The 2018 Razer Blade Stealth is an awesome Ultrabook, but double-check for these abnormalities

[Redaktion]

Loose USB Type-C charging cable, electronic noise, discharging battery when gaming, and abnormally slow processor performance round up the list of issues we encountered during our review on the latest Blade Stealth laptop.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-2018-Razer-Blade-Stealth-is-an-awesome-Ultrabook-but-double-check-for-these-abnormalities.381056.0.html

[S.Yu]

To be fair, Intel should be coming up with a brand new line of Atom next year, lol.

[juodvarnis]

14" msi PS42 with geforce 1050 or same 25w gf150 should be a better option

[Markus]

So why did id get 88% and "very good"?

If I understand it correctly, your model had ALL those issues? Often review units are hand picked by the manufacturer, so expect units in the wild to be even more problematic.

[annom]

All of the above issues you described are also happening in my model. Plan on exchanging for another unit, if the same happens, plan on finding an alternative ultrabook. Frustrating for a product that costs $1600

[S.Yu]

So why did id get 88% and "very good"?

If I understand it correctly, your model had ALL those issues? Often review units are hand picked by the manufacturer, so expect units in the wild to be even more problematic.

As far as I can tell it's the chassis and performance (quirks aside) that earned the most points, the battery life, speaker quality and trackpad are also above average for a gaming notebook.

[Markus]

I think ignoring "quirks" in the score is the wrong approach for such an expensive laptop. They need to be called out for this, with a big deduction in points.

Loose charge ports and random performance drops are not acceptable.

IF they fix this the points can be increased again.

[Will]

I've sent back 2 of the 2017 model for the exact same USB-C issue. If the 2018 have that problem as well, clearly they have no intention of fixing it.

[anon]

The slow discharge under full load is, in my opinion, totally fine. The alternative that I do not want to see is to cripple the laptop's performance.

However, I also call on you, notebook check, to test for this behavior with a third-party charger of a higher rating, like the 87W Apple charger or, if you can find one, a 100W brick.

If I were to buy this laptop, I would want the MX150 version, yet I would not expect to game for many hours at a time on such a system. Therefore, the presumably smaller, lighter 65W charger is a better value for my use case. I would enjoy both portability and high burst performance.

Please don't encourage Razer to cripple their laptop's performance with a firmware update. I see this in my Dell XPS 15 9560. When charging over USB type-C it will draw half as much power as with the stock barrel charger. In order not to discharge under load, the GPU performance is crippled, even worse than running on battery! I strongly regret this "feature" which, in my opinion, serves only to avoid the kind of public complaint you have raised.

[Eliot Lovell]

I had 4 2018 models that all has the loose USB-C problem - when the last one broke and I couldn't charge the laptop I returned it, gave up and bought something else.

Do you have any updates on this - from Razer maybe?

Thanks :)

[Graham]

i bought this laptop in May 2019 and it still has the discharge problem when gaming, even when plugged in. This is definitely not acceptable. I'll be contacting support, if they can't fix it, I'll be returning it and getting something else.