Razer Blade Stealth Laptop Review 2022

The Design of Razer Blade Stealth 13

The Blade Stealth’s aesthetic, in our opinion, is best described as subtle. It’s essentially a black matte surface of glass, plastic, and aluminum. However, it’s not a very big one, it’s a compact black slab with a quality touch that impresses you the more you operate it.

Even the traditional bright green Razer symbol looks overpowered on this Stealth variant. Trust us, it looks amazing. Outside of its illuminated keyboard, the other color shades are of green color, it comes out from the 2 A-Type USB terminals on each side of the machine.  Quite frankly, we knew Razer was going to find a way to incorporate the green aesthetic into the design.

Being one of the slimmest gaming machines we’ve ever reviewed, the Blade Stealth 13 dimensions are 11.99 x 8.27 x 0.6-inches (HWD). In contrast, Apple’s latest M1 MacBook Pro sizes up to 11.97 x 8.36 x 0.61-inches. The Blade Stealth 13 is only a little slimmer than the MacBook Pro, but it’s not by much.

Weighing 3.26 pounds in comparison to 3.00 pounds, it is somewhat heavier than the MacBook Pro. If you are hauling it on your regular commute as well as around your home, the weight difference is unlikely to make a major impact. Certainly, it’s still there, but when we compared the weights of both of these two computers, we couldn’t detect the gap.

A dark keyboard featuring single-zone RGB illumination as well as a touchpad sits underneath the top. As per Razer, the screen features thin bezels along each side that measure only 4.9mm. A larger bezel runs around the top to allow room for its 720p IR webcam, which interfaces with Windows Hello to access the laptop via face detection.

Single Thunderbolt 4 USB-C connector, one USB-A port, as well as a 3.5mm headphone connector, are located on the left flank of the laptop. Additional Thunderbolt 4 outlet is located on the opposite flank, including a USB-A port.

The laptop’s battery juice can be refilled using any Thunderbolt 4 outlet. This leaves you with exactly 3 Thunderbolt 4 slots to attach devices and gadgets. There aren’t enough slots to hook up everything you love, so that’s one of the drawbacks of this model. Still, as opposed to the current MacBook Pro, which has only two ports, this device has four!

Because the OLED display is shiny rather than matte such as the Blade Stealth we recently tested, you’ll have to battle with its shiny surface. Having said that, we did not feel that reflections are particularly oppressive or obtrusive. We did check the touch-sensitive section of the monitor, although only grudgingly. The display looks stunning, and the last thing we wanted to do was leave our smudges on it. So yes, we had to tap and swipe on it just to check out its quality and quite amazingly encountered no troubles.

Its keyboard is indeed a thrill to work on, offering exactly sufficient response to let users know whenever a keypress has been recognized before the buttons bounce back to their original position. Rather than a single illumination zone, we still prefer that its keyboard featured separately lighted keys. We are sure this is another sacrifice for the compact package size. The touchpad underneath it is sensitive to movements and presses, but again, we think it should have been a little bigger.

Lastly, if you talk about the cover design of this monster. It surely has outdone itself. It has hit the mark of the Ultrabook milestones with its sleek aesthetics.

Performance and Gaming of Razer Blade Stealth 13

An 11th Edition Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, Nvidia GTX 1650 Ti featuring Max-Q Graphics card, 16 Gigabytes 3,733Mhz of Random access memory, as well as a 512 Gigabyte SSD are integrated within the Blade Stealth 13’s body. That overall setup provides adequate energy for photo and video work, as well as moderately intensive gameplay experience – if of course, you are prepared to change your settings accordingly.

Given below are the benchmark scores for this laptop in comparison to the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i and Acer Nitro 5.

If you look at the overall performance, it is not all that spectacular. This is yet another sacrifice you pay for choosing a compact design.

However, as the norm goes, the tests do not provide a comprehensive view of total performance.  Even though the Blade Stealth 13 occasionally lagged up and seemed clunky, especially throughout the installation process while loading multiple games as well as patches, the Blade Stealth 13 is far more competent at achieving 60 fps in several Blockbuster games.

In essence, we were able to achieve sixty frames per second in both Warzone as well as the latest Call of Duty Black Ops. none of these 2 games were performing at Ultra and even High configurations, however, at Medium configurations, 60 Frames per second was achievable — satisfactory for the Ultrabook size aspect. To be truthful, we did not notice much of a shift around Medium and Low. We believe this is due to the OLED display.

OLED displays on gaming-oriented laptops have a love-hate relationship with us. They attract us since their tones are vivid and bold, and the images are clean and sharp.  At the same time, we despise OLED screens because these make switching down to a regular LCD panel tough.

In terms of space, 512GB isn’t much, so you will need an external hard drive if you want to store larger files to free up space for video games.

Battery life of Razer Blade Stealth 13

We ran the Blade Stealth on our normal battery evaluation testing, which included dimming the screen to 50%, switching off the keyboard backlight, as well as disconnecting any wireless connectivity except Wi-Fi. We subsequently conducted the Contemporary Office battery benchmark in PCMark 10, which went for 7 hours and 7 minutes until shutting down completely.

On the list of gaming-oriented laptops that we have reviewed this season, this one comes in close to the top, having a battery life that’s excellent enough to carry you through a whole day of gaming without having to charge up.

Software Features of Razer Blade Stealth 13

Razer made it very clear that their devices do not come with any pre-installed software, programs, or bloatware. And that is true. Razer’s Synapse software came preloaded on each Blade Stealth, and it is utilized to manage the keyboard illumination, fan speed, as well as energy settings.

Aside from that, the Blade Stealth comes with simply what Windows offers in regular Windows 10 software. On a $1,999 buck notebook, it’s nice not having to worry about removing random bloatware or virus protection applications.

As far as the Synapse goes, we are still trying to figure out how to operate it effectively. The top-level menus and sections are plain befuddling to us. You’ll fit in perfectly if you are a long-time Razer fan. But, there’ll be a whole new learning process if this is your initial Razer device.