![]() ![]() There's nothing preventing swapping out bases-any Surface Book tablet can work with the no-GPU base, the old GPU base, or the Performance Base without problems-it's simply that Microsoft has elected not to sell them this way. Microsoft isn't selling the Performance Base separately, so if you want one, you'll have to buy a whole new system. The performance gap is big enough that Surface Book owners running graphically intensive workloads would probably see significant gains from making the switch, but having to spend a minimum of $2,399 to get one is painful. The other annoying issue is that existing owners of Surface Books have no upgrade path. Kaby Lake provides the impetus for just such a refresh. These are still premium-priced systems, and they should offer premium features. Aside from their processors, the lack of USB Type-C or Thunderbolt 3 on these systems, while tolerable at their 2015 introduction, looks rather more intolerable as we head into 2017. Problem is, the tablet (and the Surface Pro 4) would benefit from a refresh. As such, making the upgrade may have required full revalidation and possibly a redesign of the cooling systems, which wasn't worth it for such a small update. Our understanding is that the Surface Book's tablet portion is up against the limits of Intel's thermal and power specifications, so much so that Kaby Lake wouldn't be a straightforward drop-in replacement. Even with the discrete GPU this is valuable, because many workloads (such as browsers) stick with the integrated graphics. The obvious one is, why hasn't Microsoft switched to Kaby Lake? A switch to Kaby Lake would likely provide a modest improvement in battery life, a modest increase in CPU performance, and a somewhat larger increase in integrated GPU performance. ![]() But it nonetheless raises a number of questions. The Performance Base does the job it's supposed to do if you need more graphical performance or battery life from your Surface Book, it's clearly the option to go for, especially with a mere $100 price delta. ![]() If that's important to you, it's worth having. It's a simple trade-off the bigger battery weighs more and is thicker, but it lasts longer. The total battery capacity is about 14 percent bigger, and lo and behold, the runtime on battery is about 14 percent higher. This GPU is non-standard it doesn't neatly line up with any of Nvidia's usual mobile parts, and while it's faster than the Intel integrated graphics, it's not as quick as the more mainstream numbered parts. On higher-end models the keyboard base also contains a discrete Nvidia GPU. The Surface Book's big party trick is that the screen portion is the part that contains the computer it has batteries, a processor, RAM, storage, and everything else. The keyboard base, the part that in a regular laptop houses the computer parts, contains only the keyboard, touchpad, and battery. Mini-DisplayPort, headphones, SD, 2 USB 3.0įront: 5MP, 1080p video, infrared facial recognitionġ2.30×9.14×0.59-0.90" (312×232×14.9-23 mm)Īmbient light sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer Intel HD Graphics 520 + Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M 2GBĨ02.11ac/a/b/g/n with 2x2 MIMO antennas, Bluetooth 4.0 Specs at a glance: Microsoft Surface Book with Performance Baseģ000×2000 13.5" (267 PPI), 10-point capacitive PixelSense touchscreen But Microsoft has made an upgrade of sorts to the Surface Book range in the form of an even more expensive version that sits at the very top of the range: the Surface Book with Performance Base. The Surface Book, the laptop that can do double duty as a tablet, also remains a Skylake system. The Surface Pro 4 with its Skylake processor remains the current iteration of the company's productivity-oriented tablet and hasn't changed since its introduction. Microsoft, however, has gone for none of these routes. Some manufacturers have been a little more ambitious HP's updated Spectre x360 adds Thunderbolt 3 and Windows Hello support as well as slashing the size and weight. ![]() Dell's new XPS 13 is in most regards identical to the old XPS 13, for example, except for the processor swap. Kaby Lake parts are for the most part drop-in replacements for Skylake parts-same chipsets, same power envelopes and cooling requirements-and some manufacturers have taken advantage of this fact. Most of the PC OEMs have refreshed their Skylake systems to include Intel's new Kaby Lake chips. ![]()
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