Laptop or tablet - why not both?
This is the Microsoft Surface Book 3, a premium device that can be either.
It’s available in a smaller 13.5” size, or larger 15” model which has the option
of higher end specs, and is what I’ve got here.
Build quality feels excellent, it’s got a magnesium exterior and silver finish.
Let’s start out by discussing the hinge and screen, as this is what really makes the
Surface Book unique.
Basically you can remove the screen from the keyboard, allowing you to use it as either
a traditional laptop, or as a windows tablet.
Both halves of the surface book have their own battery, though the one for tablet operation
is smaller.
The Intel CPU is behind the screen, while the Nvidia discrete graphics is in the keyboard
half, so heavy graphical tasks can only be done with the base attached.
That said, you can attach the screen in reverse and still use it like a tablet for drawing
and still take advantage of the Nvidia GPU and extra battery power.
Microsoft is using a custom hinge to make this work.
When you open the lid, the hinge sort of rolls back, and when the device is closed there’s
a gap at the back, which they’re confident won’t cause any problems over time.
To remove the screen, you just press the dedicated detach button next to the delete key on the
keyboard, and it will tell you when it’s safe to remove in Windows.
Apparently removal is 3 times faster than the older surface book 2, I haven’t used
the older model, but I can say that it didn’t feel like it took too long, but it may depend
on what applications you’ve got open.
If the discrete graphics are in use, it will ask you to close those apps first, you can
proceed anyway which would automatically close the necessary apps for you rather than dynamically
move the workload over to the integrated graphics.
You’ve also got the option of doing the swap through software without the physical
button.
I found it difficult to remove the screen with both hands on the top half, the best
way was to place one hand on the base to keep it from lifting up.
Reattaching was easy enough, it’s guided in with magnets.
Tablet mode felt much better when compared to a 2-in-1 device, you’re not holding the
entire weight of the machine so even at 15” it wasn’t too heavy, but that said I’d
probably prefer the smaller 13” model here.
Unlike a 2-in-1, you’re also not putting your hands on the keyboard to hold it, which
always felt a bit weird to me.
The touch screen itself uses a 3 by 2 aspect ratio with high but not quite 4K resolution.
I found the screen to be responsive, but it doesn’t come with a pen, the surface pen
is separate.
The bezel looks a little thick compared to alternative laptops, but I think it’s a
reasonable compromise to make it comfortable to hold as a tablet.
I’ve measured colour gamut with the Spyder 5, and got 93% of sRGB, 64% of NTSC, 69% of
AdobeRGB, and 68% of DCI-P3.
At full brightness I measured the screen at 380 nits with a 1230:1 contrast ratio, so
good brightness and contrast but a little lower on the colour gamut than I was expecting
for a premium device, not bad, just a bit lower.
There was only very minor backlight bleed in this worst case, but this will vary between
laptops and panels.
Microsoft lists the weight at 1.9kg which is what I’m getting.
With the 127 watt power brick and cables for charging, this increases to almost 2.4kg,
or 5.2lb.
As a tablet, the screen by itself was 815g or 1.8lb.
The power brick also has a 7 watt USB Type-A charging port.
It’s not too big for a 15 inch device, the thickness varies as the back is thicker due
to the hinge.
The hinge is rock solid as it runs along the entire width of the machine, there was next
to no flex when trying to twist the lid, which makes sense given it acts as a standalone
tablet.
Chassis flex was also on the lower side when pushing down hard, it feels extremely sturdy
and solid.
It opens up easily with one finger despite definitely feeling more back and top heavy,
which would be a result of all the extra components behind the screen to get it working as a tablet.
The screen still tilts back far enough without making it unbalanced though.
When you open the lid, the laptop automatically powers on, which makes sense, chances are
if you’re opening the lid you want to use it.
By default closing the lid will put it to sleep, and when you open the lid it resumes
from sleep extremely quickly.
