the original surface book from microsoft was pretty awesome but arguably a little
thick and a little underpowered so
we were thrilled when we found out that the surface book 2 would pair its
quad-core processor with a beefy gtx
1060 graphics card but
how could it do that given its detachable design
and is some extra power worth the price
and some of its questionable design choices
well you'll know the answer very soon after i thank glasswire for sponsoring
this video glasswire is a firewall that displays your pc's incoming and outgoing
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the build quality of the surface book 2 meets expectations which is to say that
like the rest of its family it is spectacular the magnesium body has this
soft texture to it and no matter where you touch it it feels solid and well
crafted it's even got a decent helping of io with
finally a type c port this is a first for a
surface product but it's also not all
good while you can use it to charge the device if you forget your magnetic
charger and if you have a powerful enough wall wart it's regular usb 3
not Thunderbolt 3 which means no external graphics or premium docks
unless microsoft were to start selling an upgraded keyboard bottom with like a
better GPU inside it
and the surface book 2 is pretty heavy
and unwieldy by 2018 standards
as a Windows tablet it's big and it's
pretty but it sacrifices nearly all of its i o
and as a laptop it's not very lapable
because so much of the weight is up top in the tablet portion
overall we feel like this detachable approach
offers questionable utility compared to folding devices like dell's upcoming xps
15 two in one and the hinge also adds
considerable thickness something that porsche design was able to overcome
however you might be able to forgive the extra bulk because of its raw power
rocking an Intel core i7 8650u 16 gigs
of RAM and a gtx 1050 in the 13 inch
model or gtx 1060 in the 15 inch the
surface book 2 is going to be great for productivity but also even for proper
photo or even video editing plus real aaa games at full details that is
assuming everything stays nice and cool which is mostly the case so after an
hour of stress testing both laptop cpus were nice and cool
unless the battery was charging at the same time
and it should be noted they sacrificed some performance in any case leveling
off under their 1.9 gigahertz base clock
so this will affect the export time of a video project for example
but it makes sense since a large consideration was the touch temperature
of the device and i still prefer this proactive approach to apples where they
just let the processor run as fast as it can and thermal throttle
a quick side note here our review ended up delayed because our first unit was
part of a small batch with terrible thermals this isn't normal so if your
results are different from what we're showing contact microsoft and get it
sorted out moving on the surface book 2 15 inches
as we mentioned before surprisingly well equipped compared to other notebooks
that aren't explicitly designed for gaming so if you want to run older
titles you can do it at native res or if you drop down to 1080p it can handle
just about anything with the 13 and a half inch model also performing
respectively with all of that said if you're just gaming you could get the
same power in an acer helios 300 for a
third of the price you get a surface book 2 for the
productivity that is where it excels
pardon the pun the surface book 2 absolutely nails the
keyboard feel compared to any other laptop we've tried it's as good or
better with a nice travel distance soft yet tactile keystrokes and a nice soft
comfortable surface coating since people will ask yes it's a lot better than the
macbook pro well at least as far as the keyboard is
concerned the touchpad is a different story apple's large gesture friendly
touch surface still stands above anything available in the pc space
though that's not to say that the one here is bad
and i guess if you're really focused on comparing size the 15 inch display
offers plenty of real estate to get your touch on
as you'd expect the surface book 2 is right up there with the best touch
experiences on the market so if you'll be using the stylus for notes or drawing
oh my god you can't really do better while maintaining a full fat x86
operating system and the screen isn't just good for touching it's also
fantastic to look at with microsoft's individual factory calibration making
sure that every color hits your eyeballs just right
furthermore as we've said about every surface product the three by two aspect
ratio coupled with the higher resolution is noticeably better for productivity
than 16x9 1080p and you'll be able to be
productive for a really long time thanks to the book 2's over nine and a half
hour score in our work battery test this is among the best results that we've
seen to date its webcam is better than
other laptops which is to say that it's still probably not as good as cameras
should be in 2018 but progress is progress
but it makes up for some of that with Windows hello facial recognition and
some pretty good speakers given its size
so overall good maybe even great
but as always there's a catch it got a
one out of 10 for repairability from ifixit so you've got to shell out up
front for the specs you think you'll need even storage
and our top of the line model here will
run you a cool 3 300 us dollars
ouch now if you compare that to another
premium product like the macbook pro well i'd say as long as you can live
without macOS the surface book 2 comes away the clear winner thanks to its
superior versatility but if you don't need one device that does
everything the price is a little tough to swallow i
mean yes technically it starts at fifteen hundred dollars but that one has
no dedicated graphics card and only two CPU cores making a surface pro or a
surface laptop easier on both your wallet and your back
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