We finally have the successor. After a troubled launch in late 2015 of the original Surface Book, Microsoft seemed to drag their feet when it came to updating what was one of the most interesting notebooks released in the last couple of years. The original Surface Book launched with some serious power management concerns, which were eventually sorted out, but then the company just left the model relatively untouched, except for a mid-generation update with a stronger GPU.

The wait is over though. Microsoft has released the Surface Book 2 as a worthy successor to the original, with many improvements. With the launch of the Surface Laptop earlier this year, which targets the $1000 price point, Microsoft was free to ratchet the Surface Book 2 up in performance, and price, and they’ve doubled the number of models, with both a 13.5-inch version, being the upgrade from the original, and a new 15-inch model which clearly targets the performance-starved users. For this review, Microsoft sent us the larger 15-inch model.

Both the 13.5 and 15-inch models are shipping with the latest Intel Core i7-8650U CPUs, offering four cores and eight threads, and a 4.2 GHz Turbo. RAM stays the same with either 8 or 16 GB of LPDDR3, and that’s because Intel CPUs don’t yet support LPDDR4, which is a shame. Storage is 256 GB to 1 TB of NVMe SSD. So far, we have a pretty typical notebook for late 2017. The difference with the Surface Book 2 is the GPU, which is optional on the smaller model but standard on the 15-inch version we have today. Microsoft packed as much GPU as possible into the Surface Book 2 models, with the 13.5-inch offered with an impressive GTX 1050, and the 15-inch model shipping with a GTX 1060. To put that into perspective, the 15.6-inch Dell XPS 15 offers the GTX 1050, so the smaller Surface Book 2 has as much GPU power as the Dell, which is fantastic. The larger Surface Book 2 gets the much more powerful GTX 1060, featuring twice the CUDA cores as its smaller brother, and four times the ROPs. The model numbers are similar, but the  GTX 1060 is going to offer a lot more compute.

Microsoft Surface Book 2
	13.5 No GPU	13.5 GPU	15 (Model Reviewed)
CPU	Intel Core i5-7300U Dual-Core w/Hyperthreading 2.6-3.5 GHz 3MB Cache 15W TDP	Intel Core i7-8650U Quad-Core w/Hyperthreading 1.9-4.2 GHz 8MB Cache 15W TDP
RAM	8GB LPDDR3	8-16 GB LPDDR3	16 GB LPDDR3
GPU	Intel HD 620	Intel HD 620 + NVIDIA GTX 1050 2GB	Intel HD 620 + NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB
Storage	256 GB NVMe	256GB, 512 GB, 1TB
Display	13.5" PixelSense 3000x2000 3:2 sRGB Touch and Pen enabled		15" PixelSense 3240x2160 3:2 sRGB Touch and Pen enabled
Networking	802.11ac 2x2:2 866Mbps max Bluetooth 4.1 Marvell AVASTAR
Audio	Stereo Speakers (front facing) Dolby Audio Premium
Battery	23 Wh (Tablet) plus 46 Wh (Base)	23 Wh (Tablet) plus 52 Wh (Base)	23 Wh (Tablet) plus 63 Wh (Base)
Xbox Wireless	No		Yes
Right Side	Surface Connect USB Type-C 3.1 Gen 1 with USB Power Delivery Headset Jack
Left Side	2 x USB 3.0 Type-ASD Card Reader
Dimensions	312 x 232 x 13-23mm 12.3 x 9.14 x 0.51-0.90 inches		343 x 251 x 15-23 mm 13.5 x 9.87 x 0.57-0.90 inches
Weight	1.53 kg 3.38 lbs	1.64 kg 3.62 lbs	1.90 kg 4.2 lbs
Cameras	8.0 MP Rear-facing camera with autofocus 5.0 MP front-facing camera with 1080p video Windows Hello IR camera
Pricing	$1499	$1999-$2999	$2499-$3200

After shunning the port for the last couple of years, Microsoft has finally added USB-C to the Surface Book 2, replacing the mini-DisplayPort. Their reasoning for not including it before was that USB-C is a confusing port, where they all look the same, but offer different capabilities, and that’s a fair point, but it also makes it more confusing that they didn’t include Thunderbolt 3 on the Surface Book 2, meaning the USB-C port on the Surface Book 2 doesn’t offer the full capabilities of the port. The company seems to have an aversion to making everyone happy. The USB-C port does offer DisplayPort output, as well as power delivery, but the lack of Thunderbolt 3 deprives the owner of the ability to output dual UHD video feeds, despite the performance of this machine, and that’s a shame.

