Microsoft Surface Book 3 15in
An ingenious design that has obvious appeal to those who draw directly onscreen, but it needs updating
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PRICE £1,833 (£2,199 inc VAT) from microsoft.com
Nearly five years on from the launch of the first Surface Book, the Surface Book 3 remains a unique laptop. With all of the core components in what would normally be the laptop’s lid, the screen can detach and function as a high-end Windows tablet, yet the GPU and secondary battery in the base give it capabilities that no rival 2-in-1 device can offer
– not to mention enhanced connectivity and sound.
It’s a design that still makes a lot of sense for many design professionals, particularly illustrators and retouchers who might prefer working with a pen. You can hold the screen in tablet mode and draw or make edits directly to the surface. Microsoft’s PixelSense technology is as fl awless as ever, and working this way can feel natural and intuitive with the right applications. Our test model’s 15in screen gives you more space to work with than you’ll find on the Surface Pro or most other convertibles, and the 4K resolution also helps create a great experience. And if you have work that requires more conventional inputs or horsepower? Reconnect the screen with the base and you’re away.
The engineering is impressive, but not quite faultless; it still feels a bit screen-heavy in clamshell laptop mode, with a little too much wobble in that ever-so-clever hinge. Meanwhile, the connectivity leaves you feeling that Microsoft is behind the curve, with two USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 ports, an SD card reader and a single USB-C Gen 1 port that doesn’t support Thunderbolt 3. There’s a Surface Connect port for fast charging and connection to Microsoft’s own docks, but the fastest external storage devices are off the menu.
There are similar issues with the screen. Don’t get us wrong: it looks great in general use, whether you’re streaming Netflix, sketching illustrations or editing photos and video. The maximum brightness of 421cd/m2 really helps. However, it can’t match the wide colour gamuts of some of the OLED panels or even the best TFT panels – we measured it at 98% of sRGB and 77.5% of DCI-P3 – although colour accuracy is excellent with an average Delta E of 1.51.
As with most Surface devices, Microsoft hasn’t put a foot wrong with the keyboard. The layout is sensible and spacious, and the keys have a light but positive feel, with just the right amount of travel. The touchpad is a little small by premium laptop standards, but the smooth surface works well, even in design apps where precision counts.
Meanwhile, the sound on the Surface Book 3 seems borderline miraculous, with a much wider stereo spread and more depth than you’d believe from a convertible laptop. You can make it through a movie or put a playlist on for background listening without feeling the urgent need to plug some headphones in. With the base attached, the Surface Book 3 survived for over nine and a half hours of video playback before giving up the ghost.
In fact, there’s only one area where Microsoft’s laptop falls down, and that’s performance. The convertible design and low-noise cooling system require the use of a low-energy CPU, in this case the 15W Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7. A four-core, eight-thread CPU with a base clock of 1.3GHz and a 3.8GHz Max Turbo, it simply can’t match the levels of performance delivered by the other Core i7 laptops in this test. While the GTX 1660 Ti graphics chipset helps it do better in more GPU-intensive tasks, the CPU left the Surface Book 3 languishing low down in most of our benchmarks. While Microsoft claims the Surface Book 3 can offer workstation-class performance, the CPU is always going to hold it back. What’s more, the casing gets hot while it’s doing it, so we wouldn’t feel comfortable asking it to sustain such heavy workloads over long periods.
There’s still potential in the Surface Book design, and it makes a lot of sense in specific design or photography workloads. But when rival laptops give you better screens and significantly more performance, the thirdgeneration model is struggling to maintain the pace.