Gadgetory

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 glass wire is a firewall that displays your PC's incoming and outgoing network connections in real time use offer code linus to get 25 percent off at the link below the build quality of the surface book - 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 first 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 board its 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 unwieldly 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 laughable 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 Dells upcoming XPS 15 2 & 1 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 8650 you 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 triple-a games at full details that is assuming everything stays nice and cool which is mostly the case so after an hour 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 215 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 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 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 sixteen by nine 1080p and you'll be able to be productive for a really long time thanks to the book two's over nine and a half our 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 1 out of 10 for repairability for my fix it so you've got a 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 3300 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 Mac OS the surface book tube 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 $1,500 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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