The larger Surface Book 2 15 offers an impressive 85 Wh of battery capacity, and that’s due to the unique design of the Book, where the detachable tablet offers 23 Wh of capacity, and the base offers another 62 Wh. The device is designed to have the tablet attached most of the time, but with the ability to remove it for certain tasks.

This isn’t an Ultrabook though. The smaller 13.5-inch model starts at 3.38 lbs (1.5 kg) and goes up if you add a GPU, and the larger 15-inch model weighs in at 4.2 lbs (1.9 kg). This is a device designed to offer portable performance, and here the weight isn’t as much of an issue. It still comes in slightly lighter than an XPS 15, despite a GPU with double the CUDA cores.

The most interesting aspect to the Surface Book 2 continues to be the design though, so let’s start there.

Design

When the Surface Book launched, it offered a lot of innovative ideas in the laptop space, and none more innovative than separating the CPU, RAM, and storage into the display section, which is removable, and the GPU and majority of the battery into the base. It allowed Microsoft to pack in more battery than most other laptops at the time. To avoid the usual top-heavy feel of most laptops with a detachable display, Microsoft created an interesting hinge design, which rolls out when opening the display, making the base slightly longer and giving it more leverage. That hinge has returned, and keeps the Surface Book 2 looking like a Surface Book. Not everyone loved the hinge design, but it does work well and gives the Surface Book lineup a design touch that is instantly recognizable. The hinge doesn’t let the display lay flat, but it has to balance the weight of the display versus the requirements of opening the display all the way, which is somewhat negated by being able to detach the display if necessary.

The tablet section is not something you could use as a tablet full-time. At 15-inches in size, it’s a bit unwieldy, which was already an issue with the smaller 13.5-inch model. The squared off edges look great, but don’t help much with in-hand feel of the large tablet. With the relatively small battery capacity, the overall weight of the tablet is light enough that it’s easy to use in short bursts, but short bursts are all you’ll get out of it anyway before the battery needs to be replenished. Just like the original, it offers a satisfying “kerchunk” when detaching from the base.

The base is almost a carbon-copy of the Surface Book with Performance Base mid-cycle upgrade model. The keyboard is slightly raised to give more room for the GPU and cooling components under it. Other than the USB-C port, the new base looks identical to the older version, keeping the two USB-A ports on the left, along with the SD card reader, and offering the Surface Connect port and USB-C on the right.

The keyboard on the original Surface Book was one of the better models available on a laptop, offering good travel, and good key feel. Luckily it hasn’t really changed, and still offers three levels of white backlighting, and thanks to the gray color of the keys, the white backlighting still offers decent contrast even when in a bright environment.

Microsoft offered the best trackpad experience on a Windows PC with the original Surface Book, and that great precision and feel of the glass trackpad carries over with the new model. The trackpad is large, but without being too large, and the latest Precision touchpad software offers plenty of customization for gestures and more. It’s wonderful to use, and makes you miss it when using an inferior device.

Microsoft’s gray magnesium design has become something they are known for, even if not all of the devices are magnesium anymore, but on the Surface Book 2, the texture and feel of the material is as premium as any device on the market. The chassis has a chamfered edge in front of the trackpad to allow you to open it easier, and although the rest of the edges are more acute, they still have a slightly rounded corner to prevent sharp pressure on your wrists when typing. Thanks to the 3:2 aspect ratio of the display, the Surface Book lineup also offers more wrist rest area than most other notebooks.

Overall the design of the Surface Book 2 is fantastic, which is becoming an expectation when dealing with the PC products from Redmond. The only small thing to point out would be the location of the headphone jack, which is on the top right corner of the display, making for a somewhat awkward cable arrangement when using wired headphones. It would be nice to see a second jack in the base, to be used while the laptop is being used as a laptop, but that seems like a small thing to complain about on an otherwise very well designed and built device.

CPU Performance

Microsoft offers the smaller 13.5-inch model with a Core i5-7300U on the base model, but once you add a GPU you get the Core i7-8650U. The 15-inch model comes exclusively with the Core i7 model. This is Kaby Lake Refresh, and the refresh is that Intel doubled the physical number of cores in the CPU, going from two to four. The Core i7 models keep Hyperthreading as well, meaning you get eight threads available. Prior to this fall, the only way to get this many cores was to go with the HQ series of processors, which have a 45-Watt TDP. That would be a bit much for a laptop with a detachable tablet, so the 15-Watt Core i7-8650U is a great way to add more multithreaded performance without increasing the heat output.

