring that cheaper price into account. Its Kaby Lake processor leaves a great impression of what we can expect as we approach the dawn of 2017, too.
I also fell in love with its Chroma keyboard, so much so that regular keyboards just aren’t the same anymore. While our current Windows favourite, Dell’s late 2015 XPS 13 lasts almost two hours longer on a full charge, its processing performance pales in comparison.
There’s just nothing quite like the Stealth and although its 15in GTX 1060-powered brother is your go-to for gaming, this is the best Windows ultraportable you can pick up right now. I didn’t want to send it back.
