for three generations the Razer Blade 14
has ODed me with its astonishingly compact design fantastic aesthetic and
superb build quality which puts the Razer Blade stealth 2016 the product I'm
evaluating today in a somewhat unique
position one of being on the inside
looking in because I'll be deciding on a new daily driver notebook before this
video is over and whether Razer wins or
loses Razer is going to
lose which will also cause Razer to win
meaning that Razer will also lose which okay the joke's old now roll
the
intro Intel has brought ddr4 to the mainstream with their core
i76700k processor check out the link in the video description to learn more I
think the smart thing to do here would be to begin with a physical tour which
is easy because Razer has taken just about a pure if it ain't broke don't fix
it approach in this regard the top of the machine is black with only a razor
logo the illumination of which can be disabled now if you want a nice touch
and a couple of accent ridges to Adorn it just like it's bigger brother the
bottom has two rubber feet the rear taller than the front to Incline the
keyboard gently toward the user and a couple of air intakes just like its
bigger brother and if I looked hard enough I could probably find a dozen
such similarities but you didn't come here for similarities you came here for
differences so let's focus in on those for a moment here the discret left and
right click buttons under the touchpad have been replaced by a gesture aware
click pad this is a change that would bother me if they hadn't implemented it
so well no issues in two-handed operation and palm rejection was solid
so good on the speakers are both narrower and
closer to the edge to salvage as much room as possible for the surprisingly
spacious keyboard which has been completely overhauled with RGB lighting
more on that later the big change though is that the blade stealth is
significantly thinner and lighter than the blade 14 shaving 7 in diagonally off
the screen size and about 75 of a kilogram off the weight making it only
2.75 lbs so light enough then that I can
pretty much not tell whether it's in my
4 and 12b backpack or not something that I can't say about my daily driver blade
14 and it manages to do all of this
while maintaining a very respectable mix of IO Apple should take notes on the
right is a USB 3.0 port and an HDMI 1.4
output then on the left is a 3 and 1 12 mm headphone microphone combo Jack
another USB 3.0 port and a USB type-c
connector that handles Thunderbolt USB 3.0 DisplayPort and charging duties
through the compact included AC adapter this is the port that will be used to
enable the theoretically hot swappable although I did manage to break it at the
demo at CES external dedicated graphics
card housing that they're calling the Razer core which I will be covering in
an upcoming separate video today though I'm focused on the blade stealth as an
Ultrabook because that's what it is while the slim exterior definitely hints
at what makes the blad stealth so different from razer's previous mobile
devices all of which adhered to that for
gamers by Gamers slogan that they've got displayed so prominently on their
website the inside of this machine reveals outright that it is not a gaming
device so regardless of which model you buy then I've got the 1199 256 gig Quad
HD skew but I spent most of my time with the 999 base model the one with the
white vinyl skin from dbrand here you'll be getting a things an Intel Core i7
6500 U 2.5 GHz base 3.1 GHz boost
hyperthreaded dual core processor with Intel HD graphics 520 yes my friends
onboard graphics and 8 gigs of non-upgraded
soldered dual Channel low power DDR 3
then depending on which trim level you opt for you can get anywhere from 128
gigs to 512 gigs of unspecified m.2 NVMe
storage on mine it was was a Samsung pm951 so about as basic as it gets for
an NVMe drive with sequential rights limited on the 128 gig version to the
rated 150 megabytes or so thanks to its
TLC nand do note however that I would
take a basic native PCIe drive over a
SATA one any day of the week the other user configurable spec is the screen
which I guess leads me to one of the things that frustrates me about Razer
systems what if I don't mind the 2560x1440 touchscreen srgb color space
display it's the one I've got here and frankly everything about it looks
fantastic at 13.3 in contrast brightness
and sharpness are great so what if I
want that instead of the Adobe RGB 4k
monitor whose advantages while tangible won't benefit me personally and whose
higher resolution will drain my battery faster but I also want a 512 gig SSD
I will need to upgrade it after the fact although all of this is irrelevant if
the experience of using the blade stealth isn't a good one and you
shouldn't buy one anyway so how is that
well for a $1,000 machine the 6500 U
processor with its 90% usage while installing applications and CPU
bottleneck while testing the maximum usb3 transfer speed with screen
recording running in the background might still not be the right solution
for me personally but if your mobile Computing needs are a little lighter
than mine they have nailed a lot of stuff here the 45w hour battery turned
in a solid result at PC Mark's recommended brightness setting although
it should be noted if you want to use it outside it goes a lot brighter than that
and I didn't realize how much I missed my touchcreen until I did my XPS 15
review without one which you can check out here by the way a one-finger hinge
is really hard to do on a device this light without having it feel flimsy but
they nailed that and Razer speaker camera and microphone quality continues
to embarrass their competitors attention
industry notebooks or communication devices this stuff is important so good
on Razer for at least maintaining their above average standard here which leads
us back finally again to the keyboard Far and Away the biggest departure from
previous razor notebooks and everyone else for that matter the layout with two
function keys six full rows a great size considering the screen size and a
sensible key cap font this time around is IMO perfect except for the half
height up and down arrows those still bother me and it's still fully
reconfigurable with remapping and macros using synapse but now it's RGB as well
so you can actually change things like color you can add canned patterns and
effects to it you can change the effects and patterns for different applications
including games with both first and third party tools and just generally
personalize the device in a way that hasn't been done on a laptop before
freaking awesome there are however some
trade-offs the new backlighting does not illuminate the whole key the way the old
type did so while the function row lights up when it's activated the actual
functions themselves are not easy to see in the dark and more importantly the
feel of the switches has been altered very significantly they are quieter
which some people will appreciate but they are also less crisp feeling than
I'm used to something that I sincerely hope does not carry over to the new
blade when I review it shortly to be clear it didn't slow me down much but it
was not as pleasing to type on something that I would personally consider more
important for a productivity-minded as opposed to a gaming device leading us
then to the conclusion of today's video the blade stealth takes the ID and the
build quality of the blade 14 which has gotten me uh wow that's a cool black
MacBook more than a few times at airport security checkpoints strips out
everything gamer about it including the video card and even the Bizarro land
keycap font in a clear effort to Target the mainstream and slashes the price in
half I mean who saw that one coming from Razer of all people but what does that
mean then would I buy one not until Ultra books can have quadcore CPUs and
16 gigs of RAM but but would I recommend
one to someone in search of an Ultra Book today you're damn right I would
this is a very compelling answer to the MacBook Air something even Apple doesn't
have right now since they seem to be on a we don't need ports kick so good work
Razer this is a great machine especially
for the price speaking of good work let's give a
good work to our friends over at dbrand who no longer are limited to phones and
game consoles yes my friends they now offer skins for mac and PC laptops
including the blade stealth so if you're kind of going oh wow ginus that white
one is really cool how do I get my hands on some of that or what if I wanted a
different color head over to the link in the video description dbrand.com and you
can use their configurator to try out all kinds of different combinations of
different colors and textures of skins to get your device looking exactly the
way you want it their skins fit like a freaking glove like seriously no one
would know looking at this that you've put a vinyl skin on it as opposed to it
shipping out of the factory like that and they're affordable and they ship
worldwide so check it out at the link in the video description if you want to
make your device more scratch resistant if you want to make it look cooler and
you don't want to spend a ton of money doing it they're the guys to go to so
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uendo ensues