Microsoft has also included the same power management software as the Surface Pro, meaning you can choose your power setting as Best Performance, Better Performance, or Best Battery Life, with the latter being the system default. This adjusts the CPU efficiency by tweaking the PL1 and PL2 levels to lower and higher results, depending on the slider setting. When in the default state, the advantage is that the system fans almost never need to be used, meaning the system is nice and quiet, but if you’re doing something that’s processor intensive, turning it up will improve the performance, with the trade-off being noise. As you’d expect, the benchmarks were run in the Best Performance mode, and battery life testing was done in Best Battery Life.

Unlike the Surface Pro, there’s no Iris GPU available, although that’s not a surprise thanks to the much more powerful GPU available in the base, and the fact that Iris isn’t offered yet in the 8th generation products.

To test CPU performance, the Surface Book 2 was run through our standard suite of laptop tests, and compared to several similar models. If you want to compare the Surface Book 2 against any device we’ve tested, please see our Notebook Bench.

PCMark

PCMark tests an entire system, from the CPU to the GPU to the storage, and all aspects of the device, including things like the display resolution, impact the results. The Surface Book 2 performs well on all of the tests, and it’s unsurprising to see it at the top for Creative, which has several GPU focused tests.

Cinebench

Cinebench is a rendering test which can use OpenCL, a single CPU thread, or all CPU threads to render the image. Our test focuses on the two CPU tests, and it gives us a great look at per-thread performance, and how that scales with more cores. Here the high turbo frequency of the Core i7-8650U delivers excellent single-threaded performance, and the multi-core result is also very strong. It can’t quite hang with XPS 15, but that has a 45-Watt TDP on its eight threads, allowing them to maintain a much higher turbo for the multithreaded result.

x264

Much like Cinebench, the x264 test converts a video using the CPU, and more cores with higher frequency generally wins the day here. The Surface Book 2 outperforms all other laptops with the 15-Watt TDP U series CPU in this test, but the higher TDP XPS 15 can still outperform it significantly when all cores are utilized.

Web Tests

The web is one of the most-used tools around, but performance on the web can be tied to the CPU as well as the browser itself. Over time, scripting performance in the browser continues to improve, and which browser you use will also impact performance and battery life. To make everything consistent, we utilize Microsoft Edge for all testing on Windows.

The Surface Book 2 has a slight CPU advantage over the ASUS ZenBook 3, and with that edge it creeps ahead in all of the web tests. The extra cores, as well as the updates to the browser with the Fall Creators Update, have made a significant difference over the older results. It would be nice to go back on some of these older devices to see how much of an impact the browser updates have made, if we still had the devices.

CPU Conclusion

As we saw with the ASUS ZenBook 3, the move to quad-core in the U series of Core chips has been very welcome. The performance increase is impressive over the older dual-core models, and although the eight threads run into the thermal limit quicker than the do on the higher-wattage HQ series chips, such as seen in the Dell XPS 15, the Core i7-8650U is still a very strong performer.

Storage Performance

The review unit for the Surface Book 2 shipped with the maximum drive size available, which is the 1 TB model. Thanks to the parallel nature of SSDs, this model should offer the best performance. The drive in the unit is a Samsumg PM961, which is a TLC based drive.

Performance is excellent for a TLC drive, and we do see the sequential write being affected by the TLC NAND, but all other aspects of the performance are excellent. In a device hitting this price target, a MLC version of this drive would be preferable, but it’s unlikely most people will notice the limits of this drive because it is quite good.

GPU Performance

Here’s where the Surface Book 2 gets really interesting. It’s almost hard to believe how much GPU Microsoft stuffed in this updated version of the laptop. The 15-inch review unit comes with the impressive GTX 1060 GPU, which offers double the CUDA cores and four times the ROPs as a GTX 1050 found in the smaller 13.5-inch model, and the GTX 1050 is already a huge upgrade over the GPU options found in the original Surface Book, which could only be had with a custom GPU based on the GT 940MX, or even the updated Performance Base Surface Book which came later with a GTX 965M. Pascal has been a wonderful update from NVIDIA.

