Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
This page was humdrum back in the day, but times have changed and vital signs and battery life are now among a laptop's most important features. With Blade Stealth we see a few interesting results. Whereas the 7th Gen machine was happy to run hot, the 8th Gen refresh is designed to keep much cooler and quickly throttles the CPU in order to keep core temperature the right side of 70ºC.
The upside is a cooler machine but the downside is that fan noise is noticeable. Blade Stealth can be practically silent at times, but ramp-up the load and the din of the fans becomes bothersome. We wouldn't go as far as to call it annoying, but other manufacturers have raised the bar with performance laptops that are eerily quiet or passively cooled, and Razer's machine isn't the quietest Ultrabook out there. Then again, would the target audience even flinch if a fanless Core i5 model became available?
Battery life, too, is an area in which laptops have made meaningful strides. The best machines in this category can offer around 15 hours of runtime from a single charge and Razer falls short with a below-average span of just under nine hours.
