Razer can now rightfully pitch its retooled Blade Stealth 13 as an actual gaming laptop, because the wimpy GeForce MX150 GPU found in the previous version has been swapped out for a GTX 1650 based on Nvidia's latest Turing GPU architecture.
Yes, the GTX 1650 lacks ray tracing hardware and is the slowest version of Turing. But unless something goes seriously wrong, it should provide a solid boost in gaming performance compared the previous build.
The refreshed Blade Stealth 13 is also one of a new crop of laptops to feature one of Intel's brand new 10th generation "Ice Lake" processors. Specifically, there is a Core i7-1065G7 inside this thing. That's a quad-core chip with Hyper Threading support, running at 1.3GHz (base) to 3.9GHz (max Turbo), with 8MB of L3 cache.
Here's a rundown of the pertinent specs:
- Intel Core i7-1065G7
- GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q w/ 4GB GDDR5
- 13.3-inch Full HD (1920x1080) or 4K (3840x2160)
- 16GB LPDDR4-3733
- 256GB or 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD
- Wi-Fi 6 + Bluetooth 5.0
- 720p webcam
- 0.60 x 11.99 x 8.27 inches (HxWxD), 2.99-3.26 pounds
Razer is calling the Blade Stealth 13 the "world's first gaming ultrabook," and while technically that may be true, there have been other thin and light gaming laptops. Like those, the GPU is of the Max-Q variety. How that translates into actual performance is something we plan to examine, though according to The Verge, it's capable of playing Doom (2016) at a steady 60fps at 1080p.
With this refresh, Razer essentially addressed our main complaint with the previous model (at least on paper). In our review, we noted that "sticking an Nvidia GPU inside the Razer Blade Stealth doesn't make it a gaming laptop." Technically the GeForce MX150 is a discrete GPU, but it's a relatively weak one, found on some laptops that sell for well below $1,000. For example, this Acer Aspire E 15 house an MX150 GPU and costs $599.99.
Pricing on the newest Blade Stealth 13 runs $1,799 for the 1080p model and $1,999 for the 4K version. There's also a cheaper "Mercury White" model (shown above) that sells for $1,499, but it drops the GTX 1650 in favor of integrated graphics, and cuts the 512GB storage in half to 256GB.
The Blade Stealth 13 with updated specs will be available at the end of the month.
