The Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 Review: Surface Essentials

Wireless

Everyone talks about the lack of USB-C on Surface, but the really strange question is why does Microsoft still rely so heavily on Marvell for their wireless solutions? Laptop wireless has very nearly become a one-horse game, with Intel being the only major player who continues to update their products annually. As such, the Marvell AVASTAR in the Surface Laptop 2 is just more and more out of date. It was never a great solution to start with, so it’s very odd that they continue to use it all these years later.

Intel’s latest 9260 card is really the wireless adapter to beat in the PC space, offering 160 Mhz channel support, MU-MIMO, and the industry’s best drivers. The good news for Microsoft is that the Marvell solutions have been getting more reliable with some driver updates, but they just don’t offer the level of performance or reliability.

Audio

Microsoft offers an interesting approach to audio in the laptop by placing the speakers underneath the keyboard deck. They refer to this as Omnisonic Speakers, and the result is a win for Surface. You can detect a change in pitch if you put your hands right over the keyboard, but under normal typing there isn’t any noticeable reduction in audio. As a thin and light laptop, don’t expect great things in terms of dynamic range, but at 100% volume the speakers are loud and crisp. Maximum SPL recorded was about 82.3 dB(A) measured one inch over the trackpad.

Thermals

The bane of any thin and light laptop is dissipating heat, so the Surface Laptop 2 was run at 100% CPU load for over an hour to see how it could cope. The Core i7-8650U has a nominal TDP of 15 Watts, although thanks to SpeedShift, on short workloads it can ramp up to over 30 Watts in some devices. In this case, Microsoft seems to have set the PL2 level to about 20 Watts.

We ran the Surface Laptop 2 on a stress test at 100% load for over an hour to see if the device would throttle over time. The answer there is no. Over the hour, the system was able to get rid of enough heat that the temperatures on the CPU never got very high at all. The average temperature over the hour was about 68°C for the duration, and CPU power was right around the 15 Watt level. Maximum power draw was 20.67 Watts right at the start of the test, until the PL2 limit was reached and the device moved into its long-term PL1 load.

The laptop fan never got very loud either, coming in right around 43-44 dB(A) measured one inch of the trackpad, and the Surface Laptop never got too warm to the touch. There’s enough cooling to get the job done without making too much noise.

Software

As a Surface device, Microsoft ships a clean image, or as clean as Windows is these days anyway. The real change here compared to the original Surface Laptop is that Microsoft no longer ships their laptop with Windows 10 S, since the S is now just a feature of Windows. That means you don’t have to unlock all the features anymore, which is good.

The idea behind Windows 10 S was noble. For those not sure what Windows 10 S was, it was a version of Windows 10 that only allowed applications to be installed from the Windows Store. The security benefits here are real, so you can see why they’d want to offer this, but the company has made the right decision in just allowing an S-Mode in Windows 10 itself.

The reality of Windows computing though is that the Windows Store doesn’t offer everything you need, so installing programs is a necessity, so this change is very much welcome. You can get the Surface Laptop with either Windows 10 Home or Pro.