Microsoft Surface Book 2 review The ultimate laptop improves in every way but one

This is Microsoft Surface book 2 its performance machine and boy is it ever This is Microsoft Surface book - it's answered to the surface book 1 which debuted a couple of years ago now This is supposed to be Microsoft's performance notebook But it was getting a little bit long the tooth it was time for an update so Microsoft delivered So what the surprise was this time around though? Is there's actually two surface book twos There is this larger 50 inch model and a smaller 13 inch model now this is actually the surface book 1 But it's essentially the same thing so you can get an idea of just how the two compare against one another What we've tested though was this model and that's what we're focusing upon for today now the 15-inch has something really special inside of it a Discrete graphics processor now the original surface book did too But this has performance of about 4 to 5 times the original surface book and what makes this especially cool Is that this has an Infinia NVIDIA GTX? 1060 Inside of it, and this thing really screamed, so let's go ahead and talk a little bit about what makes this laptop so special So first of all it's not just a laptop. It's a convertible tablet, so you can go ahead and flip it back and forth you Can actually take it out? Using the attach method here And you can actually put it back like this if you like Or you can flip it upside down Now with this One of the key attributes for this of course is the fact that it is a tablet, but that actually is Where we can sort of start out about one of its pluses and minuses now. This is the fact again? This is a 15 inch tablet, and this display is absolutely enormous in fact it is 30 to 40 by 2160, that's a 15 inch tablet. It's got 260 PPI.

The problem though of course is that when you're holding it. This is no Amazon Kindle This is an enormous tablet And it's sort of just it's a bit awkward to go ahead and hold in your hand unless you're an NBA player Which I'm obviously not so Usually I think we're gonna be using it in desktop mode and in the fact. That's where it shines So again, let's talk a little bit about what this has inside of it so This happens to be the mondo model as it were it costs 30 to 99 That's three thousand two hundred ninety nine dollars. That's a ton of money to be paying for a laptop, but again I think it's worth.

It inside is a core i7 8650 you as an 8th gen a core processor the most modern of Intel's processors and it runs from 1.9 To 4.2 Gigahertz This happens to have 16 gigs of ram ddr3 Specifically as well as a one terabyte SSD and a VM II part so this performance absolutely screams Now there's a couple of things that you should know about this as well The ports on the side are a little bit different from the earlier book model and the key isn't so much on this side Where it has two USB 3.0 Ports now 3.1. But 3.0 Ports as well as a card reader, but on this side Where it has the surface connect which is pretty standard? This is what you see this is what the service uses for for power and for i/o, but this this is a USB C port So what you're essentially getting is a USB a extension expansion port in a USBC format Now you can't actually connect this to an external display. Which is 1? Again, Thunderbolt would allow you to go ahead and use multiple displays But what I found is that? Really, you're sort of limited here Because and this is a little bit confusing so stick with me for a little bit so USB C. Of course allows you to connect to an external display, and it should allow you to draw power It doesn't i've tried connecting this to an external battery charger as well an external charger And it doesn't actually power the power of the laptop, so you're getting all of your Power through the surface connector, that's fine normally in fact.

We have the service connector. These are the maturer this time around It's actually substantially larger than the older one and it actually generates 180 watts of power as opposed to the older smaller one And that's fine for normal use the problem is if you want to connect it to multiple displays you have to use the surface dock And the surface dock doesn't generate enough power for this under load so to give you an example I was trying this last night playing a few 3d games and in fact. What happened was even though the connector with the Laptop was connected to the service. Dock is that the power is steadily decreased by the time? I was done flying for about an hour an hour and a half.

It was down to 60% charge. So that's a big drawback Now let's talk a little bit about some of the pluses here again performance If you're looking to use this for general purpose productivity device fine You're taking care of if you're looking is this to use this as an Adobe device for Photoshop again perfectly fine To give you a little bit of an example I've tried Crysis 2 a You know it's an older verb. It's an older game, but I could run this at 1080p extreme settings Watchdogs to Iran and high Far Cry 3 ran perfectly fine even on sort of the native settings here, too So again you're seeing performance here the other thing. That's interesting about the performance though Is that this machine is very quiet now the surface book and as well as surface pro 4 in the surface pro you're always accompanied by a fan hiss there was always a as The fan kicked in there is a fan in this not on the tablet, but in the base.

There is a row There's a small grill right here and this grill serves as the the fan port and With this there wasn't so much of a hiss as well as just a small a soft fan buzz So when you're using this even in a very quiet room There's really hardly any disturbance at all, and I think that really makes that this machine Really stand out from the crowd The only thing you'll notice is that some of these other Devices that we have have large grilles on the bottom. Where if air gets sucked in this again Just has the one fan grille It really doesn't interesting an excellent job and keeping the device cool and quiet now the other thing I really like about the service book too is the batteries now there are batteries both in the clipboard on the tablet portion as Well as the base and these just think these things just keep on going so we test using a video Rundown test where we go ahead and loop a 4k video over and over until the battery basically expires now normally We've talked about all-day battery life in the context of 6 8 Maybe 10 hours this under our tests went on for over 13 hours Which is simply amazing that means you can go ahead and take this to a conference? Get up in the morning Start working over breakfast go through the whole day and even go in at the dinner time the evening hours as well And I think really this makes that this for me as somebody goes to a lot of conferences really makes it stand out And really just puts it above the class in terms of everything in terms of this competition as well Now let's talk about a little bit about a couple of other things as well So we don't have the Microsoft next-generation Mouse to talk about but we do have a new pen now the pen Is you know a pen for me? You might not go ahead and get a whole lot of out of this But it does it is what they call a next generation pen it has 4096 levels of pressure and if you The one thing that we've always liked about the surface books is of course you can go ahead And draw very nicely on here everything comes syncs up very well, you can erase using the the pen as well again, I think this is one of the Certainly one of the things that I like about this the surface book too. It doesn't come with the pen though. It says separately It'll be a separate purchase Essentially that's it if you are going to buy this machine you're gonna be paying a lot of money again about $3,200 It is big and bulky it does have some weaknesses as far as the ports are concerned But the performance in the battery life are absolutely terrific We're still running our final performance tests, and we haven't assigned this a star rating as yet But I can say with confidence that if you buy the surface book - you're getting a hell of a machine.