hi everyone Aaron here for ZolloTech and many of you have been asking me to take
a look at the surface laptop 2 and since I already did the surface pro 6 I
thought we'd take a look at this now now this has been out for a couple months
and the good news is you can get this for a reduced price of about $300 off so
they currently go from $799 to $2399 and that's for a top model of with a
core i7 16 gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte of storage
this one is $999 so let me flip it over I'll show you what comes in the box and
what specs we've got so you can see in the top there it's got the 8th gen Core
i5 quad core processor 256 gigabytes SSD and 8 gigabytes of RAM so let's go ahead
and open this up we'll get it set up see what comes with it and then move on to
setting it up and seeing what it will do as far as its benchmarks go so we'll go
ahead and open this up there we go let's set this aside and here's the
surface laptop now this is the new color for this year it's in black and we'll
take a closer look at that in just a moment now in the box we've got a little
documentation it looks like and no stickers but it talks about caring for
the surface laptop let's move this aside and take a look at
the power adapter that we've got so here's the power adapter we've got an
extra USB plug in it and then our wall adapter then you can see the magnetic
connector there and this is something I wish Apple would bring back but they
won't and this is really nice to have so here is the surface laptop let's go
ahead and open it up
there we go and you can see it looks just like last year's model it's
aluminum on both top and bottom and then let's go ahead and flip it over and it
picks up fingerprints really easy but it still looks nice and then on this side
you can see we have USB a display port microphone jack no USB see and then
we've got our surface connector here so it's pretty nice just like last year's
but it doesn't have the modern adapters you can get a USBC adapter pretty
inexpensively on Amazon to USB a so we'll open it up and this is Alcantara
although it doesn't feel like I'll can tear that you get on some of the other
surface devices so it's hard to say if this is actually what that is but it
looks pretty good you've got a nice glass trackpad and a really great
keyboard since they've kept the same one from last year let's go ahead and turn
it on and get it set up now the keyboard has great throw to it it looks really
nice it feels good then the trackpad is nice it's glass and it clicks on the
bottom you can't click on the top and the overall build of this is really nice
it's very sturdy and feels very high quality you can see the screen is quite
reflective but these are really nice displays let's go ahead and turn this on
wait for it to boot up and then we'll get it set up so you'll see it says
continuing selected language I'll click yes and we'll be able to set this up
with our voice so I'll do that if you need an assistive
reader press the windows control and enter keys at the same time to turn on
narrator okay enough intro let's dig in now one thing - yes yes your keyboard is
set to us want to stick with that yes do you also type with another keyboard
layout no now let's get you connected to a network that way you can get updates
now one thing to note is the speakers are under this keyboard and they're
vibrating something you can hear that a little bit but let me go ahead and put
in my password and we'll get to the next step I'll click Next
well click accept move on to the next step you have to do that physically you
can't do that with your voice for at least I haven't been able to so I'll put
in my credentials and then click Next
yes okay hold still for a second we need to learn to recognize you
one to set up a pin if you've never used Windows hello it's like face ID for your
laptop it's definitely the best way to log in out there and I'll do this later
I don't want to do that now let's move on to the next step
yes your PC comes with a free 30-day trial of office three sixty two use the
info I need to do my best work yes these are the settings microsoft recommends
except when you're ready so everything looks good here we'll just tap on accept
there we go so it's setup and it's going to load the
desktop we'll wait a few minutes and we should be at the desktop and then we'll
take a look at some of the benchmarks and see how this compares now this
should be faster than the MacBook Pro without the touch bar which is similarly
priced or even the MacBook Air so this should be a better deal but you're
lacking those Thunderbolt ports that you have on the MacBook but either way this
is a great value for $9.99 but just keep in mind you can't upgrade this so
there's no way to actually change the RAM or the storage later on and it's not
upgradable like the surface pro you have the microSD slot on this you don't so
we're at the desktop that was pretty quick let's go ahead and close this and
let's turn up the brightness a little bit this goes pretty bright now if
you've never seen one of these displays this is really nice it's 13.5 inches
corner-to-corner 20 256 by 1504 with 201 pixels per inch
there we go it's customizing to how I have my PC set up and it's just a really
nice beautiful screen touchscreen but it is a little bit reflective if I had one
complaint about it but overall it's a great display so you'll see it comes
installed with Microsoft edge that's going to be discontinued soon or at
least revamped to use the chromium engine from Chrome but let's get some
apps installed I'll make sure this is updated and then I'll run some
benchmarks so I'll check for updates and see what we've got it's probably going
to take a while to update and currently I have about 47% battery
these easily get you through a day if you haven't used one of these and you'll
see there are a ton of updates so I'll get this updated and then I'll move on
from there and see what it's like to use in benchmarking now it's been quite a
while and I installed all the updates that this had available for it that took
quite a few hours and then I installed some benchmarks and some other things so
let's take a look at the Geekbench I ran this already and you'll see we came in
at three thousand three hundred and forty nine for a single core in ten
thousand nine hundred and thirty three for some multi-core score and this is
pretty good it's okay but the main thing holding this back is it's graphics card
and the graphics card in this is an Intel u HD graphics 620 the processor
itself sacktual e pretty good so let me go ahead and close that and you'll see I
have Cinebench open here and I also have intel's power gadget just to see if it
throttles now so far I haven't seen throttling during tasks so it's base
clock speed is about 1.8 gigahertz or so and it only runs at about 2.1 it doesn't
really get to its base clock speed so let's go ahead and hit run for the cpu
test we'll see if it throttles at all it may but it does have a fan inside as