NVIDIA Laptop GPU Specification Comparison
	GTX 1060	GTX 1050 Ti	GTX 1050
CUDA Cores	1280	768	640
Texture Units	80	48	40
ROPs	48	32	16
Core Clock	1404MHz	1493MHz	1354MHz
Boost Clock	1670MHz	1620MHz	1493MHz
Memory Clock	8Gbps GDDR5	7Gbps GDDR5	7Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit
VRAM	6GB	2GB/4GB	2GB/4GB
FP64	1/32	1/32	1/32
GPU	GP106	GP107	GP107
Transistor Count	4.4B	3.3B	3.3B
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 16nm	Samsung 14nm	Samsung 14nm
Launch Date	08/16/2016	01/03/2017	01/03/2017

The GTX 1060 is a big jump from the GTX 1050, and should really provide some serious compute and gaming capabilities with the Surface Book 2. Not everyone wants to work all the time, right? The GTX 1060 is outfitted with 6 GB of GDDR5 as well, so you will be able to play games such as Rise of the Tomb Raider without any RAM limitation issues, whereas the smaller 13.5-inch model with the GTX 1050 is limited to just 2 GB of VRAM.

First, we’ll take a look at how the Surface Book 2 does in some synthetic tests, and then jump into some actual gaming tests.

3DMark

FutureMark’s 3DMark offers several tests to choose from, and the company has been updating this version for several years now with new tests for UHD and DX12.

The GTX 1060 is a massive improvement over the original GT 940MX based Surface Book, and moves it out of being somewhat better than integrated, into a laptop with some serious gaming potential. The performance difference on the most GPU demanding test, Fire Strike, over the GTX 1050 is also a huge leap.

GFXBench

GFXBench is a cross-platform test, with tests that can be run on smartphones and tablets, which can also be run on a PC. They aren’t exactly the same test though, since the PC ones run at a higher precision, but the tests are a great way to look at performance, especially on devices with integrated graphics.

Clearly, with the GTX 1060, the GFXBench tests are a bit too easy for it, with performance that is downright silly.

Dota 2

Valve’s Dota 2 is our go-to benchmark for devices with lower-end GPUs or integrated graphics, since it can generally be run on even low-powered devices without much of an issue. The game can get CPU bound though.

On the higher level settings, the performance delta between the Surface Book 2 and devices with integrated graphics is quite large, and devices with integrated graphics can’t even crack the 30 FPS barrier, but the Surface Book 2 has no issues. It’s outperformed by the XPS 15 because the CPU is the limiting factor here.

Tomb Raider

The original Tomb Raider is getting a bit old now, but we have a lot of comparison data, and at maximum settings, it can still be a very demanding game for even devices with mid-range GPUs. We don’t test this game on devices with integrated graphics, since the framerate is not enough to play, but the Surface Book 2 can easily play this game even on enthusiast settings, and offers far more performance than the GTX 1050 in the XPS 15.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

The sequel to Tomb Raider is the amazing Rise of the Tomb Raider, and it offers a graphical showcase for anyone with a powerful system. This is a much more demanding game, and offers DX12 as well. On the Enthusiast settings, more than 4 GB of VRAM is required. The Surface Book 2 can play this even at our Enthusiast levels, which isn’t something you can say of the XPS 15. It might need a few options tweaked with GeForce Experience to get the optimal result, but it’s pretty close to 60 FPS already.

Civilization VI

Firaxis has created an even more demanding version of Civilization with the latest instalment. It is a game that can be heavily CPU dependent, especially later in the game, but it does offer a graphics benchmark as well. The Surface Book 2 can easily play this game at our Enthusiast settings, but mostly because it is a game that doesn’t penalize you much for the odd hiccup in framerate. The game engine tends to be CPU limited as well, so for best performance a fast desktop is required.

Bioshock Infinite

This is an older game, but one we keep around thanks to the excellent benchmark tool, and the copious amounts of data we have on it. At maximum settings, even today, it can be pretty punishing to mid-range devices, but the Surface Book 2 has no issues with this test, and offers dramatically more performance than the original Surface Book.

Dragon Age Inquisition

This amazing Bioware RPG is a couple of years old now, but still delivers excellent graphics and gameplay. It can also bring laptops to their knees, especially on higher settings. The Surface Book 2 offers enough performance that you could likely run in on 1080p Ultra, but it can’t quite hit 60 FPS at that level. It still offers a serious boost over the XPS 15 though.

Shadow of Mordor

There’s now a sequel to this game out as well, which we’ll have to check out and see if we can add it to our list. On this test, the Surface Book 2 offers excellent framerates, even on our maximum settings, and offers almost double the performance of the GTX 1050 in the XPS 15 on this game.

Grid Autosport

This is another game that can end up CPU bound on higher powered systems, but with the Surface Book 2, that’s not the case. Still, it averages right around 100 FPS, which is plenty for this arcade racer.

