The Microsoft Surface Book 2 (15-Inch) Review: Second Time's The Charm
by Brett Howse on December 21, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Microsoft
- Surface
- Pascal
- Surface Book
- Kaby Lake Refresh
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.
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eddman - Thursday, December 21, 2017 - link
The term you are looking for is "fan"."Fanboy" basically means "a fan of something that completely lacks logic and reason and becomes aggressive while defending it".
P.S. IMO even the word "fan" is undesirable. It's the short for "fanatic".
tyaty1 - Thursday, December 21, 2017 - link
In modern language , fan and fanatic are became distinct words.HStewart - Thursday, December 21, 2017 - link
In my opinion "fanboy" is typically a term that is on tech website often in an attempt to discredit someone who has different - this I found mostly used by people that like AMD products and hate Intel. Most Intel people pretty much ignore technical sites - except if they are gamers.I am not an Intel "Fanboy" but I do support Intel - and why is simple, I have a long history of using there products and for graphics had a bad history with Ati GPU's - which is now part of AMD. i also believe that when a company creates a product you should buy from one's that created it.
But things to change - I used to pro-Microsoft almost Fanboy and refused used Android, but I have great success with Samsung Tab S series ( both an S and now S3 ) and I also have Surface like Samsung TabPro S series.
I serious doubt in my lifetime I will support AMD - it really kind of technical thing - I was highly into CPU internals at my first job and my experience with AMD and ATI maybe me not trust them. But I would state - that a lot of this influence by AMD Fanboys ( not supporter ) on the Internet who seem to attack Intel users every where they go.
HStewart - Thursday, December 21, 2017 - link
One note like everything else on Internet, this is my opinion. For example you could Intel for AMD and ATI/AMD for NVidia and all except the line about who created - have a totally different point of viewReflex - Thursday, December 21, 2017 - link
Odd that your issue with AMD would be due to technical experience. I worked on the Windows kernel for a number of years and during that time AMD developed both the Athlon and Athlon64/Opteron line. It was the technical perspective that brought me and so many other engineers towards AMD, they understood good architecture while Intel understood good marketing. Dave Cutler famously embraced AMD64 when it became clear to him what a mess IA64 was.That isn't to besmirch Intel as an engineering company. They got religion when Netburst hit its wall at only 40% of its design specification. But for Intel the limiting factor has long been marketing and management, for AMD it has always been resources. The latter reasons I respect a lot more than the former.
I've used both extensively. Currently I have a pure Intel setup across my devices (well, ARM in my phone). But I'd happily build a Ryzen based system and having read many of the technical docs around it, its a fantastic engineering achievement.
Reflex - Thursday, December 21, 2017 - link
I've pointed this out repeatedly, but TB support is a non-starter for a corporate focused laptop. It is considered a security risk as it is a direct line to the PCIe bus and can be used to easily bypass Bitlocker and other security measures. Devices with TB on them are almost never permitted for government or sensitive corporate sales.There also really isn't much demand, while I'd like to see more USB-C if only for future compatibility, to date only my phone actually uses it (and most connectors use standard USB on the other end) and eGPU or external storage simply aren't rational for a system based on a 15W CPU. The available 1060 already is bottlenecked by that CPU so I'm not certain what an eGPU would gain you (or really fast storage vs just having it on the network).
I feel like a lot of the 'must haves' you read in these comments are theoretical rather than practical. People want to believe they have certain capabilities and expect the hardware to support the scenario yet in the real world it would almost never be used and arguably be non-sensical if they did.
damianrobertjones - Friday, December 22, 2017 - link
Shhhhh! Stop it... you're making sense!Icehawk - Friday, December 22, 2017 - link
TB3 is like firewire, nobody uses it except for a few use cases. I’d much prefer a dp/mini dp port for ease of connecting to monitors. Mind you I am coming from a corporate pov here.jabber - Saturday, December 23, 2017 - link
Yeah I'm looking around at all the Thunderbolt devices...I don't and probably never will have.KPOM - Friday, December 29, 2017 - link
Even if they are concerned about TB3, they should at least have a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 port.