If you combine this with Windows Hello, it pretty much wakes up and logs you straight
in.
There are two 1080p cameras, the one above the screen is 5MP, and there’s another on
the front lid which is 8MP.
Both the camera and sound quality are significantly better than most other laptops, and this is
what the camera on the front looks like.
The front facing speakers are towards the top of the screen on the left and right, so
you can still use them in tablet mode.
They sounded good, definitely above average for a laptop with some bass and were still
clear at maximum volume, it wasn’t super loud but I prefer quality, and the latencymon
results were looking good.
The keyboard has white backlighting which illuminates all keys and secondary key functions,
however I found the white lighting difficult to see in a well lit room when paired with
the silver keys, so you might want to only use the keyboard lighting in darker environments.
It can be adjusted between three brightness levels or turned off with the F1 shortcut
key.
Typing on the keyboard felt excellent, definitely one of the better ones I’ve used, here’s
how it sounds to give you an idea of what to expect.
I like that the function key locks on or off, so you don’t have to hold it down if you
want to use the F keys up the top.
The only thing I didn’t personally like apart from the small arrow keys was the button
for detaching near the back space, I only mispressed it once which just resulted in
the screen going a bit flaccid until you reattach it.
The glass precision touchpad was amazing, again one of the best I’ve used.
It clicks down anywhere but given the size available it probably could have been bigger.
It was extremely accurate to use, though the click is quite audible.
Fingerprints don’t show up at all on the silver finish, they do show up on the glossy
screen though, but that’s the nature of touch screens unless you’re only using a
pen.
On the left from the back there are two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports and an SD card slot.
On the right there’s a 3.5mm audio combo jack right down the front, USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C
port, no Thunderbolt though, and the power connector.
The power adapter can connect either way, and it uses magnets, so if you accidentally
trip over the cable it easily comes out without taking the machine with it, and you can also
optionally instead charge with the Type-C port.
The 3.5mm jack is on the top section so you can still use it when in tablet mode, but
when in laptop mode it’s kind of awkward.
The front has a groove in the middle for getting your finger in to open the lid, and there’s
a power button and volume adjustment buttons towards the left, again for use in tablet
mode, though you can still use them in laptop mode too.
Meanwhile on the back we just get a view of that big hinge.
Underneath is clean too, literally nothing other than some feet.
They seemed to be more of a hard rubber meaning they’re not very grippy when on a flat surface.
It doesn’t seem to be user upgradeable, I haven’t found any upgrade guides or easy
way of getting inside in any case.
The 15 inch Surface Book 3 is powered by a 22Wh battery in the screen section, and larger
63Wh battery in the keyboard section, so 85Wh total.
Windows will report the charge level of both batteries independently.
I’ve tested it with screen brightness at 50% and keyboard lighting off.
It lasted for just over 7 hours in the YouTube playback test, a respectable result.
In tablet mode it lasted for 2 hours and 47 minutes in the same test.
I was only able to test gaming in laptop mode as the Nvidia graphics is in the keyboard
half, and noted some interesting behaviour.
First off the result in gaming was above average, however the game was automatically closed
once the battery in the keyboard section reached 8% remaining, I think the Nvidia GPU just
gets disabled, and this was despite the battery in the top half still being at 45%.
It’s also worth noting that you’re not able to detach the screen if the screen’s
battery is at 10% or lower.
If the screen’s battery runs out in tablet mode, you can still use it when docked to
the base if that battery is charged, but the battery behind the screen will not charge
off of the keyboard battery, it needs to be plugged into wall power to charge.
Now let’s talk about thermals.
It was cool to the touch at idle, as the GPU in the keyboard section wouldn’t be doing
anything and the processor is behind the screen.
When under combined CPU and GPU stress test, it warms up in the middle, but it hardly felt
warm, still comfortable, and the top panel heats up too as the Intel CPU is behind the
screen, let’s have a listen to fan noise.