GPU Conclusion

The jump from the original GT 940MX found in the Surface Book, to the GTX 1060 in the Surface Book 2, is a massive increase in performance. The Surface Book 2 isn’t what most people would consider a gaming laptop, but the 15-inch model offers plenty of compute if you ever do want to game. For office productivity, apps that take advantage of CUDA, such as Adobe’s suite, should see some much-improved performance over almost any other productivity laptop. Really, to match the GPU performance in this laptop, you’d have to jump into the gaming notebook arena with something like a Razer Blade 14.

Display Analysis

One area where Microsoft has consistently outperformed the competition is in the display department. They continue to be the only major PC maker to hardware calibrate their displays at the factory, across the entire product lineup. It wasn’t always the case, but starting with the Surface 3, all Surface devices are now calibrated, and the Surface Book 2 is of course no exception.

The benefit of a hardware calibration over something you could do on your own is that you avoid issues with clipping the display to correct issues, and of course the other benefit is the display is the right color without any work involved by the end user.

For the Surface Book 2, the 13.5-inch model keeps the same 3000x2000 3:2 aspect ratio display as the original, and that’s not a bad thing, since it was arguably the best display we’ve tested in a notebook to date. For the larger 15-inch model, the aspect ratio stays the same, but you get a few more pixels at 3240x2160. The overall density is slightly less than the smaller Book, but the difference is small. The 13.5-inch model is 267 PPI, and the 15-inch model is 258 PPI.

Microsoft also has started to add some rudimentary color management tools for the end user, with selectable color profiles in the action center. They started this trend with the Surface Studio, which is the only Surface model to date which supports the wider color gamut of DCI-P3 and P3-D65, but it also has a profile for sRGB, which is what most of the web and applications use. While it would be nice to see P3-D65 gamut support on the other Surface devices as well, there are power implications of wider gamut LEDs, and the lack of a true color management system in Windows means it’s generally best to leave the system in sRGB mode anyway.

With both the new Surface Pro, and the Surface Book, to offer some of the P3-D65 benefits but with the constraints of a sRGB panel, Microsoft provides an Enhanced mode which offer mid-tones closer to P3-D65 without affecting skin tones. That gives you a bit more pop in the colors without blowing out skin tones, and is the default color mode on the Surface Book 2. It’s not the same as a true P3-D65 display by any means, but for people who feel sRGB is a bit too dull for them, it’s a way to keep those users happy as well.

To look at the Surface Book 2’s display characteristics, we utilize SpectraCal’s CalMAN suite, along with an X-Rite i1DisplayPro colorimeter for contrast and brightness readings, and the X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrophotometer for color accuracy.

Brightness and Contrast

The larger Surface Book 2 gets plenty bright, and about 450 nits, which will help if using in a bright environment or outside. But despite these very bright whites, the black levels are still very solid, leading to excellent contrast. This was one of the best things about the original Surface Book, and the black levels really help out in video content.

For those that want to use the Surface Book 2 in a dim room, the display goes all the way down to 4 nits, so there is plenty of brightness range to find a level suitable for anyone.

Grayscale

Thanks to the factory calibration, the Surface Book 2 offers exceptional grayscale results. The overall dE2000 is by far the best we’ve ever tested. The gamma levels stay pretty close to the 2.2 level, as they should. Unlike some devices where great grayscale on the black levels helps drive the average down for poor grayscale at 100% white, the Surface Book 2 is almost perfect across the entire range, with no level exceeding a dE2000 of 2.0. The white point is perfect as well.

Gamut

The gamut results mirror the grayscale, in that they are almost perfect for both the primary and secondary colors. Only 100% blue is slightly off, which drags cyan off a bit as well, but the error levels are so small it would be difficult to detect them with the human eye.

Saturation

Rather than just test the 20% levels, we now do a full 4-bit step for saturation. The Surface Book 2 has an overall dE2000 level under 1 for this test, which is exceptional.

Gretag Macbeth

The Gretag Macbeth test covers far more colors, and is the most comprehensive test. It includes the important skin tones as well. The overall result for the Surface Book 2 is once again, fantastic. A few colors drift slightly, but very few even creep over the 2.0 error level.

In addition, we run a colorchecker test to provide a relative comparison of the correct color that should be displayed on the bottom, along with the color that is actually displayed on top. The result is relative though due to error levels in your own display, but you can see that the Surface Book 2 has white and color levels that are nearly perfect.

Enhanced Mode

Turning on Enhanced Mode changes the gamma and uses hardware to shift the colors for some colors, without affecting the skin tones.

You can see the gamma is off quite a bit compared to the 2.2 level it should hit, compared to the nearly perfect gamma in sRGB mode. The overall grayscale levels are still far better than practically any other notebook though.

