Razer Blade Stealth and Core Review

Interior

In redesigning the Blade Stealth, Razer moved from a 45Wh battery to a 53.6Wh one all within the same chassis. This is an impressive capacity for a laptop of this size, and opening the unit up reveals that it utterly dominates the internals, occupying a little over half of the available space and confining the motherboard, CPU, RAM, SSD and cooling solution to a small area at the top.


The custom motherboard is very small relative to the hardware and I/O ports it contains – it has an impressively small footprint for sure.


A peak inside reveals that the LPDDR3 1,866MHz DRAM is embedded and thus not user-swappable, which is fair enough. There's no easy access to the M.2 SSD either – it would appear to require a full disassembly to get at. The SSD's model number in the BIOS tells us Razer is using a Samsung PM951 M.2 SSD, which is rated at 1,000MB/sec read but only 280MB/sec write – considerably slower than your typical SATA SSD. Presumably, Razer is using the same SSD for the 128GB (600MB/sec read, 150MB/sec write) and 512GB (1,050MB/sec read, 560MB/sec write) configurations, although the PM951 isn't available in 1TB so it must be using something different there. Still, it may not be the fastest SSD around in terms of raw speed, but NVMe PCI-E drives are more power-efficient and have lower latency, so it's far from bad news.


The CPU cooling solution is extremely low profile and tightly integrated. There appears to be a pair of copper heat pipes – one big, one small – each feeding a different heatsink and fan combination.


Ventilation is very limited – just two small sections on the underside, which aren't particularly well positioned relative to the fans. Still, it's only a 15W CPU, so this shouldn't be a major issue.