Razer Blade Stealth (2016) Review - An Ultrabook for Gaming?

A comprehensive review covering an unboxing, build quality, internal hardware, screen, keyboard, trackpad. With extensive gaming performance tests. Reviewed before launch of Razer Core.

Is the Razer Blade Stealth worth it? Is it a good gaming laptop? Does it over heat or throttle? What is the Razer Core? Watch and find out!

More info: www.razerzone.com/Razer_Blaze_Stealth
Review unit: i7/8G/128GB/HD520 - US$999

Review:

My background:
I wanted this machine primarily as a working machine and not a gaming laptop since it is incredible powerful and the 14” display make it big enough to work on it (programming) and small enough for travel (I wish there were more 14” laptops!). Overall this looks like a very good alternative to a Macbook Pro 15” or a Dell Precision 3800 (both with dedicated GPU) or a Dell XPS 15.
Before buying I read a bunch of reviews and many people were complaining about stuff like the battery life, the trackpad keys or the glossy display (touchscreen version). Anyway, I wanted to paint my own picture since my use case may be different than the ones of many reviewers. My current machine is a 5 year old Toshiba Satelite R630 which is about to breath it’s last breath very soon. So an update came very handy and I did not mind a high price tag if quality and all my requirements are fulfilled.
Review of:
New Razer Blade 14"
QHD+ Touchscreen
256GB SSD
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M graphics
Price: 2399$

Pro:
+ Build quality: is outstanding, it feels like a raw piece of metal (heavy but also like it would never, ever break)
+ Display: Gorgeous, everything looks super sharp on the QHD+ display, adjusting the display with one finger is super easy and it stays exactly where you put it! I noticed reflections on the screen but not more than on any other glossy display. I did not work with it outside in the sun though.
+ Keyboard: I have never had a better typing experience. It feels better than the Macbook Air my wife is using (and 1000x better the one on my current machine :))
+ Trackpad: I really, really enjoyed the trackpad! It is very smooth and you don’t feel any friction. The buttons below the trackpad make a very pleasant noise (many people complained about it, but I liked it!). I compared it to the Macbook Pro 13” trackpad (the one with force click) and Apple is still ahead of their competition (although I also enjoyed the trackpad of the XPS 15). But if you don’t compare it, then you’ll be very happy with this trackpad. It is very good!
+ Gaming: as I sad above, I did not buy this for gaming but I you have a machine that powerful standing on your desk…I just could not resist. So I installed Hitman Absolution and played a little bit on the highest setting. Everything looks wonderful and amazing and the Blade did not choke even a little bit!
+ (Shipment/Return: I received the machine after 2 days and was able to return it without any issues. I got my money back 7 days.)

Neutral:
+- Noise: the machine is quiet in normal use. The fans will kick off when playing games, but hey, that’s what they are supposed to do and usually you’ll wear headphones anyway. And even with fans kicked on, the fans sound good (high quality) and were not really bothering me
+- Heat: I did not experience any issues with heat. The part above the keyboard got warm while playing Hitman, but that wasn’t really bad.

Con:
- Wide bezel: Although the display is super nice, on thing that caught my attention right after booting the machine was the thick, wide bezel around the display. I told myself that I will forget about that soon, but every time I looked at my old machine (which has a fairly thin bezel) the thought came back. Also, when looking at other machine (e.g. Dell XPS 13 2015), the future seems to be no bezel and I find that much more pretty.
- Touchscreen: I bought the touchscreen version because of the higher resolution (and also because I was a little tricked by all the ads that tell us “touchscreens are necessary in Windows laptops nowadays”). The truth is, I played with it for 5 minutes and used it never again. It seems complete useless to me and I would rather buy the version with a lower resolution without touch (that should also boost the battery life a little bit).
- Performance: To be honest, I did not run an actual benchmark or stress test but these are my observations:
-- When switching between windows/app using the touchscreen I noticed a short glitch every time (maybe an OS issue?).
-- I used chrome to browse on Facebook and when typing a message the message would appear 3-4 seconds after I typed it. I tried Internet Explorer and IE Metro and both showed the same issue although not as bad (maybe 0.5 second delay). I don’t know why that happened considering the stats of this beast it seems impossible. My internet connection should not have been a problem because I was able to browse Facebook on my old machine without any issues and no download was active in the network.
- Battery life: I unplugged the machine, set the brightness to the lowest setting and disabled sleep mode etc. Occasionally I would look some stuff up on the internet but 80% of the time it would just sit on the table with some programs and apps open (Internet Explorer, Chrome, bing news, ...).
Result: 5:30 hours of battery life. Not really good. And it did not meet my expectations at all.
- (Ubuntu compatibility: When my old Laptop (Toshiba Satellite R630 – 5 years old) starting lagging, I put Ubuntu on it (for the first time in my life and I was a pretty hard windows advocate). I really fell in love with that OS and do not want to miss it anymore! So my plan was to use Razers powerful hardware and incredible build quality to get an ultra-portable Ubuntu workstation. I did not too much research for that so when I got it I discovered that many people experienced many issues and the battery life drops to 1.5 hours (https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads/linux-on-a-new-blade.4115/). Really disappointing for me, but actually not Razers fault because they never advertised the Blade to work with Linux. For me it was a bummer nevertheless but it does not affect my final score since I could have known about these issues and the machine is not made for Ubuntu!)

General experience:
Overall I had a nice experience with this laptop. Although I have to admit that I did not feel a big difference when I was only working on stuff. Browsing, writing documents and so on is something I can still do on my old machine and the nice keyboard and track is only nice if you have in mind where you come from and what ‘bad’ feels like. But overall I did not have the ‘Wow’ effect while using the Razer Blade. Everything felt very, very nice, but it did not feel like it is worth the 2400$.
This is only my perspective and people who use this machine mostly plugged in AND they like Windows 8 AND they actually use the touchscreen AND they do not mind a shorter battery life AND they actually use it for gaming will probably have a way better experience than me.
I will give this machine 3.5 stars (rounded up to 4) since it does a very good job at everything it advertised. My use case is different and I had just hoped I could have used it for that. Unfortunately not so I sent it back.

Grab it below:

http://amzn.to/1KWgf6p