Microsoft Surface Book 2

REWRITING THE BOOK ON GAMING 2-IN-1S.

THE SURFACE BOOK 2 is Microsoft’s second crack at a gamingcapable 2-in-1 that sees the return of the detachable 13.5-inch (3,000 x 2,000-pixel) tablet alongside a matching keyboard base. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU that’s in the base means the Surface Book 2’s good for a bit of gaming, but what that chip’s really intended for is GPU-accelerated media rendering and encoding and, frankly, there are better laptops out there if you’re after one primarily for games.

That chip combined with the Core i7-8650U CPU in our review unit did help ramp up encoding speeds, giving about twice the power of what’s in, say, the Acer Switch 5. And to get anything beefier, you’ll generally need to go for a significantly thicker (and, at full tilt, louder) laptop thanks to the greater cooling requirements.

The Book 2’s battery life is also admirable, ranging from 7 to 10 hours in our tests — something that’s helped along by that second battery underneath the keyboard. Without that, the runtime’s cut in half, which is still not bad for a large-screen tablet.

The entry-level Core i5/256GB model is priced at a fairly reasonable $2,199 — although it doesn’t include that Nvidia GPU — with three further models on offer, topping out at the $4,499 Core i7/1TB model. Prospective buyers will also want to note that the Book 2s don’t come with a Surface Pen stylus — that’ll cost you $140 extra.