Razer’s 2019 Blade Stealth is NOT Project Athena Certified

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    Today, Razer unveiled its 2019 line-up of Blade Stealth laptops with the latest 10th generation Intel CPU and a discrete Nvidia GPU which is quite a step-up from 2018’s line-up in both the CPU and GPU department. Razer was able to pull this off with a negligible weight and thickness increase which is just incredible. And despite these high-end components and form factor, the 2019 Razer Blade Stealth did not earn Intel’s Project Athena certification.

    What’s Project Athena you ask? It is a standard set by Intel which has certain requirements for features, performance, battery life and a bunch of other things. If a laptop meets the company’s key experience indicators (KEI), it earns a Project Athena certification which is commemorated by a badge or stamp that says ‘Engineered for Mobile Performance’. These badges or stamps are placed on the product pages, display units in stores, online listings and packaging, but not on the laptop itself which is perfect in my opinion.

    Given below is Intel’s target specification for a laptop to be Athena certified.

    With that out of the way, Razer announced three versions of the 13.3” Blade Stealth – a 1080p Mercury White model without dedicated graphics, a 1080p and a 4K model with dedicated graphics. All three machines come with Intel’s Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 – an 8 core 16 thread CPU – and a GeForce GTX 1650 with 4 GB GDDR5 memory. The Mercury White model, on the other hand, has Intel Iris Plus graphics. All three have 16 GB LPDDR4-3733 memory, Intel Wireless-AX 201 and a Thunderbolt 3 port. The Mercury White variant has a 256 GB M.2 PCIe SSD while the other two have 512 GB M.2 PCIe SSDs.

    The 2019 line-up has Bluetooth 5.0, one USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. The keyboard is RGB-backlit and Razer Chroma compatible. The webcam on top of the display is a 720p sensor but has IR for Windows Hello. Razer has also fitted these machines with four speakers with Dolby Atmos support and a 53.1Wh battery.

    Even after falling in line with the requirements of Project Athena, the Blade Stealth laptops did not get the certification. Guess we’ll have to wait and find out why.

    The Razer Blade Stealth trio will be available for purchase towards the end of this month. The starting price is $1,499.99 which translates to roughly Rs.1.08 lacs.

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