The Gretag Macbeth shows off the effect on colors. The dE2000 level is much higher on certain colors, but the skin tones remain unchanged. But even so, with a GMB result under 2.0, even in enhanced mode the color accuracy is far better than almost any other notebook.

Display Conclusion

Microsoft continues to be the only major PC maker to color calibrate all of their devices, and the Surface Book 2 sets new levels for accuracy in a notebook. The display also has amazing contrast. It’s not difficult to add these together and say that the Surface Book 2 has the best display on any laptop.

Battery Life

The original Surface Book we tested was the Core i5 model, and it offered amazing battery life that the Core i7 model with a discrete GPU couldn’t quite match. With the Surface Book 2 15, the battery capacity has increased, although so has the display size and resolution, so it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts the results.

Our battery life tests include our older 2013 web browsing test, a newer 2016 web browsing test which is more demanding, and a movie playback test. All of our browsing is done with Edge, and movie playback with the built-in Films and TV software, with the display set at 200 nits of brightness.

2013 Light

You feel kind of greedy when you feel like almost 14 hours of browsing isn’t enough, but it felt like the Surface Book 2 might really set a new record with the large 85 Wh of battery capacity. The new model handily outperforms the outgoing Surface Book Core i7 though, despite the larger display and higher resolution.

The tablet itself will still get several hours away from the base, which is more than enough time for the use case of the tablet, which is going to be for short sessions away from the base.

2016 Web

Our newer web test is more demanding of the CPU, and on devices like the Surface Book 2, where the CPU power usage is a significant factor in the overall power drain, the result is less battery life than our older, easier test. At almost ten hours of battery life though, the Surface Book 2 still offers a lot of time off the mains.

Normalized Results

By removing the battery capacity from the equation, we can see the efficiency of each device. Here, the larger battery size is removed, and the Surface Book 2 ends up about midfield. The larger display and higher resolution of the display are a significant impact on the battery life.

To dig in to this a bit more, additional testing was done to see just how much power the display draws. At maximum brightness, and with the system at idle, the display draws 7.65 W of power, while the rest of the system only consumes 1.43 W of power. On our 200 nit display brightness setting, that power requirement of the display drops to 4.1 W, which is still over double what the rest of the system is using at idle. The display is a significant factor, as expected.

Movie Playback

When playing back a movie, the CPU can offload the task to fixed function hardware, so the overall power usage goes down even further than normal. The Surface Book 2 offers tremendous battery life at this task, coming in at close to 15 hours.

This would let you play The Avengers over six times on a single charge. That should be enough for almost any scenario.

With just the tablet, the battery life is still almost five hours of movie playback, which is certainly usable, although I doubt most people would use just the tablet to watch movies due to the size of it.

Charge Time

Despite the larger battery, the 100-Watt AC Adapter charges the battery quite quickly, and both batteries are full in under three hours.

Both batteries charge at the same time, and are almost in lock-step with each other in terms of charge, despite the difference in capacity.

For those interested, the bottom of the tablet features the same Surface Connect port, so you can charge the tablet away from the base if necessary, although most of the time it would be charged when docked.

Wireless

Like all Surface devices for the past several years, Microsoft uses the Marvell AVASTAR network card in the Surface Book 2. It offers 2x2:2 802.11ac support, with Bluetooth 4.1. The network adapter has a checkered past, with reliability and speed issues, but over time, the reliability has improved a lot, and the speed is much better than it used to be.

The sequential transfer speeds are now quite strong on the Marvell network card. They still can’t match the best Intel solutions in terms of speed, and the Intel cards also offer MU-MIMO support, but the AVASTAR has turned the corner in terms of speed and reliability enough where it’s not a knock against Surface like it used to be. That being said, we’re at a point where it seems like only Intel is continually updating their wireless NIC hardware.

Speakers

Much like the new Surface Pro, the speakers on the new Surface Book 2 have improved in sound quality, offering stronger mid-range and bass levels than before. They sound remarkably good, for a notebook. The speakers are located in the display and are front firing, which likely helps with the sound as well. They don’t get overly loud, at around 74-75 dB(A) on our test track, but with the better sound quality that’s a good trade-off.

If you’re after better sound, you still have to rely on external speakers or headphones though. Laptops just don’t offer the space required for quality speakers.

Thermals

Thanks to the unique design where the CPU and required components live in the detachable tablet, and the discrete GPU lives in the base, the Surface Book design offers more cooling capability than a traditional notebook would, since the thermal zones are split up. It can also help with noise, thanks to not needing the fans to run as much to cool both the CPU and GPU, and the fan speeds can be independent.

