MICROSOFT SURFACE BOOK i7
Price: £1,799 inc VAT, 256GB; £2,249 inc VAT, 256GB; £2,649 inc VAT, 1TB
It’s always been difficult trying to find the right category for Microsoft’s hybrid tablet/laptop Surface Book. And now with the new i7 in hand, it’s even harder to work out just what square hole to put this round peg into.
The Surface Book i7 is the second iteration of Microsoft’s ‘convertible’ laptop. The top half is a beautifully proportioned 13.5in tablet with a ‘PixelSense’ screen that has touch and pen support. The keyboard base (called the Performance Base) is home to a discrete graphics chip, which takes the i7’s performance beyond that of any other laptop in its class.
The two sides are held together with a hinge that will be familiar to owner’s of the first generation model. There were rumours Microsoft would give up on its ‘dynamic fulcrum hinge’ and eliminate the gap it creates, but it’s still there and remains one of the i7’s most prominent features.
Design
The Surface Book’s tablet has the same IPS (3000x2000) screen, behind which is an Intel dual-core sixth-generation Skylake Core i7-6600U. This is paired with 8- or 16GB of RAM, and depending on the depth of your pockets an SSD with 256GB, 512GB or 1TB SSD.
For hardware addicts, that CPU is a disappointment. With lots of laptops now using Intel’s seventh-generation Kaby Lake CPUs, you’re probably wondering why Microsoft went with an older processor. It appears the firm was more concerned with upgrading the graphics in Performance Base. The original Surface Book featured a discrete Nvidia ‘GeForce’ chip, which was custom but widely believed to be a GeForce GT 940M. The i7 packs an Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M chip with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. The newer GPU is far faster, but also far hotter. Microsoft said that it added a second fan to keep it cool, but the Performance Base is also a little thicker than the original model, with larger air vents.
Under heavy load, the fans get louder, but the acoustics aren’t bad. A bit shrill, maybe, but acceptable. The fans also seem to work well at keeping the GPU cool. We ran a GPU torture test on the device for more than an hour and although it got warmer, it didn’t get uncomfortable
The newer GPU is far faster, but also far hotter. Microsoft said it added a second fan to keep it cool, but the Performance Base is also a little thicker than the original model
to touch or use. So good job on the implementation, Microsoft.
Hardware
The Surface Book i7’s CPU performance can be summed up pretty much in one sentence: it’s a dualcore Intel chip. Being a sixthgeneration Skylake CPU, it’s around 10 percent slower than a comparable seventhgeneration Kaby Lake. Of course, a lot of people won’t feel that deficit very often.
To illustrate this, the charts on page 74 reveal how the i7 compares to some of the best laptops around. For context, we threw in a larger quad-core Dell XPS 15 and the Microsoft Surface 3, which runs on the anaemic Atom X7 CPU. Our test takes a 30GB MKV file and converts it with Handbrake 0.9.9.
On most dual-core laptops (including the Kaby Lake-based Dell XPS 13 and HP Spectre x360), it takes almost two hours to run this test, and as you can see overleaf, as the chips heat up and slow down during the course of the test, there are minimal differences in performance. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any differences, but the sixth-generation Skylake chip keeps up.
The charts also illustrate just how little has changed from the first Surface Book. In
another performance test – the CPU-heavy Cinebench R15 – the score for the i7 was identical to one we recorded last year.
The performance you really care about is the GPU that Microsoft tucked under the keyboard. Even though we all hoped for some secret new AMD or Nvidia GPU, the GeForce GTX 965M doesn’t disappoint.
Performance Futuremark’s 3DMark Sky Diver
This is a synthetic test that measures the graphics performance of a PC. Although it doesn’t use an actual video game engine, it’s still well respected. For comparison we also threw in the Dell XPS 15. It’s a much thicker and larger 15in laptop with a quadcore CPU and GeForce GTX 960M. Since the overall score factors in the CPU cores, the XPS 15 takes the win. Elsewhere in the pack though, you can see how 2015’s Surface Book is head and shoulders above everyone else. But then you get to the Surface Book i7’s GeForce GTX 965M, which is basically three times the performance of most laptops with integrated graphics.
3DMark also gives you a sub score, which focuses solely on the graphics performance and cuts out the CPU performance. Once we take the quad-core out of the equation, the Surface Book i7 moves into first place. Not by as much as we expected, but it’s not bad. The Surface Book i7 is certainly fast.
Tomb Raider
Not everyone trusts synthetic tests though, so we also ran the three-year-old, but still quite lovely, Tomb Raider game. We don’t have as many comparable laptops, but you can see how two of the XPS 13’s perform when running the game at 1920x1080 on the High setting. The slowest of the bunch is the seventh-generation Kaby Lake laptop with HD 620 graphics. Moving up to the Dell XPS 13, with an Intel Core i7-6560U and Iris 540, nets a decent boost. The original Surface Book with its GeForce GT 940M is faster still, but at 35.4fps, we wouldn’t play the game. That changes with the Surface Book i7, which achieves a totally satisfying 80.8fps, and even exceeds the Dell XPS 15’s GeForce GTX 960M.