well so let's wait for this to finish and see what we get
now completed with 476 for CPU that's not great but it's not horrible either
but let's go ahead and run the OpenGL test and also I never saw it throttle it
ran at about 2.3 gigahertz the whole time so let's go ahead and hit run and
if you look down here there's GPU utilization and it's doing pretty good
as far as the overall temperature it's not warm or anything like that even if
you touch it here on the underside it may get a little bit warm so let's wait
for this to run and see how it does
now at first when this started to run it actually throttled a little bit but then
I noticed the CPU utilization is way down so it's actually not throttling
it's just not using a lot of its power so we'll wait for this it's hanging out
about 50 degrees Celsius so that's pretty cold actually not bad at all
the OpenGL test completed and it completed at thirty six point seven
three frames per second if you can see up there and that's pretty good that's
actually better than some others that I've tested MacBooks and things and
again the temperature never really went over 50 degrees Celsius it's gone back
down to 44 degrees Celsius so let me close that and then we're going to try
the heaven benchmark which is more of a gaming benchmark and then we'll try a
game that everyone's going to ask me if it runs anyway we'll try out fortnight
and just see what it runs at so we'll click run here I'll leave everything at
default for now everything is on high and we'll click run and see what Heaven
benchmark does so right now on its default settings I didn't change
anything we're running at about 5 frames per second in the upper right there so
not so great normally when we get to the part where there's the airship it goes
up a little bit and we're at about 8 frames per second 6 to 8 it depends on
what it's doing so not so great there and I wouldn't expect it to be very good
at this this is not really meant for gaming so let's go ahead and exit out of
this quit now because many of you will ask anyway
we'll go ahead and open fortnight now keep in mind this has not gone above
fifty degrees Celsius that's really impressive I don't hear any fans or
anything it's staying nice and cool so let's see if it runs this what kind of
frames per second we get I'll let it kind of run itself as far as what it can
handle and hopefully we get okay benchmark so I haven't opened this
before it just finished installing a little while ago and let's see how it
does you'll see it's fully loaded at least in the lobby and by default it
set everything to medium and we're running at about 20 frames per second so
let me go ahead and hit play see what it does I may have to lower it down to low
just to get decent frame rates out of it also while we're waiting for it to do
matchmaking GPU utilization is usually run 94% here and I'm starting to hear
the fans spin up so there's that and also it's running at about 2.4 gigahertz
right now at 43 percent utilization so it's doing okay as far as the CPU is
concerned you can see it's quite choppy right now and it's not really doing so
well as far as the framerate is concerned let me change some of the
settings quick this is much more playable although still kind of choppy
you're actually better off playing it on your phone probably for framerate and if
you want a little higher resolution it seems like it works but it's not so
great so it's playable but it's it's not anything that I would recommend when
you're when you're playing this it seems like it's going to be okay in low
resolution or low mode but overall it's not going to be great and I'm terrible
at this game so let's move on to the next thing now as I said during that
fortnight test it actually spun the fan up for the first time although we're
only at about 53 degrees Celsius and it's coming down now and you can see it
actually thermal throttled a little bit once we got to that full CPU utilization
and GPU utilization it pulled back the frequency a little bit for the most part
though it did really well and then the other thing with this is something I
actually miss when I'm using a Mac is the
touchscreen the touchscreen is super responsive and it's great to be able to
just use this as something that you have in addition to whatever you're doing so
if you want to open up Chrome go to my website here and let me move this out of
the way go to my website and it's nice and fast but we can scroll through this
and this is really a Productivity machine just little just size things
it's great for productivity maybe you need to administer some servers maybe
get some schoolwork done with word things like that you're not gonna have
any problems as far as those tasks go however if you want something for gaming
I would highly recommend taking a look at something like the surface book 2 or
maybe even something from a razor now I'm not so sure that this is actually
Alcantara I guess it could be but it doesn't feel like the Alcantara of the
other colors that they have available so there's something different with the
black color and the device itself just feels great it just like last year's
it's super high quality build I used one for an entire year the previous version
and liked it a lot to administer some servers and things like that it was
great for remoting into servers running a bunch of tabs having a ton of things
open at once even with eight gigs of ram it seems to handle it just fine and then
you get all the updates for surface and it was rock-solid the main limitation is
really the ports on the side although if you use this with a dock that's what I
did most of the time with a monitor it was great and then over here you only
have one USB a and the headphone but that usually works for most of the
things you're going to do and if you use a dock you're good to go but if you want
to edit video or you want to do something like maybe game on it you may
want to look elsewhere or get a surface book too or maybe a razor or something
along those lines to get you by a little bit faster but when it comes to
trackpads and the touch screen and the keyboard this is a really solid package
that I can highly recommend to most people wanting a Productivity machine
now additionally if you are someone that wants to use a pen it's not really easy
to use a pen on this display although the surface pen will work as well as the
surface dial next but I found over the year of using the
previous version I never used the pen just because it was awkward to use on
this display it's better for a tablet style I get the surface pro or the
surface go now if you haven't seen my surface pro 6 video this is going to
have the same internals and be capable of the same thing and there's also the
surface go but I don't normally recommend that unless you want to do
really light work let me know your thoughts about the surface laptop 2 in
the comments below and if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and
like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next time