Razer’s new Blade Stealth has strong gaming performance in a thin frame

Razer has refreshed its Blade Stealth laptops for 2019. There are three new configurations, and each of them ships with an Intel Core i7-1065G7, one of Intel’s Ice Lake 10th Gen processors that features Iris Plus graphics.

Two of these configurations have 15W TDP processors, which would worry me, if not for the fact that they are also equipped with the Nvidia GTX 1650 discrete GPU by default. This year’s Blade Stealth is especially adept at playing graphically intensive games at fluid frame rates. According to Nvidia, that card can run Apex Legends at max settings, and during my time with this machine, it ripped and tore through Doom (2016) at a steady 60 frames per second on 1080p, with all of the graphical settings turned up to ultra.

Another model with Razer’s new “Mercury White” color option uses a 25W TDP processor with integrated graphics in lieu of the discrete Nvidia GPU. This is Razer’s Ultrabook entry for 2019, and the one that you’ll want if you’re looking for the lightest, most power-efficient laptop it’s bringing to market this year. Intel claims that Iris Plus graphics will allow you to play some games at 1080p, and it will probably offer far better gaming performance than previous iterations of the Blade Stealth. However, my colleague Sean Hollister wrote in a handy 10th Gen Ice Lake explainer that super-smooth frame rates might be out of the question, even with games that aren’t notorious for being resource-hungry.

There are several other nice additions found across the whole of this new lineup. All of them feature 16GB of fast LPDDR4 3,733MHz dual-channel RAM, a big improvement compared to the previous version’s LPDDR3 2,133MHz RAM. All models also include PCIe M.2 SSDs by default, too. In my testing of different portable USB-C SSDs, I found that the performance of Thunderbolt 3 in the previous base model was bottle-necked by the SATA M.2 drive, so this is a swell upgrade, too.

All of the good stuff is still here, too, like a trackpad with Windows Precision drivers, a backlit keyboard, a 13.3-inch display with slim bezels, a Thunderbolt 3 port, and nice build quality.

The updated Blade Stealth will start at $1,500 when it releases. We’ve posted the specs for the three configurations below.

Update September 4th, 8:50am: Added pricing information.