Battery
With the Surface Book i7’s upgrade you already know Microsoft didn’t touch the tablet portion, which has the same DYN made 18 watt-hour (Wh) batteries. Where Microsoft did change things was, again, in the Performance Base, whose now-thicker profile accommodates more battery capacity. The original Surface Book with GeForce card packs a 53Wh cell while the new one has nearly a 63Wh battery. All told, that’s a massive 81Wh battery pushing the Surface Book i7 along. To see how well it does, we ran the same rundown test on both it and the 2015 Surface Book.
Our test looped a 4K resolution movie using Windows 10 Movies & TV app. That particular app is selected because it’s a super-efficient video player. We set the laptops to flight mode and the brightness
to a relatively bright 250- to 260 nits to approximate what you’d use in a typical house or office in the daytime. Audio is enabled, but we use a pair of small earbuds.
The result? Stupendous battery life. In fact, it set a new record in a laptop at just over 13 hours of playback. The original Surface Book gave us a respectable 10 hours and the next closest competitor was Dell’s current XPS 13 at about 11 hours.
Modular laptop
Since the tablet of the new Surface Book i7 appears to be exactly the same as the original, we naturally wondered if we could simply attach the original to the upgraded Performance Base, since that’s where most of the upgrade happened. Sure enough, the two sides fit, and after a few driver downloads we were all set.
In some ways, the Surface Book i7 is the first modular laptop. With the GPU and extra batteries stored in the base, you could, in theory, upgrade by just buying a new base. It’s almost like Google’s cancelled Project Ara, except it’s an actual product.
The problem is, of course, that Microsoft doesn’t sell just the base. That’s a shame as we think the firm is missing an opportunity here. Plenty of people who bought a Surface Book last year are probably still pretty happy with the Skylake CPU and tablet portion, but that GeForce GT 940M is getting long in the tooth. If we cared about graphics performance and we had the original, we’d jump at the chance to buy the Performance Base with the GeForce GTX 965M upgrade.
The downsides
The most obvious problems are the prior sins. The original Surface Book amazed everyone at launch but went through many months of teething pains with docking and undocking issues, and multiple firmware fixes issued over the past year, which both corrected and then reintroduced new docking or sleep issues.
In the interest of full disclosure, we used an original Surface Book (although not our original review sample) on and off for the better part of the past 10 months. For the most part, problems were few and far between, but they were there and occasionally maddening.
But whether those were problems with the Surface Book, per se, or issues induced by Windows 10 Insider Preview program, we don’t know. Despite all that, we still have no problems recommending it.
Still, we have a few complaints. The most prominent is the lack of Thunderbolt 3, or at least a faster 10Gb/s port. With this class of performance, ‘pro’ ports should be part of the package.
One of the stickiest points with the Surface Book i7 is its price. The unit you see here with Core i7, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and GeForce GTX 965M is £2,649. You can knock £400 off the Surface Book i7’s price by cutting the SSD capacity in half. Or you can step down to 8GB of RAM and a 256GB drive for £2,249. The problem is those prices aren’t competitive with competing laptops from
PC makers. Of course, no other PC vendors offers anything quite like the i7 either.
The other issue we have is the size and weight of the i7. Our review unit weighed just over 1576g. That’s only 60g heavier than the original Surface Book, but it’s hefty.
Verdict
When Microsoft announced details of the Surface Book i7, we were pretty disappointed in its middle-aged hardware. In use, however, it appears there’s plenty of life left in these parts. That it can actually give you better graphics performance than a larger 15in laptop with discrete graphics is amazing. Combined with its tablet mode, swanky hinge, pen support, beautiful screen, and stellar battery life, it’s easy to remember what made us fall in love with the Surface Book in the first place.
Specifications Gordon Mah Ung
13.5in (3000x2000, 267ppi) PixelSense display Windows 10 Pro Office 365 30-day trial 256GB, 512GB or 1TB SSD 8GB or 16GB RAM Sixth-generation Intel Core i7 Nvidia GeForce graphics 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless networking 802.11a/b/g/n compatible Bluetooth 4.0 TPM chip for enterprise security 2x USB 3.0 SD card reader Surface Connect Headset jack Mini DisplayPort Cameras, video and audio 5Mp front-facing camera 8Mp rear-facing camera with autofocus Dual Microphones, front- and rear facing Front-facing stereo speakers with Dolby Audio Premium Ambient light sensor Accelerometer Gyroscope Magnetometer Up to 12 hours video playback Laptop: 312.3x232.1x13-22.8mm Clipboard: 312.3x220.2x7.7mm 1576g Microsoft’s Surface Book i7 (bottom) isn’t the tiniest laptop around compared to the last-generation MacBook Pro 13 (second from bottom), the latest-generation HP Spectre x360 13 (third from bottom), and Dell’s bantam XPS 13 (top)