Razer Blade Stealth review:

Afer turning heads and garnering accolades at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, the Razer Blade Stealth is here. And having spent some quality hands-on time with the final product, it's not hard to see why this slim Windows 10 laptop with a 12.5-inch screen caught so many eyes when it was unveiled in January. Razer, best known for its keyboards and other gaming peripherals, saw a hole in the 13-inch laptop market (which we interpret loosely to include 12.5-inch screens), and drove a very unique matte black truck through it.

This is not exactly a slim-at-all-costs high-fashion ultrabook. Nor is it a gaming laptop, despite Razer's years of experience in the PC gaming biz. It's an amalgam of many different ideas about what a high-end ultrabook-style laptop should be, including some wish-list items we've wanted for years -- and a few we never thought to even ask for.
The company's previous laptops have been well-received gaming systems with 17-inch or 14-inch displays, all notable for being reasonably thin and light despite packing in mid- to high-end gaming components. The Razer Blade Stealth keeps much of the look and feel of the previous models, such as the matte-black shell, rigid construction, minimalist design and green snake-like logo. But the most important thing to keep in mind is that this is not actually a gaming laptop.

A Razer laptop without a dedicated graphics card sounds like an Apple product without an app store -- unexpected, and potentially not playing to its maker's strengths. But this is still Razer after all. So while the Blade Stealth is not a gaming laptop by itself, Razer plans for it to eventually become one component of a larger gaming ecosystem. Announced in January at CES 2016 -- but not yet available to even preorder -- is the Razer Core, an external box built to house a single desktop graphics card (for example, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980), and route its graphics rendering power to the laptop via Thunderbolt-enabled USB-C connection. (That single wire will also handle power duties, too.)

Others have gone down this road before, attempting to create an external graphics solution for laptops, but no one has yet cracked the code of balancing price, performance, flexibility, and design. Asus has offered similar products off and on for years, including a new version coming later this year, while Dell attempted to add an external GPU box to its Alienware 13 in 2014, but that product was too expensive and too proprietary to catch on.

At some point later this year, we'll hopefully hook up a Razer Core unit to a Razer Blade Stealth laptop and be able to judge it as a gaming machine. But for now, we're looking at it strictly as a flare-filled ultrabook with an optional 4K screen. If anything, that restriction makes the Blade Stealth even more impressive. It offers a great design and high-end components, plus extras such as the highly programmable and fun to play with backlit Chroma keyboard, all starting at $999 or AU$1,549. There's no separate UK pricing right now, but the US base price works out to around £705.

The base model includes a 2,560x1,440 (QHD) touchscreen display (not 4K, but still pretty good), a current-gen Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Adding more storage and the optional 4K display jumps the price up, and the model reviewed here combines a 4K screen and 256GB of storage for $1,399/AU$2,149.

Price as reviewed$1,399/AU$2,149Display size/resolution13-inch 3,840 x 2,160 touchscreenPC CPU2.5Ghz Intel Core i7-6500UPC Memory8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHzGraphics1024MB Intel HD Graphics 520Storage256GB SSDNetworking802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0Operating systemWindows 10 Home (64-bit)

Conclusion

For use as a travel laptop, I'd lean towards that QHD model, as the resolution is still more than high enough for something this size, plus it costs less and promises better battery life. With a QHD display and 128GB of storage, it's a fantastic value if you're looking to hit that magic $999 number, and likely will run for significantly longer per charge, based on our previous experience with 4K vs. non-4K laptops.
But the 4K display and added storage space make the higher-end configuration tested here are worthwhile upgrades, too, and the extra-bright display is really a joy to watch. While we're eager to see if Razer can pull off the Core add-on and its promise of high-end slim laptop gaming, the Stealth is a fantastic highly portable laptop all on its own.

For another option in a 12.5-inch 4K/Core i7 laptop, Toshiba has dropped the price of its similar-on-paper Radius 12 from $1,599 to just $1,199, but that system had so many ergonomic and usability issues that it failed to impress. Plus, you can't set it in a dark room and have it cycle through a trippy rainbow of keyboard colors until your eyes bleed.

          SYSTEM CONFIGURATIONS

Razer Blade StealthMicrosoft Windows 10 Home (64-bit); 2.5HGz Intel Core i7-6500U; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 1,024MB (dedicated) Intel HD Graphics 520; 256GB SSDApple MacBook Air (13-inch, 2015)Apple Yosemite OSX 10.10.2; 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-5250U; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 1,536MB Intel HD Graphics 6000; 128GB SSDHP Envy 13Microsoft Windows 10 Home (64-bit); 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-6200U; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 128MB (dedicated) Intel HD Graphics 520; 128GB SSDLenovo Yoga 900Microsoft Windows 10 Home (64-bit); 2.5HGz Intel Core i7-6500U; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 128MB (dedicated) Intel HD Graphics 520; 512GB SSDMicrosoft Surface Pro 4Microsoft Windows 10 Pro (64-bit) 2.4GHz Intel C