The Razer Blade Stealth Review: Razer Takes On The Ultrabook
by Brett Howse on March 29, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Razer
- Skylake
- Razer Blade Stealth
- eGFX
- Razer Core
- Skylake-U
Battery Life
Mobility goes hand-in-hand with battery life. The Razer Blade Stealth certainly fits the mobility part, with a small, thin, and light design which would be easy to take with you. But if you have to bring the charger with you, it’s less convenient. We’ve seen some impressive battery life numbers on Ultrabooks and other low-profile devices over the last couple of years, with the Dell XPS 13 and Microsoft Surface Book both hitting over 15 hours on our light test.
The Stealth has a slightly smaller than average battery size, at 45 Wh. I would say the average for an Ultrabook of this size would be around 50 Wh, with a couple below and a couple above. This is going to be a factor against the Stealth right out of the gate. The other factor against it is the high resolution display offerings. Baseline Ultrabooks generally come with a 1920x1080 display, and the lowest offered on the Stealth is a 2560x1440. The top model is 3840x2160, or four times the pixels of a 1080p display. This not only is more work to render images on for the GPU, the transistors used to drive the pixels also block the backlighting, necessitating a brighter, more power-hungry backlight.
We measure battery life with two standardized tests. The light test is simply web browsing, with the display set to 200 nits brightness. The heavy test loads many more pages, adds in a movie playback, and includes a 1 MB/s file download to keep the wireless NIC active. For 2016, these tests may be adjusted, but for now the existing tests give us lots of data points against previously tested devices. All browsing is done with Microsoft Edge as the browser, and keyboard backlighting is disabled.
Light Battery
This, well there’s no way to sugar coat this. This is poor battery life for an Ultrabook in 2016. The UHD model unsurprisingly suffers even more than the QHD version, but both are below average. At just about 6.5 hours on the QHD one, it is getting very close to the same battery life as the Razer Blade 14, which is a full-fledged gaming notebook. The UHD model is 67 minutes less. If you are after the ultimate in mobility, then the Razer Blade Stealth is not the notebook for you.
Heavy Battery
Adding in more CPU, NIC, and GPU shifts the balance on power draw away from the display, which is the main power draw on the light test. This pulls the UHD model a bit closer to the QHD version, with it only 51 minutes behind this time. But regardless, these heavy load times are far from the top of the Ultrabook class.
Normalized Battery Life
Removing the battery size from the equation gives us a better look at platform efficiency, since low efficiency can’t be masked by larger battery sizes in these scores.
The Stealth clearly has some work to do on efficiency. The best devices in the Ultrabook category can be in the 10-14 minutes per Watt-Hour range on the light test, and even the QHD version of the Stealth is only at 8.6. On the heavy test, it fares a bit better, but is still below the other devices.
This is Razer’s first kick at the can when building an Ultrabook. On the Razer Blade 14, the battery life is pretty decent for a gaming laptop. There are plenty of high draw components like a discrete GPU and quad-core processor to mask smaller inefficiencies of the platform. But, when looking at Ultrabooks, Razer is up against some of the biggest OEMs out there, and whom all are trying for that elusive top battery life score. There are missteps by the OEMs too, such as Dell having an issue with NVMe storage not going to sleep, which was later fixed with a BIOS update, but Razer needs to look at their platform at a component by component basis, and strive for better. Getting six or so hours out of a gaming notebook like the Blade 14 is pretty decent, but an Ultrabook in 2016 needs to be at least eight.
As an experiment, the Stealth was left running idle at the desktop at 200 nits, with just a script running to log the time every two minutes. Here it only got just 8:17, barely a squeak over eight hours, and this is with it doing nothing at all. Not everyone needs long battery life, but it’s going to be on a lot of people’s list when considering a notebook, so hopefully this will be addressed for future models.
Charge Time
The other half of the equation is charge time. This is generally limited by the AC adapter shipped with the device. In this case, that’s a 45-Watt adapter, and Razer uses the USB-C port as the charging port. The design of the charger is quite nice too, with a braided cord on the USB end and a very small adapter. One issue I’ve had with the charger though is that there is noticeable coil whine from the adapter, especially when the laptop is charged but plugged in. I’ve actually got three adapters, and all of them have some coil while, although one of them is significantly louder than the others.
Moving on the charging times, the charging time test is done with the machine idle at the desktop, and the display set to 200 nits again. Charge times are from whatever the laptop shuts off at (generally 5% battery) to 100% charge. Most devices charge pretty quickly up to 99%, and then trickle charge the last percent, so a charge graph is provided as well.
At 190 minutes, the Stealth is amazingly right around the same time as the Blade 14. The similarities seem to never end, but the result is below average but not a huge amount.
It’s great to see Razer go with a USB-C charging cable. For most laptops, the 100-Watt power availability from USB-C is going to be enough, meaning there’s a good chance laptop cords will finally be universal. In fact, it’s very convenient that I can already charge this laptop with the same cord that I use for my phone, and vice versa, and especially when travelling it’s nice to see a move to a standard charging connector.
This section is not the strongest part of the Stealth. Battery life has been sub-par and the charging speed is below average as well, and compounded by a power supply that is not inaudible. It’s well designed aesthetically but the coil whine is annoying to the point where I disconnect the laptop when its charged.
