Razer Blade Stealth Review
Razer Blade Stealth: 3D Mark & Far Cry 2
Before we jump into this next set of benchmarks we need to reiterate that the Razer Blade Stealth is in no way intended to be a gaming machine (on its own) despite Razer's gaming heritage. It is subject to the same performance constraints as any other ultrabook and will be assessed accordingly.
Futuremark 3D Mark
We step up our graphics assault with the tried and true 3D Mark Cloud Gate benchmark. This isn't as punishing as the Fire Strike benchmark but is still plenty to give low-power and portable PC's like this a good workout. The Cloud Gate benchmark consists of an array of graphical and physics based tests to simulate a typical load from a DirectX 10 title. Following this we broke out the newer DirectX 11 targeted Skydiver benchmark to see how it fairs against notebooks packing discrete GPU's.
The Stealth puts up a good fight against Cloud Gate with a respectable score of 5841. Gloud Gate serves up a longer runtime than Cinebench's OpenGL test so thermal throttling becomes a greater concern and we suspect this is the reason behind the Stealth's slightly weaker score although it still beats out HP's Spectre x360 by a decent margin.
We don't usually beat up integrated graphics chips with the Skydiver test but we thought it would be useful here to demonstrate the difference between an ultrabook and a gaming notebook. To put it simply, Intel's HD 520 graphics chip gets crushed by even entry level gaming machines that utilize an Nvidia GTX 960M or higher-end discrete GPU. If you want to game with this notebook we urge you to weigh out the Razer Core as an option because ultrabooks cannot go it alone on newer titles.
For an idea of what this might handle sans Razer Core we turn to our next benchmark...
Far Cry 2
Sure Far Cry 2 has a few years under its belt but who doesn't love being a bit of a mercenary? Far Cry 2's ahead of its time graphics and realism and exceptional built-in benchmark tool make it a great metric to see how far integrated graphics systems have come. For our tests we target DirectX 10 and aim for the High detail preset...
Not content with its slight missteps under PC Mark and 3D Mark, the Razer Blade Stealth bounces back with top marks in Far Cry 2. These tests have scripted events but rely on real-time physics processing to determine how onscreen elements move and are rendered, so a top score here bodes well for overall performance in everyday usage.
The Razer Blade Stealth clearly is a contender on performance, but does it have endurance? Let's look at battery life next...