Microsoft has also carried forward their power management slider which was introduced with the latest Surface Pro. The slider lets the end user choose between best battery life, which is the default, better performance, and best performance. If you’re running on battery power, the slider adds another notch to the far right to let you access Battery Saver mode as well. The slider adjusts to PL1 and PL2 states of the CPU, capping the maximum power draw, especially for burst workloads. Arguably the biggest advantage for this for the user is that in the default mode, the system fan is almost never activated unless the system is doing a long task which requires a lot of CPU performance. Unlike Surface devices from a couple of years ago, in the default mode you don’t get the random fan events, which could be somewhat annoying.

There’s a lot of power under the hood of the Surface Book 2 to keep cool as well. The Core i7-8650U is a 15-Watt TDP processor, but in short bursts of work, it can easily use 30 Watts, until it settles down on a 15-Watt level for longer tasks. The GTX 1060 has no official TDP numbers from NVIDIA, and that’s so that manufacturers can tune the level to what works in their system, but it is likely somewhere around 80 Watts or so. If you add those up, and then factor in the extra power draw from the display, storage, RAM, and other factors, you can see that we’re right at the limit of the 100-Watt AC adapter as well.

To take a look at the system performance under load, Rise of the Tomb Raider was run at our Enthusiast settings (1080p Very High) for 75 minutes or so.

Zeroing in on the GPU log first, you can see that the GPU temperature never gets very warm, with the temperature staying right around the 70°C mark for most of the test, but the core clock does dip a bit. The reason for that can be found in the second chart, which shows the CPU performance, as well as the battery charge rate.

The 100-Watt AC adapter included with the Surface Book 2 is not quite powerful enough to keep the system fully charged under a high load such as this, so you can see there is some power draw from the battery (the green line in the chart) which is leveraged to make up the difference. Over time, the battery drops to about 95% charge, at which time the system drops the GPU clock a bit to prevent draining the battery any further. Not all games are going to run into this issue, but certain games will require more power from the GPU and CPU than the power input can handle. However, the battery will never completely be drained, as the system doesn’t let it get out of control.

In an ideal world, this wouldn’t happen. Gaming laptops use large diameter barrel plugs with high-wattage AC adapters to prevent this exact issue, but it’s clear that Microsoft is bumping into the maximum power that they can put through the Surface Connect port, which first debuted on the Surface Pro 3. At the time, they likely didn’t ever see them needing more than 100 Watts, but now they do, so their only option would be to either redesign the Surface Connect port, which may limit compatibility with existing devices, or move to a new design, which certainly would limit compatibility, so instead they’ve allowed the battery to be used as a backup for short bursts, and then tick down the performance slightly to prevent it happening further. The only battery that gets drained is the one in the base, which makes sense since it’s the GPU that’s drawing all of this power.

As for device temperatures, we’ve used the FLIR camera to capture the thermal image of the device right at the end of the test run above. The chassis gets to about 43°C at the hottest point, which is warm but not distracting.

The system fans, under this kind of heavy load, do get fairly loud though. At full load, the maximum fan noise measured was around 53 dB(A) measured an inch over the trackpad. It’s not as loud as some gaming laptops, but this kind of sound level would likely require the user to use headphones if gaming. Luckily, under most light workloads, the fans don’t come on at all, so the system is generally silent under those conditions.

Accessories

Like the Surface Pro, there are no accessories included with the Surface Book, but unlike the Surface Pro, the keyboard is included, of course, so the only one that you may need is the Surface Pen. With the launch of the Surface Pro this year, Microsoft has updated the pen pretty substantially. It now offers 4096 levels, and supports lower pressures to initiate writing. The new pen also adds a feature which had been available on some of the competition, but was lacking with the Surface Pen, in tilt.

The new pen, if you need a stylus, is quite capable, and Windows has been adding features to their Windows Inking experience for some time. The text input has gotten a lot better, for instance, but it’s also easier to discover apps for Inking, and launch your favorites now.

Unlike the Surface Pro, there’s no solid kickstand to hold the display from wobbling when inking, so really the best option is to detach the display, flip it around, and then attach it again, which gives you the same sort of easel mode that Microsoft offers on their other products. The advantage to this over just detaching the tablet is that you get to keep access to the GPU and larger battery as well.

I think the pen isn’t as important on a device like this as it would be on a smaller tablet like the Surface Pro, but the full capabilities of it are available if necessary.

