The 2019 Razer Blade Stealth series was a huge mess. The 2020 series puts it back on track

Normally, yearly laptop updates should offer faster performance or better features than the year before them even if the differences are sometimes marginal. After all, it would be counter-intuitive for an older version to perform faster than the newer, pricier version. The 2019 Blade Stealth series was an unfortunate victim of this as these first Ice Lake SKUs from Razer would perform slower than the Whiskey Lake-U-powered 2018 Blade Stealth that came before it. In other words, Razer was charging users more for less processor performance.

Now that the 2020 Blade Stealth series is available, Razer has right this wrong by dropping the 10 W Core i7 CPU and having the 25 W version be standard on these latest configurations. The 10 W Core i7-1065G7 was disappointing to say the least as it would perform 15 percent slower than the Core i7-8565U in the older 2018 Blade Stealth. In our reviews of the two different 2019 Blade Stealth SKUs last year, we didn't recommend either of them because the 2018 Core i7-8565U and GeForce MX150 would still outperform the 10 W Core i7-1065G7 and integrated Iris Plus G7 GPU, respectively.

Our tables below comparing the 2018 Blade Stealth, 2019 Blade Stealth, and 2020 Blade Stealth show the 2020 version being comfortably ahead in key benchmarks like CineBench and 3DMark. It took Razer two years to release something that we can finally say is a worthy successor to the 2018 version. If you're in the market for one, you may want to skip the 2019 series and go with the 2020 series or 2018 series if GeForce GTX graphics aren't your thing.

See our full review on the 2020 Blade Stealth here to learn more about the high-end 4K SKU. Keep in mind that the chassis has remained almost the same between the 2018 and 2020 SKUs meaning that the faster 2020 version will inevitably run louder and warmer than its previous iterations.