It was completely silent at idle, and even when under load the fan was still on the quieter
side when compared to others.
Warm air is exhausted below the screen from the GPU, and out the sides of the screen for
the CPU.
The internals were cool at idle, and then when under combined CPU plus GPU stress test
it wasn’t getting too hot.
In this heavy worst case workload the CPU was given 18 watts for PL1.
The 1660 Ti Max-Q was reporting as hitting both power and thermal limits despite only
being 61 degrees Celsius.
This resulted in the processor running at 2.6GHz over all 4 cores in this stress test,
undervolting didn’t work.
In a GPU only load the 1660 Ti Max-Q would sit at 55 watts, which seems to be below the
60 watts specified by Nvidia.
I didn’t expect the GPU would drop about 20 watts lower with the CPU active, given
it’s in a different part of the machine with a separate cooling solution, so there
must be some power limitation there.
In a CPU only workload like Cinebench though, the 1065G7 is able to run up to 25 watts for
PL1.
In cinebench processor performance was on the lower side when compared to others I’ve
tested.
Single core performance wasn’t too bad, but multicore is limited by the power limit
of the processor, and look I get it, you can’t exactly shove a beefy 45 watt part in something
like this due to limited cooling on the screen half.
I’ve exported one of my laptop review videos with Adobe Premiere, and the Surface Book
3 was on the slower side out of the options I’ve recently tested.
I’ve also tested Adobe Premiere but with the puget systems benchmark tool, which tests
more things such as live playback, and again the Surface Book 3 was closer to the bottom
of the stack.
It was in the same position in the Adobe Photoshop test, and then down a spot when it came to
Davinci Resolve.
While not exactly a powerhouse due to the lower wattage processor, it’s definitely
still capable of running these sorts of workloads, just don’t expect excellent performance.
Although not a gaming laptop, it should still be possible to kick back at the end of the
day and play some games with this level of hardware.
I’ve got the results of the Surface Book 3 in Battlefield 5 shown in red, and it’s
actually doing a bit better than what I was expecting considering the Max-Q graphics and
lower wattage processor.
Far Cry 5 was tested using the games benchmark tool, and the Surface Book 3 was placed similarly
here too at just under 70 FPS with ultra settings.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider it’s just able to manage 60 FPS at max settings, so not bad
results at all all things considered.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test storage, and the 512gb SSD was performing fairly well.
The SD card slot was also doing well too, and the card sticks out by this much and doesn’t
click in.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording, in the US we’re looking at $2800 USD for the configuration
I’ve tested here, paying more gets you more storage space, but there are cheaper options
too.
The 13” model with same specs for instance is more than $500 less.
Meanwhile here in Australia the configuration I’ve tested is above $4400 AUD, so definitely
premium pricing for a premium device, no surprise there.
Overall Microsoft’s Surface Book 3 is a well built machine, and is offering a unique
combination of laptop and tablet with its bendy hinge.
I thought the implementation worked well, but considering the price you’ll mainly
want to consider this machine if you really need the tablet experience in the same device,
as it is possible to get a better performing laptop for less money and possibly even a
dedicated tablet.
The specs in my higher end model are definitely capable, but yeah due to the custom form factor
there are trade offs being made with regards to performance for the design.
Thermals were fine and it always ran quiet, even when being stressed, but this is a result
of lower power limits.
The dual cameras put others to shame, the 3:2 screen looks good, keyboard and touchpad
were amazing to use, and battery life was up there too.
Lack of thunderbolt in a solution like this is a bit unfortunate, especially for those
that might already have a dock, otherwise apart from the higher price I didn’t have
much to complain about.
Not having upgrade options does suck, but I can understand why it may not be possible
in a custom design like this.
Again it’s really going to come down to how much you’ll benefit from the option
of using it as a tablet as well as a regular laptop.
Anyway, let me know what you thought about Microsoft’s surface book 3 down in the comments,
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