Then, after months of waiting and at least two additional delays, the Core was finally delivered to many Razer fans in late May. Some user issues popped-up in the Razer forums throughout June. Other problems revolving around getting familiar with Thunderbolt 3 and Core recognition on the host system were also discussed and somewhat resolved by Reddit users. By late July, there wasn’t much traffic relating to Core/Stealth pairing problems, indicating a relatively successful delivery on Razer’s promise.
Fast forward a few more months to September of 2016 and the announcement of Kaby Lake.
At this point, Razer has decided that the Stealth can be improved in the battery department to address the major complaint from users, adding a few ounces of weight in the process. The New Razer Blade Stealth was equipped with a 53.6 WHr Lithium Ion battery, and could be configured with a 7th generation Core i7 (an option for a Core i5-7200U was also added), 16GB of DDR3 DRAM, and now a 1TB PCIe SSD. The price tag of the fully equipped option was staggering, but to their credit, the low-end option was now less expensive than before.
CES 2017, the Razer Stealth and Core are sitting in the Razer booth in relative anonymity, hiding in the shadow of the wildly popular concept Project Valerie. Things are mostly quiet on the web in terms of driver switching issues, and true to their word Razer, with the help of AMD, nVidia, and MS has produced a properly functioning, PNP, external GPU enclosure. We’re still not convinced that the Core is the answer for laptop gamers (see coverage on GTX 1050/1050 Ti laptops), but Razer has proven that they have the skill and manpower to make concept ideas come to fruition. While we’re also not convinced that Project Valerie is a great idea we’ll at least give the tip of the hat if and when they pull it off.
- Patrick “Mocalcium” Stone