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forgot2yield28 - Thursday, March 31, 2016 - link
Won't benefit the end user? Are you kidding? If you do any kind of work viewing fine vector images, such as architectural displays, a high DPI display is a godsend. For productivity software, if you have good eyesight and don't mind shrunken UI elements, you fit your work on more of the screen. It's obviously a tradeoff against battery life, but it's a tradeoff some would gladly make. It's simply not true to state there are zero use cases where a high DPI display provides a tangible benefit.niva - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
You can disagree all you want, but anything below 1080p should be immediately disqualified from being purchased 5 years ago. An argument about 1080p for the sake of efficiency can be made, but discouraging companies from adopting higher resolution standards is just wrong. The UHD display can be ran as a 1080 for performance purposes.moozooh - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link
> An Intel GPU in a 12.5 inch laptop display that is unable to drive games at much lower resolutions should be paired with a 1366x768 panel of decent quality with good viewing angles.That is just silly. Gaming performance is never a goal with laptops of this form-factor, not even a secondary one. If you're looking for any kind of decent gaming performance you shouldn't be considering an Ultrabook at all. Their primary task is the ability to handle large amounts of text, non-computanionally-intensive media work, and internet browsing/media consumption on-the-go for as long as possible without having to be plugged in. The difference between a 120 dpi panel and a 190+ dpi panel when working with text or photos is MASSIVE. They aren't even comparable, not if you value your eyesight and comfort at all. Had you experienced that you would never write the nonsense about 768p panels.
deeps6x - Wednesday, April 6, 2016 - link
Which is why they should have had a 1080P option with a nice Matte IPS screen. 13.3", not the micro size they went with. It fits. Use it Razor. You build this fine ass machine then gimp it with the large bezels. If Dell can do it you can do it as well, if not better.Why 1080P? Because it uses less power than 3k or 4k, and extends battery life. Why matte screen? Because touch is Intel forced cow poop, and I like to be able to use my laptops with windows behind me. Or even outside. I don't know what kind of profit Intel makes by insisting touch screens are part of the 'Ultrabook' spec, but it is one of their dumbest ideas ever. Touch on a tablet? Of course. Touch on a laptop? Useless.
jlabelle - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
- Higher resolution displays, while nice looking, offer little to no added functionality after reaching the point -So...it does !
And let's be honest, we are still far from smartphone resolution. I am not pushing for 4K display on a 12" screen but there is a CLEAR difference between 768p and QHD on such size.
- after reaching the point where it becomes necessary to scale the interface in order to retain visibility of objects displayed in it -
Which is not a issue per see. Windows Store applications and UI just scaled perfectly. It is old legacy software that needs to be adapted for that so indeed, it is a good thing to evolve in this direction to force the software manufacturer to make their homework as high DPI support exists on Windows since more than 7 years.
- Anything more than that won't benefit the end user regardless of how much they think they need more pixels.-
It does. What does NOT is the aRGB screen, which, as explained, for most of the operation is detrimental to the user experience.
mikesackett.85 - Thursday, March 31, 2016 - link
768 is awful, 1080p should be the minimum. Having been spoiled by nice high DPI screens (1600-1700p) I'll never go back to anything less than FHD. For me the QHD model hits the sweet spot at $999.99, for that you get an i7, 8GB Ram, 128GB SSD, and QHD touchscreen, which is higher specs than the similarly priced XPS 13 (i5, 1080p, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, non-touch) and a similar specced MBP is $1299. This laptop also has the added bonus of having a thunderbolt connected dGPU which none of the other options have (Though the Razer dock should work on other pc's with thunderbolt ports, including the Dell XPS 13). This laptop has the ability to serve both as a road warrior and in-home gaming machine, for that I feel it is absolutely worth the price of admission.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
I agree. The battery life is a big drawback considering that the competitors offer nearly twice the battery life.A part of my wonders why won't Razer offer a model for the normal consumer. Kill the fancy keyboard backlight and offer i3 and i5 CPUs, and the Stealth could be very competitive against the likes of Dell and ASUS. I know Razer is all about gamers, but the Stealth looks like a very solid machine and given Razer's higher-end brand status and quality I'm sure they could reach a wider audience with just a few small tweaks.
zeroqw - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
Exactly. I have been monitoring the ultrabook market for 2 years and to be honest this laptop could have been a big hit with real battery life. It feels like all the ultrabook laptops got some smaller or bigger drawbacks and you just cant get what you pay for. I just hope they consider moving closer to a wider audience in the future.nerd1 - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
They can provide FHD (matte) screen with i5 version at $799, which should last twice longer than this.ImSpartacus - Tuesday, March 29, 2016 - link
Since at first glance, it appears that Razer is emulating parts of Apple's strategy, I would guess that Razer is ensuring that every modern system in the Razer "ecosystem" can have a satisfactory experience with their Core.The Blade 14 & 17 are both easily up for the task. And Razer at least attempted to ensure that every Stealth will be a good match for the Core. However, if they put a weaker 15W CPU in there, then it might not perform as well with the Core.
Is that the right thing to do? Objectively no, but I wonder if that kinda of Apple-esque way of thinking of part of the reason why the Blade laptops seem to be so cool in the first place. You take the good with the bad, I guess.