Razer Blade Stealth 13 goes white and adds Intel Ice Lake
At IFA 2019, Razer brings Ice Lake and a Mercury White model to its 13-inch Blade Stealth ultrabook laptop lineup.
Razer's refresh of its Blade Stealth 13 ultraportable laptop skates into fall on Intel's 10nm Ice Lake processors with a quad-core Core i7-1065G7 U-series processor, a Mercury White alternative to basic black (and pink!) and new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 discrete graphics to replace its MX150 options.
The white version replaces the entry level model at a slightly higher price -- $1,500 rather than $1,400 (based on current pricing, that means it'll probably run £1,400 and AU$2,549 in the UK and Australia) -- and like all the refreshed models gets a boost to 16GB RAM and includes the same factory-calibrated sRGB displays as before. Razer says the Iris Plus integrated graphics in the i7-1068G7 chip deliver performance about on par with that of the MX150 it incorporated into the previous higher-end models. Razer runs the CPU at the full 25 watts, not stepped down as we'll see in some systems.
If you've been following Intel Project Athena developments, this meets all the same requirements though it's not certified, thanks to a claimed battery-life boost to about 10 hours, up from our tested 6.8 hours. Now it even looks more like a MacBook Air alternative than before.
The two higher-end models, one with a 1080p display and the other with a 4K touch display, both have 512GB SSD; previously, only the 4K model did. As mentioned earlier, they incorporate the GTX 1650, which performs roughly the same as the GTX 1060 -- so definitely a graphics step up from the old MX150, though still only occasionally capable of reaching 60fps or more in 1080p. The middle model will run $1,800 ($100 more than before) and the top model $2,000. Based on current pricing, they'll probably cost £1,600 and £1,800, or AU$2,879 and $3,399.
All of them are slated to ship by the end of September.
Correction, Sept. 15: A previous version of this story implied that this is a Project Athena-certified laptop. That is not the case.