This is Microsoft Surface book 2 its performance machine and boy is it ever
This is Microsoft Surface book - it's answered to the surface book 1 which debuted a couple of years ago now
This is supposed to be Microsoft's performance notebook
But it was getting a little bit long the tooth it was time for an update so Microsoft delivered
So what the surprise was this time around though? Is there's actually two surface book twos
There is this larger 50 inch model and a smaller 13 inch model now
this is actually the surface book 1
But it's essentially the same thing so you can get an idea of just how the two compare against one another
What we've tested though was this model
and that's what we're focusing upon for today now the 15-inch has something really special inside of it a
Discrete graphics processor now the original surface book did too
But this has performance of about 4 to 5 times the original surface book and what makes this especially cool
Is that this has an Infinia NVIDIA GTX?
1060 inside of it, and this thing really screamed, so let's go ahead and talk a little bit about what makes this laptop so special
So first of all it's not just a laptop. It's a convertible tablet, so you can go ahead and flip it back and forth you
Can actually take it out?
Using the attach method here
And you can actually put it back like this if you like
Or you can flip it upside down
Now with this
One of the key attributes for this of course is the fact that it is a tablet, but that actually is
Where we can sort of start out about one of its pluses and minuses now. This is the fact again?
This is a 15 inch tablet, and this display is absolutely enormous in fact it is
30 to 40 by 2160, that's a 15 inch tablet. It's got 260 PPI
The problem though of course is that when you're holding it. This is no Amazon Kindle
This is an enormous tablet
And it's sort of just it's a bit awkward to go ahead and hold in your hand unless you're an NBA player
Which I'm obviously not
so
Usually I think we're gonna be using it in desktop mode and in the fact. That's where it shines
So again, let's talk a little bit about what this has inside of it
so
This happens to be the mondo model as it were it costs 30 to 99
That's three thousand two hundred ninety nine dollars. That's a ton of money to be paying for a laptop, but again
I think it's worth. It inside is a core i7
8650 you as an 8th gen a core processor the most modern of Intel's processors and it runs from 1.9 to 4.2 gigahertz
This happens to have 16 gigs of ram ddr3
Specifically as well as a one terabyte SSD and a VM II part so this performance absolutely
screams
Now there's a couple of things that you should know about this as well
The ports on the side are a little bit different from the earlier book model and the key isn't so much on this side
Where it has two USB 3.0 ports now 3.1. But 3.0 ports as well as a card reader, but on this side
Where it has the surface connect which is pretty standard?
This is what you see this is what the service uses for for power and for i/o, but this this is a USB C port
So what you're essentially getting is a USB a extension expansion port in a USBC format
Now you can't actually connect this to an external display. Which is 1?
Again, Thunderbolt would allow you to go ahead and use multiple displays
But what I found is that?
Really, you're sort of limited here
Because and this is a little bit confusing so stick with me for a little bit so USB C
Of course allows you to connect to an external display, and it should allow you to draw power
It doesn't i've tried connecting this to an external battery charger as well an external charger
And it doesn't actually power the power of the laptop, so you're getting all of your
Power through the surface connector, that's fine normally in fact. We have the service connector. These are the maturer this time around
It's actually substantially larger than the older one and it actually generates 180 watts of power as opposed to the older smaller one
And that's fine for normal use the problem is if you want to connect it to multiple displays you have to use the surface dock
And the surface dock doesn't generate enough power for this under load so to give you an example
I was trying this last night playing a few 3d games and in fact. What happened was even though the connector with the
Laptop was connected to the service. Dock is that the power is steadily decreased by the time?
I was done flying for about an hour an hour and a half. It was down to 60% charge. So that's a big drawback
Now let's talk a little bit about some of the pluses here again performance
If you're looking to use this for general purpose productivity device fine
You're taking care of if you're looking is this to use this as an Adobe device for Photoshop again perfectly fine
To give you a little bit of an example
I've tried
Crysis 2 a
You know it's an older verb. It's an older game, but I could run this at 1080p extreme settings
Watchdogs to Iran and high Far Cry 3 ran perfectly fine even on sort of the native settings here, too
So again you're seeing performance here the other thing. That's interesting about the performance though
Is that this machine is very quiet now the surface book and as well as surface pro 4 in the surface pro
you're always accompanied by a fan hiss there was always a
as
The fan kicked in there is a fan in this not on the tablet, but in the base. There is a row
There's a small grill right here
and this grill serves as the the fan port and
With this there wasn't so much of a hiss as well as just a small a soft fan buzz
So when you're using this even in a very quiet room
There's really hardly any disturbance at all, and I think that really makes that this machine
Really stand out from the crowd
The only thing you'll notice is that some of these other
Devices that we have have large grilles on the bottom. Where if air gets sucked in this again
Just has the one fan grille
It really doesn't interesting an excellent job and keeping the device cool and quiet now the other thing
I really like about the service book too is the batteries now there are batteries both in the clipboard on the tablet portion as
Well as the base and these just think these things just keep on going so we test using a video
Rundown test where we go ahead and loop a 4k video over and over until the battery basically expires now normally
We've talked about all-day battery life in the context of 6 8
Maybe 10 hours this under our tests went on for over 13 hours
Which is simply amazing that means you can go ahead and take this to a conference?
Get up in the morning
Start working over breakfast go through the whole day and even go in at the dinner time the evening hours as well
And I think really this makes that this for me as somebody goes to a lot of conferences really makes it stand out
And really just puts it above the class in terms of everything in terms of this competition as well
Now let's talk about a little bit about a couple of other things as well
So we don't have the Microsoft next-generation Mouse to talk about but we do have a new pen now the pen
Is you know a pen for me?
You might not go ahead and get a whole lot of out of this
But it does it is what they call a next generation pen it has
4096 levels of pressure and
if you
The one thing that we've always liked about the surface books is of course you can go ahead
And draw very nicely on here everything comes syncs up very well, you can erase using the the pen as well
again, I think this is one of the
Certainly one of the things that I like about this the surface book too. It doesn't come with the pen though. It says separately
It'll be a separate purchase
Essentially that's it if you are going to buy this machine you're gonna be paying a lot of money again about $3,200
It is big and bulky it does have some weaknesses as far as the ports are concerned
But the performance in the battery life are absolutely terrific
We're still running our final performance tests, and we haven't assigned this a star rating as yet
But I can say with confidence that if you buy the surface book - you're getting a hell of a machine