Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is my review of the Microsoft Surface book now I do a lot of reviews on Tomb on devices like I love the idea of hybrid devices because I like having less stuff but for the most part I find it difficult to use a toulon device as my daily driver I find them often underpowered or like the tablet isn't very good or the laptop isn't very good but when Microsoft revealed this thing and they show that you could remove the screen and use it as a tablet I was like up up up up up up up stop my penis can only get sore rekt so I've had this thing for a week I've used it every single day and I've edited two videos on it including the one you're watching right now here are my thoughts okay so instead of a slide-out tray like other surface devices this box opens up from the top and inside you get the surface book the stylus some pamphlets and the charger the device has a magnesium casing like we've come to expect from the entire surface line the finish feels identical to basically every other surface product and that's a good thing it feels durable it feels premium and it looks good and I like the polish the windows logo up here so it's the same magnesium finish on the bottom and it has two rubber strips that give the surface book a little grip when it's on a table we'll talk about the hinge later but when you press this button here you can remove the screen from the surface book and it functions as a powerful tablet which Microsoft has called the clipboard we have a power button and a volume rocker on one side and a headphone jack over here and then along the length of this entire side we have connections so these two are for attaching it to the base and these three are for transferring data between the two halves when they're connected and the middle one can also be used for charging the clipboard separately if you need it now inside this clipboard is a fully functional Windows 10 PC so this unit here has a skylake core i5 running at 2.4 gigahertz and has 8 gigs of ram 256 gigs of storage and Intel HD 520 integrated graphics as well as a discreet Nvidia chip which isn't in here but it's in the keyboard base and this configuration will run you $1,900 u.s. yeah it's very expensive now the base unit starts at 1500 but once you throw in the Nvidia chip you're looking at 1900 and up the screen is a 13.5 inch panel running at three thousand by two thousand pixels so like all current surface products it has an aspect ratio of 3 to 2 instead of like the 16 to 10 or 69 like other tablets the disadvantage is that you get some pretty heavy letterboxing when you're watching videos it's not a wide screen right and then you also lose some width on your screen when you're editing things with timelines so for like video or audio production but the good thing is that for things like taking notes reading books or just browse on the web or doing basically any kind of work one clipboard mode it's a lot better so for the purpose of a two-in-one device a three by two aspect ratio is definitely the right choice viewing angles are great and it's really bright like as bright as a macbook pro dislike and something else I really like is how dim the screen gets like you can comfortably view this in the dark there's an 8 megapixel camera on the back which gets decent pictures but come on it's a 13.5 inch tablet you don't want to be that guy and there's a 5 megapixel camera on the front which has surprisingly good video quality and it's used for Microsoft hello it's basically like a quick way to unlock the device using facial recognition and it works really well the tablet experience is decent it's reasonably lightweight at one point six pounds but remember it's a 13.5 inch screen so it's a really large tablet and it's kind of cumbersome when you use it it's good as a digital clipboard for sharing things with others and it's nice and big for illustrations and any kind of creative work but when you use it as like a media consumption device it's really fluid and it's snappy for browsing the web and watching videos but it doesn't feel particularly organ amah or inviting to use like the edges are a little sharp and it feels really industrial but for a large screen tablet it's pretty comfortable to use overall as long as it has battery life and therein lies the cat the battery life on this thing is really short Microsoft gives a rough estimate of around 4 hours I got around 2 to 3 hours so if you're watching a longer movie at maximum brightness you may not be able to make it through the whole thing the speakers were okay they get reasonably loud but the sound quality isn't great for a clipboard that you occasionally use to share a screen with someone it's pretty cool but for personal media consumption a battery life of three hours is too short so if you're looking for the Windows experience in a tablet I would really recommend the surface pro 4 over the surface book the new surface pen is an upgrade over the previous generation so this nib has better texture to it it doesn't quite feel like writing on paper when you use it but it's better than before the eraser on the back is really cool they got the texture right and legitimately feels like you're erasing something you'll look for eraser bits on the screen when you use it so I've erased a lot of stuff while playing with it over the past week and the eraser nub still looks the same it doesn't seem to wear out quickly you can click the eraser to start up OneNote and then you can double click it to take screenshots and you can hold it to launch Cortana overall they did a great job on this pen now I'm not a strong illustrator but I have a friend who is and she drew a couple things using the surface book and like any other tablet it's inefficient to draw without a keyboard because you lose your keyboard shortcuts but overall she thought it was pretty cool and I quote I thought it was pretty cool ok the clipboard attaches to the keyboard using these two tabs here so you line up the two tabs with the slots you place it in and then you get a fully functional laptop and to detach it again you press the same button here's a cool fact there is a click you hear when it attaches which is supposedly a sound that they put out through the speakers just so you know it's been detached because the actual mechanism is pretty quiet the connection is strong and it seems reliable like you can carry it around holding just the screen the mechanism seems to work well but I had a couple times when the screen wouldn't disconnect properly and I had to reboot the device to get it working again it's not a huge issue but I'm hoping a software update will fix this the hinge itself has this mechanism that kind of rolls it outward as you open it so I don't know about its long-term durability