Launching alongside the Surface Book was a new Microsoft Precision Mouse, which is much more ergonomic than the Surface Mouse that ships with the Surface Studio, as an example. It offers the ability to pair it with up to three devices at a time, as well as the same sort of toggle on the scroll wheel as seen in Logitech mice, where you have a notched scroll for precision, and a freewheeling scroll for faster scrolling. That’s a welcome feature, and one that is quickly missed if you are used to it from Logitech mice.

Overall, the feel of the mouse is nice, but mice are a very personal decision, and the shape of the Precision Mouse was far better than the Surface Mouse, but still not what I am used to with my favorite mouse. If you want one that matches the color of a Surface, be sure to check it out though.

Final Words

The Surface Book 2 is still one of the most unique device designs out there. The detachable display docks to a solid keyboard base, which offers a powerful GPU and plenty of battery. The extra capabilities add to a laptop that can be used in a lot of scenarios.

Microsoft has focused on bringing new device designs to market since they launched Surface, and it’s fair to say that the Surface Book 2 is more evolution than revolution, but it’s still a very unique design in the PC space that didn’t need a lot of tweaks. The interesting hinge allows for a more stable platform when used on a desk or in your lap, especially compared to most detachable tablets, which are far too top heavy.

There’s no question the choice of materials, and the attention to detail, make the Surface Book 2 stand apart. The all-metal design is wonderful to hold, with a great finish that resists fingerprints, and doesn’t feel slippery in the hand. The docking mechanism sounds, and works, great, but it’s hard to judge how it will stand up over time. The original Surface Book did have some docking connector issues over its lifespan, so hopefully these are resolved.

Making the Surface Book 2 bigger with the new 15-inch model doesn’t really make it feel much bigger than the 13.5-inch version, but there is even more desktop space available on the 3:2 aspect ratio display.

Speaking of the display, it’s a stunner. The 15-inch 3240x2160 resolution panel is calibrated at the factory for accuracy, and on the review unit we received, it is the most accurate display we’ve ever tested. The lack of a wide-gamut is a small knock against the Surface Book 2. A wider gamut would be nice, but until Windows gets a proper color management system, a proper sRGB mode is likely for the best. The enhanced mode does give a bit more pop if you need that, although it can’t replace a true P3 D65 display if you have the content to use it for. But thanks to the super accurate colors, and amazing contrast ratio, it would be hard to feel disappointed with this display.

Surface Book had a great keyboard, and fantastic trackpad, and both of those carry over to the new model. The size, texture, and feel of the trackpad easily make it one of the best available on a Windows PC today. The Precision drivers offer enough customization to get the job done, without adding bulk or confusion to the experience.

Every device has faults, and this one is no exception. The lack of Thunderbolt 3 on the USB-C port is a bit of a mystery on a premium notebook like this, and despite Microsoft claiming their issue with USB-C is port capability confusion, they’ve limited the port on their own device. Most people aren’t going to need to run high-speed storage, or multiple UHD displays, but for those that do, the Surface Book 2 is simply not an option for them thanks to this decision. Two years ago, it was questionable, but practically every other notebook in this segment offers Thunderbolt 3 now.

The second issue is not being able to supply enough power to cover the laptop’s demands under all situations. It’s not a huge issue, since even after 75 minutes of gaming the laptop had only dropped to 95% charge, but in order to do that, it had to drop performance a bit. Clearly the Surface Connect is at its power limit, and that’s a shame. There’s no elegant solution to this if Microsoft wants to keep their magnetic connector, which certainly has its benefits.

The final issue with the Surface Book 2 is the price. The smaller 13.5-inch model starts at $1500 with no GPU, although thankfully it does have 8 GB of memory, unlike the base model Surface Laptop and Surface Pro. But the 15-inch model being reviewed today starts at $2500 with just a 256 GB SSD. The 15-inch version does come standard with the Core i7-8650U and GTX 1060 though, as well as 16 GB of RAM, so even the base model is a stout computer. The jump to 512 GB costs an additional $400 though, and that’s just for the SSD upgrade. The 1 TB model is a staggering $3299. There’s no way to sugar coat this. The Surface Book 2 15-inch is very, very, expensive. A 14-inch Razer Blade UHD with a 1 TB SSD is a full $500 less, with the same GPU and a more powerful CPU, but still with an all-metal chassis.

But it’s not just about the components. Microsoft’s display is arguably the best in any notebook. The magnesium finish is fantastic. The design is interesting, and functional, and the versatility of the detachable display, even if only to flip it around to watch a movie on a plane, adds value to the device. When Surface Book launched in 2015, it was a new, fresh take. The 2017 model adds performance, refinement, and reliability, and is simply one of the best notebooks on the market today.