microsoft surface laptop studio is the spiritual successor to this
the surface book 3. the question is is it worth the upgrade
a few months ago we expected that microsoft might introduce the surface book 4 this holiday
season obviously it didn't however the surface laptop studio is as good as a surface book 4.
in fact it's as good of a surface as we've seen in about half a decade what we're going to talk
about today are three defining characteristics of both the surface laptop studio and the surface
book 3 the physical hardware how well they ink and of course closing with performance you're
probably familiar with the surface book 3 that debuted last year it features a core i7 1065 g7
32 gigabytes of memory 512 gigabytes of storage and an nvidia geforce gtx 1660 ti
opposing it is the new surface laptop studio inside of it is a core i7 11370h that's the
new h35 processor until debuted in january 32 gigs of memory a terabyte of storage and an rtx
3050 ti gpu the surface book 3 was iconic in the way that straddled a traditional clamshell
notebook and a detachable tablet all you had to do with the surface book 3 was go ahead
push the detach button on the keyboard and pull away the tablet when you did so you had
something that was crossed between a personal workstation as well as a surface pro tablet
now the hardware of the surface book 3 allows you to do a couple of things one it allows you to swap
the tablet backwards into presentation mode but it also allows you to go ahead and use it strictly as
an attached tablet as well now the other thing the surface book 3 offered was what we might
call legacy hardware a pair of usb type a slots a usb c slot a surface charger and a full sized sd
card slot as well the surface laptop studio on the other hand features a new somewhat radical
pole 4 design but wait we've actually seen this before the acer concept d3 easel debuted about
a year ago and also features that same sort of pole 4 design that we're seeing on the surface
laptop studio now we're not going to do a direct comparison between the two because we expect or
hope that the acer will refresh this particular device in about a week or within a month's time
but perhaps then we'll be able to take a closer look at it now the difference between the concept
d3 easel and the surface laptop studio is both in the hinge as well as the elegance of the design
the concept d3 easel supports the tablet sort of through its entire range of motion the surface
laptop studio on the other hand really only has two points in which it supports the tablet
sufficiently both in its traditional clamshell mode as well as in its pull forward mode which
is about 45 degrees off the vertical so the surface laptop studio has several key differences
the first being the inclusion of thunderbolt ports which are sort of a super powered usbc allowing
you to connect external storage and monitors second there is the inclusion of this really nifty
haptic touchpad a haptic touchpad is something you might find on a smartphone for example
but it's a little bit different in that you're not physically clicking anything in fact in a way it's
clicking you the surface laptop screen is also a little bit diminished in terms of resolution
but it's also a little bit increased in terms of display refresh rate this refresh rate goes up to
120 hertz versus the 60 hertz on the surface book 3. that's essentially superior in terms
of inking but it also allows you a little bit smoother animations for games one more point on
the dimensions the surface laptop studio only ships in a 14.4 inch display form factor the
surface book 3 was available in both a 15-inch as well as a 13.5 inch display size as well
the surface laptop studio is a bit lighter than that 15-inch form factor but a bit heavier than
the 13.5 inch as well so let's talk about inking both the surface book 3 and the surface laptop
studio are content creation devices and content creation devices typically require a pen now for
the purposes of this demonstration we're going to use the surface slim pen 2 that ships with
a surface laptop studio but also works on other surface devices as well now the important thing
to realize when you're inking is three things first you want the e-ink latency to be as small as
possible that's the delay in after which the ink flows out of the pen you also want to make sure
that the ink is not offset in other words where you touch the pen is where the ink flows from
and finally you want to make sure that the ink jutter or jitter is reduced as much as possible
that's the sort of wavy line effect that you get when drawing with a straight edge with a surface
book 3 we don't see a whole lot of ink latency it was pretty good for that regard however when we
draw a straight line especially a slow diagonal straight line we do see a little bit of a wavy
effect which was evidence of inkjetter or jitter now the surface laptop studio a couple of things
first of all we have the surface slim pen 2 nestled in its little charging cradle that's
underneath the front of the laptop not only pairs automatically but also automatically charges
which is a nice little feature you don't have to search out a triple or a quadruple a battery that
you did with previous surface pens again when we ink upon the surface laptop studio we're not
quite seeing as much ink latency i think as we saw on the surface book 3 we are still seeing a
little bit of inkjetter or jitter though when we ink that slow diagonal line in summary though i
think that the surface laptop studio provides a superior experience so the question is how well
does each of these perform and to answer that we turn to our traditional benchmarks the first
benchmark we looked at was pcmark 10 a general purpose benchmark which measures everything from
web browsing to like game playing application startup and even cad work in this the surface
laptop studio showed a definitive victory a 45 increase in performance over the surface book 3.
in cinebench r15 a synthetic cpu benchmark the difference was a little bit closer here the
surface laptop studio showed a score of 745 which is a 7.5 percent increase over the surface book 3.
in graphics it was a different story here we use the 3dmark time spy benchmark and the surface
book 3 scored 4615 a 2.5 percent increase over the surface laptop studio that just shows that
the rtx hardware in the surface laptop studio doesn't quite keep up with the older gtx hardware
and the surface book 3. as far as battery life is concerned the surface book 3 was traditionally the
champion of the surface lineup in the surface book 3 demonstrated 11.96 hours of battery life almost
12 the surface laptop studio however was almost 13 and a half hours of battery life proving that
if you want an all-day machine the surface laptop studio is your device in price the two contestants
were more closely matched the price of our surface laptop studio review unit was two thousand seven
hundred dollars and at the time we received it the surface book three was priced at 800
so the question we come back to is whether you should upgrade from the surface book 3
to the more modern surface laptop studio and some surprisingly my answer is yes the surface laptop
studio offers quite a bit in terms of its dramatic redesign it offers performance that's moderately
to significantly better than the surface book 3 and at a price that's roughly comparable
so if you had to make a choice between the surface book 3 and the surface laptop studio
i would definitely go with microsoft's most modern surface yet
for the full review of the surface laptop studio please visit pcworld.com and for more tips tricks
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