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Unless you’re a gamer, you’ve probably never heard of Razer.

The company’s known mostly for its performance gaming mice, keyboards and controllers designed for professional gamers and "e-sport athletes" who want a competitive edge over their buddies.

In the last five years, the company’s quickly transformed itself into one of the hottest PC makers, thanks to its powerful and sleek Blade gaming laptops.

At CES, Razer announced plans to take on established PC giants like HP, Dell and Apple with its own Ultrabook, the Blade Stealth.

I’ve been testing the Razer Blade Stealth for the last few weeks and it’s quite possibly the best Windows 10 Ultrabook I’ve ever used. Starting at $999, it’s damn affordable, too.

Stealth bomber sleek

Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

As appealing as transforming 2-in-1 convertibles are, I like my Ultrabooks simple: well-built and clamshell-style. Spare me the fancy flippy hinges.

The Blade Stealth is the Darth Vader black laptop Apple won’t sell. The black anodized aluminum chassis is sleek and solid. It’s all clean lines and carefully machined ports — just the way a modern laptop should look. My only complaint is the computer starts to look gross after a little while from all the natural grease it picks up from your fingers and hands.

Where a backlit Apple logo would be on a MacBook's lid, there’s Razer’s triple-headed snake logo. The logo glows green when the computer is on, but you can turn off the backlighting if you don’t like it.

Audio is an area computer makers always scrimp on. Flanking the keyboard are stereo speakers that can get really loud, and the sound projects upwards towards you. At full volume, audio starts to sound a little tinny, but overall I was pleased with the speakers. They’re definitely better than the muffled speakers inside of the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s hinge.

Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

On the left side, you’ll find the brand new USB-C port for charging, data and display output, a USB 3.0 port and a headphone jack. The right side has a full-size HDMI and another USB 3.0 port. Missing is an SD card slot; it’s not a huge loss, but I could really use it since I offload a lot of photos from my camera.

The laptop weighs 2.75 pounds, lighter than Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display, which weighs 3.48 pounds. It’s also thinner: 0.52 inches thick versus 0.71 inches when completely closed. It’s a true ultra-thin and light laptop that doesn’t weigh your bag down.

Touch, type, mouse

Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

The Stealth’s 12.5-inch touchscreen comes in two resolutions: Quad HD (2,560 x 1,440) and 4K (3,840 x 2,160).

My test model came with the 4K screen, which costs more. The base model comes with Quad HD. It’s a beautiful screen, especially for watching high-definition videos and looking at photos in full resolution, but it’s really reflective.

While the 4K screen is ridiculously sharp, I’m not convinced anyone needs that kind of resolution on a laptop this size. It’s really overkill, and I’d take the Quad HD model over it for the sake of longer battery life. I’m also not a fan of the thick bezel around the screen; it makes the screen look even smaller than it really is.

Steve Jobs famously said touchscreens don’t pair well with laptops because your arms will eventually get tired from reaching out and tapping on the screen. I disagree. I think a touchscreen is a great addition to a solid trackpad. I’ve tested a fairly good amount of laptops with touchscreens and my arms haven’t fallen off yet.

The Blade Stealth’s touchscreen is excellent; it’s responsive and precise. The touchscreen works great for scrolling up and down webpages and tapping on buttons like play/pause on a YouTube video. It’s not a replacement for the trackpad, though.

Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

Speaking of the trackpad, it’s good. Apple’s MacBooks still have the best and most responsive trackpads. The trackpad on the Blade Stealth is smooth, but I’ve noticed it can sometimes lag. You can go into the trackpad settings and increase its sensitivity, but a regular person may not realize they can do that.

Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

Typing on the keyboard is a joy. A few people who checked it out felt the keys were a little mushy, but I had no issues. Like all of Razer’s PC accessories, the Blade Stealth’s keyboard comes with its signature Chroma lighting system. Using the Razer Synapse app, you can configure the keyboard to glow in 16.8 million different colors. As with the Chroma mechanical keyboards, there’s also a bunch of lighting effects like rainbow wave, spectrum cycling and ripple. The backlit keyboard is pure eye candy, but it’s eye candy other laptops don’t have.

Ultrabook power

Runs Windows 10. Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

Make no mistake, the Blade Stealth is a powerful little machine. It comes with a sixth-generation 2.5GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of ultra-fast LPDDR3-1866MHz RAM, and storage options of 128GB or 256GB of SSD (Quad HD model) and 256GB and 512GB of SSD (4K).

Those are great specs for a 12.5-inch laptop, but like practically all Ultrabooks, it’s saddled with Intel integrated graphics (HD Graphics 520) instead of packing a discrete graphics card.

Intel’s HD Graphics 520 isn’t bad, it’s just not going to let you run the latest graphic-intensive games at high visual settings and high frame rates — a crucial part to enjoyable PC gaming.

You’ll be able to bang that novel you’ve been meaning to write, browse Mashable, stalk the heck out of your friends on Facebook and run Photoshop just fine. You can even run Adobe Premiere CC and do some light video editing.

Rocket League's graphics start to bleed around the edges...best lower them. Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

That’s not to say you can’t do any gaming at all on the machine. It’s still better than a 13-inch MacBook Pro. I was able to run the addictive Rocket League on Steam fairly well so long as I dropped the resolution down and downgraded the graphic fidelity; it’s not ideal — I saw tons of pixel bleeding around the edges of the screen — but playable. Older games like Left 4 Dead 2 also work okay.

On its own, the Blade Stealth is no 14-inch or 17-inch Blade laptop, which have the graphics cards for gamers to go bananas with.

The Blade Stealth charges via a USB-C port. Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

Should you desire the graphics horsepower, you’ll be able to purchase a Razer Core, an external dock that houses either a Nvidia or AMD graphics card. The Core plugs into the Blade Stealth USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port and turbocharges it into a desktop-class gaming PC. Since the Core houses a desktop graphics card, you’ll be able to upgrade it to a new one as well, ensuring you’re always on top of the latest oomph.

It’s not the first this laptop and GPU dock combo has been tried — Sony did it first with the Vaio Z and Power Media Dock in 2011 — but it’s the first time it’s as easy as plug and play.

I didn’t get a chance to try the Core with the Blade Stealth for this review. However, if it’s as impressive as what I saw at CES, it could be a game changer.

Battery life is about average. With mixed usage (web browsing, writing, watching videos, streaming music, etc.), the laptop lasted four to five hours on a single charge.

An ace Apple alternative

Image: Brittany Herbert/Mashable

There aren’t a whole a ton Windows Ultrabooks that I would consider desirable. The Dell XPS 13 is the only one that comes to mind. Lenovo makes some nice laptops, but they’re mostly convertibles, and like I said earlier, I don’t care for them.

The Blade Stealth may not be the powerhouse gaming laptop like Razer’s larger laptop offerings, but it’s still one slick Ultrabook. It’s got great stealthy looks, a sharp screen that’s also a touchscreen, a comfortable full-size keyboard and a decent trackpad, Windows 10 and enough power to compete and sometimes exceed the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Not to mention, it starts at $200 less than Apple’s machine. And when the Core comes out, it’ll be even more of a dream machine. An Ultrabook that’s great now and will be greater in the future? How do you compete with that?