Razer Blade Stealth + Core X Review
This is Razer’s new Blade Stealth, rocking an 11th gen Intel CPU, GTX 1650Ti Max-Q, and a stunning 1080p touchscreen OLED, and next to it is the behemoth Core X, Razer external GPU enclosure. Together, they make for an interesting pair, but for nearing £2,500 for a laptop and an empty box, is it really worth it? Lets take a look at them and find out. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
Let’s put the Core X to one side for now and take a look at the laptop on it’s own, as let’s face it that’s how it’ll spend most of its time. Now the stealth lineup is Razer’s 13” ultra thin & light laptop – seriously look how tiny this is. It comes with 2 screen options for this generation, either this 1080p 60Hz Touchscreen OLED, or a 120Hz non-touch 1080p panel. Both come with the new 1165G7 and a GTX 1650ti Max-Q, alongside 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD space. All of that comes in, for the OLED anyway, at £2100. Yeah, a fair bit. And, worryingly, even more than a Macbook Pro 13”, the top end Intel one too. Of course that doesn’t have dedicated graphics and some other differences, but still.
So, what do you get for your money? A very well built machine, that’s for sure. It still features Razer’s wrist-slitting edges, seriously Razer please learn what a bevel is, but otherwise feels incredibly solid and definitely has an air of quality about it. The OLED is stunning, it’s beautiful for watching back movies and youtube on, colours are incredibly vibrant and since it’s an OLED the blacks are, well, black. My only gripe with the usage experience of the display is the gloss finish thanks to it being a touchscreen. Reflections distract pretty badly on this and you’ll struggle to find an angle that doesn’t have something annoying reflected on the screen.
Gaming on the 60Hz OLED isn’t terrible, but if gaming is your priority the 120Hz option, or better yet a more powerful machine are going to be for you instead. The screen has an almost instant response time as you’d expect, and exactly 0 ghosting which is amazing, but because it’s 60Hz it’s really slow. Input lag using the 1650ti was around 75ms which is really, really bad as for context a desktop takes 20-30ms. The playing experience isn’t too badly affected by that though, and as long as you are playing at low settings at 1080p you’ll have a reasonable time – take a look at the benchmark results using the 1650ti.
| 1650Ti LOW | COD MW | BFV | Watchdogs Legion | Fortnite |
| AVG | 74.23 | 75.61 | 50 | 178.34 |
| 1% Low | 59.38242 | 37.83579 | 38 | 124.6883 |
On low settings you get a playable experience in pretty much any game, averaging over 60FPS in anything other than Watchdogs or games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, but that’s to be expected. Surprisingly, the laptop is relatively quiet while gaming – it’s hardly silent but much better than expected. The GPU is also kept pretty cool, hitting just 70°c at its peak.
Sadly, the CPU doesn’t fair as well. That peaked at 95°c, as usual really, and cut boost clocks back significantly under load. It sat at a constant 2.6GHz while rendering in Blender, while sucking back 35W of power – which considering the 1165G7 is meant to boost to 4.7GHz and is only an “up to” 28W TDP chip, that’s surprising. Performance from the quad core was mixed. Short, bursty workloads held up well as it was able to use it’s boost clocks to its advantage. Single threaded workloads, like Cinebench 1T, were able to beat a 9750H, and even the newer 10875H in the Blade 15 Advanced, but it’s 4 cores couldn’t match them in multithreaded. Lets take a look at those results.
| 1165G7 | Cinebench 1T | Cinebench nT | Blender BMW | Blender Gooseberry |
| Result | 459 | 2104 | 7m 51s | 38m 58s |
As for the user experience, that was alright. I think this is a little small for me, my medium to large hands felt really crowded on the keyboard and while it types nicely, with rather good key feel, it wasn’t overly comfortable for me to use. The trackpad was great, still one of the best Windows trackpads on the market, and having a touchscreen was an excellent bonus. The I/O is sparing, two USB A ports, 2 USB C ports and a headphone jack. That is more than you get on a Macbook, but you’ll probably want to invest in a USB hub like this if you get one.
So that’s the laptop, but what about the Core X? Well that changes things. Since you can put any GPU you like in there – as it comes empty from Razer – you can transform the gaming experience from everything low, to everything ultra, and still get a playable gaming experience, or even use it with external monitors for a better feel.
The box itself is pretty sparse. On the standard model, it just has power in and a USB C port on the back, nothing else. If you pay an extra £120 you can get the Chroma version which has 4 USB ports and ethernet. Inside is space for up to a triple slot (ish) GPU, a 650W PSU and a 120mm fan. The exterior case is just a stylish and heavy shell. Once you drop a GPU in and power it up, and connect it via the Thunderbolt 3 cable included, you’ll need to reboot the laptop to let it work properly. When you do, games absolutely fly. I stuck an RTX 2070 in there, and the performance was much, much better. Take a look.
| 2070 ULTRA | COD MW | BFV | Watchdogs Legion | Fortnite |
| AVG | 78.17 | 63.57 | 35 | 105.56 |
| 1% Low | 62.18905 | 35.49876 | 16 | 73.90983 |
There are still some teething issues with using the Core X, namely when you disconnect it you will most likely need to restart – although if you disconnect it while still in game, Windows will handily do that for you! (I’m kidding, it’ll just blue screen…). When you do boot back up, I found I had to reinstall the NVIDIA driver for it to detect the 1650ti again, which became quite a pain. I am probably missing something here, but if I am it isn’t obvious which means plenty of other idiots like me will be making the same mistakes.
And then there is the price. This near-empty-box costs £260, or if you want the one with some USB ports and ethernet, it’s £380. Without a GPU. So all in for say an RTX 2060 Super and the more useful version, you are looking at a good £800, which is more than a lot of people spend on their entire PCs. Add to that the £2100 for the laptop, and man that’s a lot. I’d really, really like to have seen some extra storage included in the Core X – 512GB in the laptop isn’t nearly enough for a game library, I only test a couple games and it was already completely full, so much so that I had to uninstall COD MW’s campaign and coop just to get it to fit. And for this much money, I would have like to have seen some more.
For me, this laptop, and the Core X for that matter, don’t make much sense. I don’t travel enough that I’d want a tiny machine like this. When I do, a 15” laptop fits just fine, and will have more space for storage, built in horsepower rather than expensive external graphics that you can’t take with you, and more battery life, as for me this was getting around 3 hours from a full charge, admittedly with high screen brightness, but still, that’s not great. For this much money, you can buy the blade 15 advanced with the 300Hz display and the RTX 2070 Max-Q, and get more power, including a faster CPU, the same built quality and usage experience, but have more room on your desk, and a more seamless experience too. Personally, I’d buy a Triton 300 and be done with it, but that’s me.
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TechteamGB Score