but mechanically it works really well but because of this hinge it has this gap and I've been staring at this thing for over a week and it hasn't grown on me at all if anything I've found it more and more distasteful like I like the way it looks when it opens but then the gap bugs me when it's closed and when you keep it in your bag lint and dust just love to go into that gap and there's a lot of moving parts in there so we'll have to see how it holds up over time when you connect the screen to the keyboard base you get a laptop and I'm going to cut right to the chase here this is an excellent laptop the keyboard is nice the key travel is good three-stage backlight is good the layout could be better I mean the page up and page down are up in the function keys which might annoy you if you use those a lot and I don't like the up and down arrows which are the same height as the left and right keys like I find a little disorienting sometimes and I'll accidentally press shift when I'm trying to press up but aside from that it's a good keyboard the glass trackpad is also pretty good I thought it'd be as good as a MacBook trackpad because I heard the word glass and it's really close but there's still the occasional skip especially in Chrome so I think it's just the software thing but the texture on the glass is a little sticky or just rougher than a MacBook texture but I feel like I'm just nitpicking here it's seriously the best trackpad I've used on a Windows machine to date okay going around the base on the left you get two USB 3.0 ports a pretty shallow SD card slot and on the right side you get a mini DisplayPort and the surface connect slot there's only one power button on this device so you still have to use the one on the top of the screen even in laptop mode now the screen does have a little bit of a wobble when you move it around or when you poke at it but it's not a big deal like basically every notebook screen wobbles when you use it as a touchscreen okay let's talk performance the drive has a fast read speed at around 1,500 Meg's per second but the write speed is surprisingly slow at less than 200 MX per second so I edited a couple videos with the surface book and it's not bad I mean 1080p edits are smooth 4k edits are a little choppy err but it's still pretty usable in comparison to the 13-inch I 5 MacBook Pro 1080p edits feel identical but the MacBook Pro is noticeably smoother to edit on in 4k if I had to guess I think it's the slow right speed on the surface book like if you're writing preview files and the media cache at a right speed of 170 Meg's per second it's got to be hurting performance now the easy solution is just to use fast external drives for edits render speeds were faster on the surface book with NVIDIA chip so it's about 10 to 15 percent faster than the MacBook for 4k renders so this Nvidia chip has 384 CUDA cores so it resembles a low-end maximal chip so it's like a 920 or like a 940 m but it has one gig of ddr4 AM which is less RAM than your average 940 m it's got faster Ram because it's ddr5 but less ram okay let's talk about games the screen has a 3 by 2 aspect ratio so some games will have block bars on the left and right if they don't support the resolution so light games like csgo they run nicely on this device had graphics on high and I was getting around 50 frames per second at 1080p MOBA is like dota 2 and here's of the storm to get pretty good frame rates like I tried to push the graphics quality and I was getting around 35 to 40 frames per second on extreme graphics at 1080p so you can easily hit 50 60 frames per second on high graphics settings games like rust or any kind of like online open-world environment those don't run well probably because of that one gig of video RAM so at fastest settings at 1080p I was getting around 1520 frames per second I wouldn't really call that playable Starcraft runs well I haven't played it in a while and I got rekt but I was easily getting 50 frames per second on high settings at 1080p I didn't notice much throttling in game's framerate seemed pretty steady and everything I played and the temperatures are normal like it's a little warm on the clipboard screen but the keyboard stays relatively cool even under load it's a similar temperature to a MacBook Pro when it's under load the fan noise is silent at idle and it's about 30 decibels when it's under load so very tolerable it's a 60 watt AC adapter and like the surface pro it has that USB plug on the side the battery life on the laptop is fantastic like I can easily break 10 hours of regular use with the screen at 80% playing games frame rates take a big hit when you're playing on battery but I got around three to three and a half hours which is actually really good and in case you're wondering when the clipboard is out of batteries and you plug it up to the base the connection doesn't like refuel the clipboard using the batteries from the base you need to actually have the charging cable plugged in to juice it up all right the title of this video is the almost perfect tune one and I really mean that if I was tasked to re-engineer the surface book there's very little I'd change I'd keep the screen I keep the keyboard I'd keep the trackpad I'd keep the magnesium build I keep the graphics cards I mean I'd even keep the ports there's no us PC but its 2015 I think we're good without us PC for another year one thing that I would change or at least try to change is that hinge functionally it's fantastic it works really well but it doesn't look very pretty and I think is going to deter a lot of people from purchasing this device just because of how it looks it's a very expensive device very expensive so you kind of expect your product to look as good as they perform at this price point the other thing is that it's not a very balanced two-in-one device it's an excellent laptop and it's a very laptop focused device but the tablet component is it's not an afterthought it's very functional and it works well but it's not as good as the laptop component and that to me makes it less than perfect it would I would consider this a really good product for like a medical student and engineering student architecture student basically any kind of professional faculty student this is a fantastic device a very expensive device but a fantastic device same thing goes for people in the workplace if you can use both of the components it's an excellent device for that but if you're a casual user and you just want to like consume media or play video games this is not that device you'll have fun you'll love it but it's a very expensive device and you won't get a good value out of it that's the end of this review hope you guys liked it give some thumbs if you did subs if you loved it it's been I'll see you guys next time