The Performance of the Razer Steakth 2019 on Battery is AWFUL!

I recently purchased a Razer Stealth 2019 - i7 4k, MX150, 16gb 512gb. I purchased this because all the reviews I read said this is the most powerful ultrabook on the market. As a photographer I need a powerful and light editing and travel laptop. For photo editing, CPU speeds (not necessarily core count) is the most important factor and the 4k display is also helpful for crisp images. My previous laptop was an HP envy 13t with similar specs - 8550u, 13.3 4k touch screen, 16gb ram, MX150, 512gb. However it was hardware TDP locked by HP where it will boost to 25w for a few seconds and drop to 15w and no amount of tweaking can unlock the TDP. I was able to a -94mv undervolt it a bit for better performance, and during Cinebench R15 it would boost to 3.1ghz before settling to 2.6ghz. Editing on that laptop was painfully slow with large 42MP raw files.

I was super excited to receive the Stealth and it's a beautiful laptop. I did got a -115mv undervolt and the laptop was able to hit 4.1ghz at 40w and then 3.3ghz at 25w on Cinebench R15 plugged in getting scores between 680-735. I even tried some light games like Xcom and while not great, it was much smoother. This was amazing and much faster than my old HP. However after owning this for about a week I noticed the performance is significantly worse on battery than plugged in. I ran a whole number of tests and realized that while this has been advertised as a laptop that can do 25w CPU, the laptop resorts to 15w on battery. Even worse, there are times when the laptop will run at 10w or less. Running Cinebench R15 on battery the laptop starts out at 10w @2.1ghz and after a while then boosts to 15w @ 2.8ghz. This is the exact opposite of how turbo boost is supposed to work - turbo boost is supposed to boost speeds at the start then level off. Even worse there are times where the laptop runs at 10w @ 2.1ghz the whole time or start at 10w then jumps to 15w then back again. I would run one test, walk away and 10 min later re-run the test and get a completely different result. All of this was in best performance setting, creators mode which is supposed to boost CPU speeds.

Plugged in 40w 4.1ghz then 25w 3.3ghz. Cinebench Score 712

Battery 10w 2.1ghz then 15w 2.8ghz. Cinebench score 420

Even worse, gaming performance on battery is horrendous and unplayable. While the GPU remains consistent around 1700mhz, the CPU runs at 400 mhz on battery during a game and would have tiny spikes in 1.8ghz. I've tested this repeatedly with Deus Ex and Xcom 2, both games had FPS in the teens because the CPU would not keep up.

Graphics plugged in, 40 FPFS


Graphics on battery, 21FPS



I tried everything from changing the power settings to changing Synapse settings. I even created a new power plan for max performance and nothing changed. After much digging I found a helpful reddit post that told me to turn of BD PROCHOT in Throttlestop. (https://www.reddit.com/r/razer/comments/bvw8xq/rbs_2019_cpu_throttling_fix/) Apparently the Stealth has a hard temp limit at 60C for the CPU on battery but this same limit does not exist plugged in. With BD PROCHOT disabled I was able to play games at reasonable CPU loads. This seems like an unreasonable requirement for people to disable one thermal setting just to get the laptop to work. Even my old HP could play games at better frame rates than the Stealth.

At the moment I am thinking of returning this laptop. I've had a lot of the issues people have complained about in this forum and elsewhere - loose USB C ports, battery that drains while doing heavy loads plugged in, buzzing speakers, etc. However the lack of full power on battery is a near deal breaker for me. 2.8ghz is only 200 mhz faster than my old HP and this is with a HEAFTY -115mv undervolt. I'm overall extremely disappointed by laptop because it had great potential. However the 25w TDP only plugged in which the purpose of a mobile computer to begin with. At 15w the performance is average with other laptops of the same caliber. However performance is extremely inconsistent and TDP drops to 10w or less and I can't seem to figure out why. I hope Razer would solve this issue, but it'st been half a year since this laptop has been released and this seems like a pretty huge deal (400mhz) that RAZER hasn't addressed yet. Razer is supposed to be a company for gamers, I don't know what games run at 400mhz (Sim City 2000?). And let's not forget the price, this is an expensive premium laptop. I daresay Apple does a better job than this.

 

Is this on Bios 1.02, February update?

 

Yes, I have gone through with Razer support, latest bios, EC firmware, and Synapse has all been installed. I even uninstalled Synapse as per their instructions. I have spoken to another person on Reddit and their laptop performs the same exact way on battery including the 400mhz on gaming. The reddit post with the instructions for turning off BD PROCHOT were all Razer Stealth owners with the same 400mhz problem.

 

Yeah i noticed on early stage there was potential issue like notebookcheck pointed.

