The Razer Blade Stealth takes on Ultrabook gaming at 4K

Razer's made a name for itself producing some astonishingly thin gaming laptops and now it's venturing into the world of Ultrabooks with the Blade Stealth.

Measuring just 0.52-inches thin and weighing 2.75-pounds, the Razer Blade Stealth is the company's thinnest and lightest machine yet. The 12.5-inch notebook, nips at the heels of other compact Ultrabooks like the Dell XPS 13 with a thinner and lighter chassis.

This is thanks to its entirely metal frame etched from a block of aircraft-grade aluminum using CNC machinery. The keyboard also features a fully backlit and customizable Chroma-styled keyboard. If you've seen any of Razer's recent PC peripherals, the Chroma backlit lets you tune the colors down to every keyboard key and that's the same on the Blade Stealth.

But this laptop isn't just thin, it's also powerful packing an Intel Skylake Core i7, PCIe SSD and 8GB of DDR3 memory. Screen options are also generous with IGZO touch-enabled panels in 2,560 x 1,440 (QHD) and 3,840 x 2,160 (4K) resolutions.

Razer Blade Stealth

But in order to drive those sharp displays while gaming, Razer is also introducing the Core, a GPU box that connects the Blade Stealth to a full-sized desktop GPU. Built with a durable aluminum housing, the Razer Core can fit just about any graphics card from both Nvidia and AMD.

Razer's approach to creating an gaming Ultrabook is very similar to the MSI GS30 Shadow, however instead of utilizing a PCI-express port soldered to the back of the machine, the Blade Stealth connects through a Thunderbolt 3.0 supported USB-C cable. According to Razer, this type of connection is able to carry even more data than PCI-express.

The Razer Blade Stealth is available now with a starting price of $999 for the configuration with a QHD screen, Intel Core i7 CPU, 128GB SSD and 8GB of RAM – however this deal is only available direct from Razer's website. The 12.5-inch Ultrabook will also be available in Microsoft Stores by February.

Unfortunately, Razer has yet to announce pricing and availability for the Core.

Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee was a former computing reporter at TechRadar. Kevin is now the SEO Updates Editor at IGN based in New York. He handles all of the best of tech buying guides while also dipping his hand in the entertainment and games evergreen content. Kevin has over eight years of experience in the tech and games publications with previous bylines at Polygon, PC World, and more. Outside of work, Kevin is major movie buff of cult and bad films. He also regularly plays flight & space sim and racing games. IRL he's a fan of archery, axe throwing, and board games.