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Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book Reviews

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-it-out dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Anandtech posted reviews of the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and the Microsoft Surface Book today. They write: "After launching Surface Pro 3 with Haswell in 2014, Microsoft — like so many manufacturers — opted to skip the short-lived Broadwell generation of Intel CPUs in favor of making the larger jump to Skylake. Skylake brings with it notable increases in both CPU and GPU performance, particularly in the mobile space thanks to a series of optimizations and the use of Intel's leading 14nm manufacturing node," about the Pro 4 and with regards to the Book, "The basis of the Surface Book is that it is designed to be used as a laptop most of the time, but the display can be removed as a Clipboard for use with the pen. The Surface Book is certainly not the first device to do this, but it does some things in new ways that are pretty interesting."

1 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Too costly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As someone with a maxxed-out ThinkPad W530 they've payed ~$2.2k for overall (originally $1.7k then upgraded to a 512GB mSATA ($200) + 2 * 2TB SATA ($100 each) and 32GB of RAM ($200) aftermarket during sales) honestly the Surface Pro 4 is quite tempting.

    The Core i7 version with the Iris 540 has equal/better performance to the Quadro K2000M my current laptop has as a secondary Optimus video card. So it has MASSIVE power honestly, "Integrated" doesn't mean it's any slouch for gaming anymore, this is a giant myth ever since the first Intel HD Graphics 4000 came out. Iris is capable of 1080p gaming just fine, and the HD 4000 can cruise-control even brand new games at 720p easily in my experience.

    Honestly, $1800 for the i7 w/ 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD, or $1600 for only 8GB of RAM? That's a damn good price for a travel-friendly laptop for any business traveller. It's far more capable than most 'full fledged' notebooks I've had to cope with.

    And at $900 for the 'Core M' version with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD? I'd still rather have that than the other $900 laptops out there. People with desktops seem to miss that you really don't need massive storage on a portable device. You need storage, yes, but most of that can be kept off-device, even for gaming these days I rarely have more than 50GB of games installed at a time as I uninstall anything I haven't played in a few months and re-download it later if I pick it up again.

    So for the crowd MS is targetting? I'd call the Surface a home run. The 3rd version had massive and known overheating issues, but this iteration? I'm excited about getting one to replace my W530 at some point most likely.

    - WolfWings, too lazy to login to /. in years and years.