Today we have some news that is kind of unexpected. Razer, the company known for gaming peripherals and gaming laptops such as the Razer Blade, has decided to enter the Ultrabook market with the launch of the Razer Blade Stealth. Not only is an Ultrabook not something expected from Razer, it is also priced very competitively and undercuts the competition on price.

Razer did not cut any corners either when designing the Stealth. Just like it’s more powerful and higher priced siblings, it is built out of a CNC-milled aluminum chassis, which is a designing feature of Razer laptops. But despite the solid frame, the laptop is still only 0.52-inches thick and weighs in at just 2.75 lbs. On the styling front, it keeps the black finish of other Razer laptops, but also outdoes them with a full “Chroma” keyboard with individually lit RGB keys. I’ve been hoping that they would do this for a while when reviewing the Razer Blade, so it’s great to see the RGB keyboard come to the Stealth model.

The 12.5-inch display comes in two options. The base model is a QHD (2560x1440) resolution, but you can also opt for a UHD (3840x2160) model with full Adobe RGB color gamut. I need to check in with Razer on how they are going to handle the wider color gamut, and will let you know after we get some hands-on time on the show floor.

The Stealth, as an Ultrabook, is going to be powered by Ultrabook class components, which in this case is the Intel Core i7-6500U processor. This Skylake chip features two cores, hyperthreading, and a base/turbo frequency of 2.5 GHz / 3.1 GHz. I was hoping that Razer would also offer a model with Intel’s Iris GPU, but that won’t be the case, at least at launch. The only memory option is 8 GB of LPDDR3-1866, and storage options range from 128 GB to 256 GB of PCIe storage on the QHD model, and 256 GB to 512 GB on the UHD model. The battery life will need to be tested, but the laptop has a 45 Wh battery, so it’s not going to be class leading in that regard.

For connectivity, the Stealth will have two USB 3.0 ports, and a USB 3.1 Type-C connector with Thunderbolt 3 support. The Thunderbolt is a key component to the Stealth, thanks to the accessory that Razer is also launching.

The Razer Core is a Thunderbolt 3 connected external GPU, which also acts as a docking station for the Stealth. With a single cable connection, the laptop can power an external display, all of the docking connections with four USB 3.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet, and support for a 375W GPU.

The Core features a built-in 500W power supply, and the GPU support is for any single card which is full-length and double-wide, which means pretty much any GPU out there. The Core also features two additional Chroma lighting zones so that you can tailor it to your liking.

Razer has not yet announced any updates to the Razer Blade or Razer Blade Pro, but I would expect that both of these will also feature support for the Core when they do get their next refresh.

The Core supports plug and play with validated graphics cards, without the need to reboot.

The addition of the Razer Core brings back some of the gaming performance that Razer has been known for, although with a U series CPU it will be interesting to see what level of GPU is required to become CPU bound, especially with DX 12. If we can track down a review unit, we’ll try to sort that out.

The Razer Blade Stealth will be on-sale starting today, with a starting price of just $999. Considering the high resolution panel and Core i7, this undercuts most, if not all, of the Ultrabook competition on price. The top end 4K model with the UHD display and 512 GB of storage will be $1599.

Source: Razer

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  • ImSpartacus - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link

    Skylake desktop i3s are kinda nice.

    I'm fascinated to see if it causes any substantial bottlenecking because it isn't clocked very high, but the concept of gaming with a 2C/4T Skylake cpu is sound.
  • OrphanageExplosion - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link

    Really confused by this product. I have a cheap games machine that has a GTX 950 with a Core i3 6100 - and I'm often hitting CPU limits. The ultrabook looks great, but the CPU is much weaker, so unless you're playing Tomb Raider or other older CPU-light games, I'm not really sure whether you'd want to hook this up with anything better than a 950 or even a 750 ti.

    And if that's the case, surely you'd be better off buying an ultrabook and building an i3/950 gaming PC and presumably saving a fair amount of cash?
  • moozooh - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link

    I can tell you why you're confused. By having presented both the laptop and the GPU enclosure together at the same event, Razer (and, in a way, Anandtech) has provoked somewhat of a misunderstanding that their design intent is to pair these two pieces together. Whereas it's only one of the possible options; they DON'T HAVE TO be paired. You can use the Stealth as you would use any other Ultrabook-type laptop, and you can use the Core with any laptop that has a TB3 interface available.
  • ImSpartacus - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link

    What kind of games are you playing that are too much for a 6100?

    I'm always fascinated by the idea of CPU load in a gaming situation.

    Techspot did a neat review on the 6100 and it definitely kept up with the competition on cpu-heavy games like civilization.

    http://www.techspot.com/review/1087-best-value-des...

    And then they did an update once they could overclock it to a monstrous 4.7ghz and it wasn't even close.

    http://www.techspot.com/review/1108-intel-locked-s...
  • WinglessDwarf - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link

    Civilization? CPU intensive? Nah! I play CIV V on my desktop with an AMD Phenom II x4 965 (which isn't that great). My PC also only has a GTS 250 and 4GB of 1333mhz ddr3 ram.

    The razer blade stealth could probably CIV V without the core.

    Mind you CIV V occasionally crashes but I think it's got more to do with the fact that I'm only using DirectX 9.0 with such a low spec graphics card.
    Windows XP for the win.
  • Stig995 - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link

    The BIG question is can you officially buy either of these outside the US?

    The rest of the world sti can't buy a Blade without resorting to a Gray import :-(
  • mobutu - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link

    razer blade STEALTH with VISIBLE bezels from the moon. 2016?
    the real star is that external vgabox. the rest is not worth it.
  • wintermute000 - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link

    They missed a trick there by not having 3.5" HDD bays (bonus points if multiple and RAID capable) - even if it required another say USB3 connection - then its truly an all-in-one enclosure
  • jasonelmore - Thursday, January 7, 2016 - link

    that bus is already going to be bandwidth limited, the more stuff you put in there, the more it has to share over a PCIe x4 bus. Gigabit Ethernet, USB Devices, etc.. you can always use a external SSD or 4TB HDD and use one of the USB 3 ports on the HUB.

    With a little modding you could add it inside and make your own enclosure.
  • Haldane - Thursday, January 7, 2016 - link

    The only thing that's stopping me from buying this is the RAM... 8GB of RAM is the min req for many games nowadays...

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