With its latest laptop, Razer may have finally achieved its elusive goal of many years: a truly sleek and subtle laptop that's also a gaming beast.

While most gaming laptops stand out immediately with their lurid colours, bulky designs and myriad grilles and lights, the 2018 Razer Blade is a very thin matte black rectangle that weighs a smidge over 2kg and is packed to the gills with power.

Razer is calling it "the world's smallest 15.6-inch gaming laptop", and while I don't know exactly how the company is measuring that I certainly believe it. This is a machine that I comfortably carried for hours a day in a backpack, yet was powerful enough for pretty much all of my PC gaming needs.

Compared with previous Razer laptops, this one looks less like it's trying to imitate a MacBook and more like its own thing, with sharp square edges and extremely slight bezels surrounding its 15.6-inch screen. It's had to ditch its Ethernet port and an SD card slot to make the squeeze (the new machine is even more compact than the 14-inch Blade is replaces), but it still manages 3 full USB ports, full HDMI and a Mini DisplayPort. There's also a USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port so you can plug into hubs, external graphics cards and newer displays.

And while Razer is straying from that MacBook-like look, I still believe Apple is the only laptop-maker that beats Razer when it comes to solidity of design. Like with previous Blades, the unibody is soft under your hands while also being completely free of the creaks and wobbles found in some other machines. The keyboard — which of course features individually RGB lit keys that you can customise to your heart's content — is decently clicky for a laptop this thin and is fine for productivity on the go, but obviously no match for a mechanical unit. There's also a huge and responsive new glass trackpad.