 Venom is back. Last time around with the Blackbook 15, I told them I loved the performance and loved the aluminum chassis but I felt like the price was pretty expensive. I also confessed that 13 to 14 inches is my ideal size and that no 15 inch really had a fair shot at stealing my heart. So now they've come back swinging with the Blackbook 13 Zero, which targets a more aggressive price point and looks, at least on the surface, like an absolute stunner. Let's see how it fares. Cooler Master's new Master Keys Pro-L and Pro-S keyboards provide 16.7 million color RGB backlighting, genuine Cherry MX switches, and an industry-leading ARM Cortex processor. Learn more at the link in the video description. Now I could say that zero means something like zero compromises or so thin in line as to feel like you're carrying nothing. But based on that I know that the Venom guys are a bunch of gamers with a focus on selling gaming laptops, I suspect it means zero dedicated graphics card. So the zero, whether it carries Intel's Ultrabook certification sticker or not, is pretty much an Ultrabook. Sorry gamers. With that said, it's clearly a better than average Ultrabook from the outset. It's available in a variety of configurations all the way down to a very attractive 999 US dollar model with the Core i5 and a 120 gig SSD OS drive with a 500 gig hard drive all the way up to the top of the line $2500 Midnight Edition with a Core i7 6500U, 8 gigs of RAM, a top-of-the-line 512 gig Samsung 950 Pro M.2 PCI Express based SSD and a 2 terabyte Samsung 850 Evo SATA SSD for storage. It's got an Intel 8260 2x2 AC wireless card that managed over 20 megabytes per second, sustaining transfers in my tests. It's got Windows 10 Pro and a healthy 45 watt-hour lithium-ion battery. It features an all-aluminum chassis design with perhaps a greater propensity for picking up greasy fingerprints and a little bit more flex than I'd like, not to mention that the hinge isn't the premium one finger style. But it makes up for at least some of all of that by being crazy light right around 1.4 kilos or 3 pounds. Overall, I'd say the device feels pretty darn good. I.O. is a pretty good mix with a single type-C port and a headphone jack and nothing else. Sorry, I was thinking of the MacBook. That's right. No, it's got power in, a USB 2.0 port and a headphone-microphone combo jack on the left with a USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, a type-C 5 gigabit USB 3.0 port, not Thunderbolt unfortunately, and an SD card reader on the right. I love the SD card reader. I mean the number of times I have needed one of those in the field. Let me tell you, not good. Flipping this puppy open reveals something that may feel like a compromise to some, but that I don't actually mind. I actually ordered my custom-built XPS 15 with a 1080p display because I don't feel like at this size, the higher DPI makes enough of a difference to justify the battery life that I'm giving up and apparently Venom agrees because every model of Blackbook 13.0 is equipped with a 1080p IPS display. But while the resolution spec of this panel is not that impressive, in other ways, it's among the best that I've seen. The blacks are midnight black and there is astonishingly little backlight bleed even though Venom has the guts to ship it with a black desktop background. As a communications device, the 13.0 is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the microphone actually sounds pretty good, but on the other, the 1 megapixel camera doesn't perform particularly well in either backlit or even frontlit scenarios with the subject ending up quite washed out and pale looking. So while the speakers are okay, about all you'd expect for a notebook this size, making it fine as a casual movie watching device on the couch, it is not ideal for regular video conferencing. The keyboard is what I would characterize as pretty good. The keycaps wobble more than I'd like on a truly premium device and the stroke action is a little bit mushy. But for me, there are really more important things on a thin and light. The adjustable backlight is great and the 13.0 delivers on typing speed and accuracy as well as the overall layout. The arrow keys have that annoying up-down combo close together thing that I think Apple started, but it's otherwise bog standard with function modifiers available for pretty much anything that I would need to do, including one to disable the touchpad. Which leads us to that, I guess. The touchpad has some high points and also some low points. From a things that I like perspective, it's got the full range of gesture controls which can be set up within the ElanTech control panel. It's got a satisfying pad click with no discrete buttons and it does a pretty darn good job of rejecting both palms and my click finger when I'm operating it two-handed. But it comes with what is for me a bit of an annoying flaw, hopefully one that can be addressed with a driver tweak or something along those lines. There's a, for me, perceptible leg between moving my finger across the trackpad and seeing my actions on the screen. This is true with the notebook plugged in or running off battery and I even went as far as to reinstall Windows using the included 16 gig USB drive, which is nice to have by the way. I prefer that to a recovery partition as an enthusiast, which resolved this issue when I encountered it on the Blade 14 2015. Moving on though, there is more good stuff. The bundled software package is very Spartan, basically some alternate browsers and not much else. Norton is on there, but it's a full year subscription rather than a 30-day subsidized trial. So I'll give that a neutral rating. Leaving really only a few things to talk about in the part of this video where I would normally talk about gaming performance. Haha. Acoustics are better than I expected with the 13.0 managing to run fanless quite frequently even with the i7 installed, so you'll do better with an i5 SKU. And while the battery takes over four hours to charge, which is agonizing when you're waiting around for it to run a battery life benchmark, the good news is that in PCMark8's productivity suite, it managed to run for well over three hours continuously, which is a pretty darn solid score. Leading us finally to the conclusion. In a market that did not contain the razor blade stealth, the BlackBook Zero would be a savior to folks who wanted a great ultrabook experience without dealing with the hassle of running Windows on a MacBook Air. There are some minor quirks. In the real world, it's a less obvious choice, but not an entirely invalid one. While the blade stealth features an undeniably stronger, thinner industrial design, Thunderbolt, an RGB backlit keyboard, and a higher resolution display across all SKUs, its thinner fans will work harder to control CPU thermals, and it's much less configurable spec-wise, with a maximum of 8 gigs of RAM soldered to the main board and only the M.2 drive being upgradeable. The BlackBook 13 Zero, by contrast, and this one hits pretty hard for heavy Google Chrome tab users like myself, manages to cram the same capacity battery, a two and a half inch drive bay, which is pretty nice if your ultrabook is your primary machine as it is for so many people these days, and a SODIMM memory socket into its only marginally thicker shell. And while Venom doesn't advertise the capability of the 13 Zero to run a single 16 gig DDR3L SODIMM, I tried it with a 1333 megahertz intelligent memory branded stick that I had lying around, and it worked perfectly. That right there is a huge win from my perspective on what is already a very compelling little product, provided that they can quickly sort out the touchpad lag. 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