Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Razer

Andrew Cunningham

Razer

Razer, once a company that mostly made accessories for gaming PCs, keeps getting more and more serious about its PC business. It began with a 17-inch gaming notebook called the Razer Blade but soon expanded to a 14-inch version of the Blade and an odd-but-unique gaming tablet called the Razer Edge. Earlier this year, the company announced plans to sell a range of gaming desktops with Lenovo’s help, and it snapped up the remains of crowdfunding-success-story-turned-failure Ouya to bolster the Forge, its own Android TV-based microconsole.

All of those systems have one thing in common: a focus on gaming. Today at CES, the company introduced its first laptop that, in and of itself, isn’t a gaming system: the Razer Blade Stealth. The 0.52-inch thick, 2.75-pound laptop includes individually backlit keys with RGB LEDs (you can color-code each key for aesthetics or to help make it even clearer which key is which) and Razer’s general black-and-green aesthetic, but otherwise it’s a bog-standard Ultrabook that’s not all that different from the ones Dell or HP will sell you.

The laptop is made primarily of black aluminum, and its 12.5-inch IPS touchscreen comes in both 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 flavors (the 4K version covers 100 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut, too). All models include dual-core Skylake Core i7-6500U CPUs and 8GB of 1866MHz LPDDR3 RAM (sadly not upgradeable to 16GB, either at purchase or afterward). All models apparently use PCI Express SSDs instead of the slower SATA-based drives that many PC OEMs are still shipping, so even if you don’t game there are some good reasons to check the Blade Stealth out.

Additionally, the laptop includes a Thunderbolt 3 port for both data and charging, and this port also supports full 10Gbps USB 3.1 speeds.

I had a chance to go hands-on with the laptop for a while today, and it's pretty much the way it sounds on paper: a solidly built laptop from a company that understands what goes into a good one. It's not the thinnest and lightest thing you can buy, but it's more than competitive, and the keyboard, trackpad, and screen feel and look good (though I'd want to use it for longer to make sure there weren't any odd problems).

Thunderbolt is important for the accessory that will make the Razer Blade Stealth into a gaming laptop: the Razer Core is a Thunderbolt 3 dock that can fit a full-size dual-slot PCI Express graphics card. In addition to powering the laptop over the Type-C cable when it’s plugged in, this dock includes four USB 3.0 ports and an Ethernet port.

Razer

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Razer

Razer

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

External graphics enclosures have always been a sort of pie-in-the-sky dream use case for Thunderbolt, since it’s an external interface that provides enough bandwidth to compete with internal interfaces. But it’s been hampered by a few factors, including the PC OEMs’ general indifference to Thunderbolt versions 1 and 2—low adoption outside of the Mac ecosystem means relatively few accessories, and most of the useful ones that exist are external hard drives. Thunderbolt enclosures exist, but most of them are designed for external Wi-Fi cards or storage controllers that take up less space and draw significantly less power than a mid- to high-end graphics card.

The Core will fit "virtually every popular desktop graphics card from AMD and Nvidia," which should encompass most mainstream cards. The enclosure includes a 500W power supply, and Razer says that cards that consume up to 375W of power will fit—this is enough for dual-GPU monsters like Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan Z, cards that require that much power are rare. The company will validate specific GPUs, but anything within the power envelope that can physically fit should work fine.

When plugged into the Blade Stealth, the laptop should seamlessly switch from the integrated Intel GPU to the dedicated GPU. You’ll be able to use any of the GPU’s ports to drive external displays, but Razer also says that Thunderbolt 3 provides enough bandwidth (and enough flexibility) that the GPU can also be used to drive the laptop’s built-in display. You just can't drive the built-in display and external displays at the same time. Update: While this information was accurate as of yesterday, Razer now tells us that the Core is actually capable of driving both the built-in and external displays simultaneously.

The company also says that other PC OEMs with Thunderbolt 3 laptops should be able to implement support for the Core if they want. It's not clear what that would entail—Razer says it's a combination of drivers plus BIOS settings—but it would be nice to have a graphics enclosure that could work with laptops other than Razer's. Thunderbolt 3 is becoming surprisingly common in high-end systems as Skylake and USB Type-C spread.

The $999 version of the Razer Blade Stealth gets you the standard Core i7 and 8GB of RAM, 1440p screen, and 128GB PCIe SSD. The fully decked-out version with the 4K screen and a 512GB PCIe SSD costs $1,599. It will be available directly from Razer in January and from Microsoft Stores starting in February. Pricing for the Core enclosure hasn’t been announced, but it will be available in the first half of 2016.

The company also announced the Razer Stargazer, a $200 webcam equipped with Intel’s RealSense 3D technology. It can record 720p video at 60 frames per second or 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and Razer is aiming it at eSports commentators who want to separate their faces from their backgrounds without using a green screen. The Stargazer will be available in Q2 of 2016.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham