Razer's thin and light Blade Stealth laptop now comes with a bit more power for multitasking and multi-threaded workloads, as it's been upgraded with an 8th generation Core i7-8550U mobile processor based on Intel's newest Coffee Lake architecture. The Core i7-8550U is a 4-core/12-thread chip clocked at 1.8GHz to 4GHz, with 8MB of cache and a 25W TDP.
This is an upgrade over the 7th generation dual-core processor options (Core i7-7200U and Core i7-7500U) that previously resided inside the Stealth Blade. In addition to a bit more performance, Razer is touting improved battery life, which it now rates at up to 10 hours. That's 2 hours more than before, at least on paper.
"Our engineers have done something truly remarkable with the new Blade Stealth by significantly increasing power while extending battery life," says Min-Liang Tan, Razer co-founder and CEO. "The new Blade Stealth is the most well-rounded Windows laptop out there, and it can be further supercharged with the help of the new Razer Core V2."
The quad-core model is available now for $1,699 in a 13.3-inch form factor with a 4K IGZO touchscreen display. It also features 16GB of LPDDR3-2133 memory and a 512GB NVMe SSD wrapped in the same aluminum housing as before.
Also as before, the Blade Stealth does not come with a discrete GPU, instead relying on integrated graphics—Intel HD 620, in this instance. Razer sells an external graphics enclosure that you can pair with the Blade Stealth, which it also updated.
The Core V2, as Min-Liang Tan references, now comes with dual Thunderbolt 3 controllers that separate those speedy lanes for graphics and other devices. It also has four USB 3.0 ports and a GbE LAN port.
A 500W power supply sits on the inside. Razer said it redesigned the interior to support an expanded range of taller graphics cards, including Nvidia's 10 series and AMD's 500 series, along with some Nvidia Quadro cards. There is no mention of Radeon RX Vega being supported at this time.
The Core V2 costs $499 and will be available "soon" in the US, Canada, UK, France, and Germany.