Spoiler: 400 mhz

Source

From notebookcheck stress test there’s something weird also I found, pretty similar as yours

As comparison this power limitation on Blade 15 2018,
there’s no such big frequency drop. I thought it’ll be addressed per bios after notebookcheck pointed some potential issues on that early review.
Concerning battery cpu performance, I don’t have stealth 2019 but hope @figrin1 that made quite detailed guide about this model has some opinions about this. But on Blade 15 which is similar Optimus laptop, Battery vs Plugged. Cpu is especially the one that got huge performance drops over half performance is taken, but overall is 22% performance drop,
I’ll check around and come back again if I find anything, thanks for pointing this. Btw I saw also that Reddit BD prochot found, I was thinking stealth 2019 is fine now, unfortunately not only Razer, in nowadays laptops, there’re tons performance limitation but with this kind posts, it make manufactures recheck their setting. Yes it’s also due intel and Nvidia pack more performance inside small (not quite changed) package, so a lot manufactures do this limitation for better thermal which translates lower defective unit possibilities, but sometimes I feel it’s too much.

 

This is interesting.

I've never expected to get great performance while running on battery, so it's not something that I've tested. I usually just use mine for word processing and surfing the internet when it's not plugged in. But sometime soon I'll see what happens when I try to play some games on battery and what the difference is in CPU performance when BD PROCHOT is checked/unchecked.

 

I can totally understand manufacturers performance on their machines for the sake of battery life or temperature comfort. There are even times where I've owned laptops and I've wished they capped temp performance because the temperature was burning hot (Xiaomi Air 13 for example). However with Razer, the temperature limit is 50C, which anyone can tell you is ridiculous, it's like capping the speed limit of a 25mph road at 4mph. 400mhz for CPU while fill 1700mhz for GPU is simply poor planning or implementation of a temp limit. What programs can you run that requires do with a 400mhz CPU speed and 1700mhz GPU speed? No video rendering, no compiling, and certainly no gaming. It's like they wanted to cap the total power and thermal limit to the system on battery but limited the CPU but forgot to limit the GPU and what you got was a gimped system. Ideally if you wanted to adhere to a certain temp limit you would have designed the cooling better through hardware not software trickery. I have been talking to Razer support and they told me "That is how the Blade was designed to save on battery life.Once unplugged fro the wall, the system will downclock so you can use for longer periods of time."

This is supposed to be a high performance machine by a company renowned for gaming devices. But on battery the CPU performance is terrible and it's not possible to get full 25w performance at all. You get 10 watts to 15 watts. Saying it's a 25w system is a lie, it's a 25 watt system in certain circumstances when plugged into a charger that doesn't even charge when the system is stressed.

I've read some of these complaints before buying the system and thought maybe it's bad batches or something due to user error and trusted the Razer brand. I was wrong and this machine is being returned.

 

I'd be interested to see what your results are like. I've spoken to another Stealth owner on reddit and his was exactly the same. I don't have any reason to believe otherwise.

 

I see. Keep in mind I saw you mentioned above 25 watt cpu, it’s actually ULV 15 watt cpu, notebookcheck review mentioned that as well, 25 watt it the gpu tdp. Performance on battery may be vary depends brands or model, i saw Alienware gaming laptops like m15 performs way worse than my 2018 Blade advanced on battery, the score I posted above actually for their comparison since I was asked and accidentally I saw this thread. I’ve thrown this to staff hope there will be something improved, thanks anyway for pointing this because there’s probably also other users that feel just like you. On Blade 15 (2018 1070), once I forgot switch on the power brick socket on the wall and run game didn’t notice that until battery warning popped up, not FPS game though it was open world so less noticeable if it was FPS shooting maybe I recognized it. Other thing I didn’t mention, this’s maybe not related to 4K one but on 1080p model it use new intel 1 watt low display technology which is great on battery usage.

 

It's not just a 25w GPU, it's also a 25w CPU, as you can tell from my tests plugged in, it was doing 40w on turbo and 25w on sustained. Razer has tuned the laptop to do 25w for more performance even though it's technically a 15w ULV CPU. The problem is that on battery it's 15w and sometimes 10w, and other times 7w. It's extremely inconsistent. Techspot's review of the laptop says this: (https://www.techspot.com/review/1783-razer-blade-stealth-2019/)

"As a refresher, the Blade Stealth uses the quad-core i7-8565U which is Intel’s new high-end Whiskey Lake CPU built on 14nm++. Normally this CPU is configured to use a 15W TDP, however Razer has chosen to use the cTDP up state of 25W, which allows the chip to run at higher sustained clock speeds.

The rated clock speeds for the 8565U are 1.8 GHz base with a 4.6 GHz single-core Turbo and a 4.1 GHz all-core Turbo, but typically the 25W version of the chip hovers around 3.1 GHz during sustained non-AVX workloads"​

 

Thanks for pointing this, I didn’t quite read all HWinfo64 Sensor value, indeed on notebookcheck screenshot that I attached above it’s actually not only boosting up to 25 watt but even more like almost 40 watt, interesting. This might be reason about early batch discharging issue, that’s too high boost for ultrabook with only 65 watt ac Adapter.
This cTDP, is actually depends on OEM setting but average stealth isn’t even closing 25 watt (plugged), maybe it has to do with bios power limit. This made me want to get one actually and dive in to the Bios (advanced) setting. I’m tempted to get this actually from end 2018 but unfortunately my stealth 2016 still doesn’t die yet.