Microsoft Surface Book 3 – Review 2020

If Microsoft-designed mobile PCs are the essence of the Windows computing experience, and the Surface Book is Microsoft’s flagship, then the Surface Book 3 (starts at $1,599; $2,799 as tested) has a reasonable claim to be the ultimate Windows-powered mobile device. This detachable 2-in-1 laptop certainly offers the best blend of unique features, operating-mode flexibility, computing power, and portability of any Microsoft PC. With an advanced mechanical locking system for the keyboard base, powerful graphics processing, multiple cameras and batteries, and a choice of two screen sizes, the Surface Book 3 is a category-defying device for the few laptop buyers who can afford it and realize its full potential.

What Exactly Is the Surface Book 3?

Laptops these days tend to fall into one of three categories: conventional designs that open like the shell of a clam, 2-in-1 convertible models with screens that rotate 360 degrees, and detachable PCs that can be used as tablets once you remove their optional keyboards.

The Surface Book 3 is a mashup of all three. Its keyboard base and display, made of sturdy magnesium and finished with an understated platinum-silver color scheme, are joined with a hinge that works like a clamshell. But this hinge has a hidden release mechanism, activated with a press of a key on the keyboard. Once released, you can jettison the keyboard base and use the Surface Book 3 as a standalone tablet.

That’s not all. You can also flip the keyboard base over and reattach it, letting you use the device as an easel or kiosk, with the display facing you and the keyboard resting on a flat surface. You can also prop up the Surface Book 3 as an inverted-“V” tent, with its edges resting on your desk, and even lay its two halves flush together. These modes are traditionally the province of 2-in-1 convertible designs.

Why would you want to go through these contortions? Probably because you’re one of the two types of buyers most suited to the Surface Book 3. Digital artists can take advantage of the device’s flexibility to sketch, retouch, and edit using their fingers or optional tools like the Surface Pen and Surface Dial. Meanwhile, corporate road warriors can flit from conference room to cafeteria to airport security checkpoint with only the tools required for that day’s work. If they’re not planning on doing much typing, they can leave the keyboard base at home and travel with just the display and a padded sleeve or carrying case.

These are very specific use cases, of course, and they mean that the Surface Book 3 is not for everyone. Most people would be better off choosing a less expensive laptop, 2-in-1, or detachable tablet according to what they plan to do most often. But if you want a jack-of-all trades device and you have the budget for it, the Surface Book 3 might be for you.

The Surface Book 3 Screen: Two Sizes

The Surface Book 3 comes in either 13.5-inch or 15-inch display sizes and many different internal component configurations. The entry-level 13.5-inch version has a 10th Generation Intel Core i5 processor with Iris Plus Graphics, a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), and 8GB of memory. The display alone weighs just 1.59 pounds, though that jumps to 3.38 pounds when you attach the keyboard base. The entry-level version measures 0.51 by 12.3 by 9.14 inches (HWD), with the keyboard base bringing the total height to 0.9 inch.

These specs make it comparable to dozens of ultraportable laptops, from the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 to Microsoft’s own 13.5-inch Surface Laptop 3. Value-seekers will be disappointed to learn that most of these alternatives start around $1,000 for comparable configurations, $600 less than the Surface Book 3’s starting price. But none of these alternatives has such a flexible design.

The version of the Surface Book 3 reviewed here is the larger 15-inch model, with significantly upgraded components. It features a quad-core Intel Core i7-1065G7 CPU with a 1.3GHz base clock speed, 32GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU to handle graphics output. With the keyboard attached, it measures 0.9 by 13.6 by 9.9 inches and weighs 4.2 pounds. The heavy weight is not out of the ordinary for a 15-inch-class laptop, but when you detach the keyboard, the display is a much more manageable 1.8 pounds.

Other options for the 15-inch Surface Pro 3 include an Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 GPU, and a 1TB or 2TB SSD. While the Quadro RTX 3000 isn’t that much more powerful for general use than the GTX 1660 Ti in our review unit (both have the same 6GB of GDDR6 memory), it could benefit users of professional apps with independent software vendor (ISV) certification that are specifically designed to run on Quadro chips.

The Core i5 and Core i7 mentioned above are the only two processor options. People with especially demanding CPU needs will miss the ability to configure a Surface Book 3 with a six- or eight-core Core i7 or Core i9, the way they can with many other mobile workstations, like Dell’s Precision line, or in the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro.

All configurations of the Surface Book 3 feature the same port selection. It comprises two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports, one USB Type-C port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a full-size SDXC card reader. This is by far the best physical connectivity of any Microsoft laptop, with even the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 offering just two USB ports and a headphone jack.

The Surface Book 3’s headphone jack is the only one of its connectors located in the display portion, with all of the other ports located on the keyboard base. The power button and a volume rocker are located in the top left corner of the display.

Wireless connectivity includes Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). That’s a nice improvement over the Surface Book 2’s older 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and a small advantage over the MacBook Pro, which still uses this older standard.

All Surface mobile PCs also come with the Surface Connect port, a proprietary jack that accepts the included AC charging cable and adapter. The power adapter offers an additional USB Type-A port for charging external devices, though it can’t be used for data transfer. In place of the charging cable, the Surface Connect port can also link to one of Microsoft’s optional expansion hubs, like the Surface Dock 2, some of which offer pass-through charging.

The Surface Book 3 has separate batteries in the keyboard base and in the screen portion. It’s possible to recharge the display portion’s battery by itself; part of the docking connector doubles as a second Surface Connect port when the Surface Book 3 is detached from its keyboard base.

Preparing the Surface Book 3 for Docking and Undocking

To disengage the screen from the keyboard, you press a dedicated key on the top right of the keyboard. After a few seconds, a prompt lets you know that it’s free to detach, and you can hear and feel it unlock. You’ll need to grasp the display with one hand and steady the keyboard base with your other hand to pry the two halves apart.

When you use the Surface Book 3 as a tablet without the keyboard base, there are a few things you’ll be missing out on besides the obvious lack of a physical keyboard and touchpad. Some of the guts—namely the larger of the two batteries and the discrete GPU—are built into the keyboard. There’s no practical way to fit a powerful graphics card and two batteries into a tablet that weighs less than two pounds, so these are acceptable compromises. While detached, the Core i7’s integrated Iris Plus handles graphics output. Just remember that to make full use of the Surface Book 3’s power, you’ll need to reconnect the keyboard base.

Doing so is easy—just line up the connectors and gently push down. It’s a breeze once you’ve done it a few times, although the first couple of attempts may cause some fumbling. Just remember that finesse is more important than force. Windows will let you know when it’s attached via a green pop-up notification.

The docking and undocking process can occasionally have hiccups. If you’re running an app that uses the GeForce GPU, the Detach key on the keyboard will glow red and a pop-up will appear asking you to quit the app before the system unlocks the detaching mechanism. (The GeForce chip resides in the keyboard base; when detached, the tablet portion relies on the integrated graphics silicon that’s part of the Intel CPU.)

Comfortable Typing, Excellent PixelSense Display

Some of the Surface Book 3’s physical features are virtually identical to those of its predecessors, and that’s a good thing. Consistencies include the keyboard, with comfortable backlit keys that are quiet, feel satisfying to tap, and offer a good amount of travel without being mushy. The touchpad is also largely unchanged, offering responsive tracking and a very stable clicking mechanism.

The display is the same excellent PixelSense display offered on the Surface Book 2. It’s a beautiful screen with a 3,240-by-2,160-pixel native resolution, a 1,600:1 contrast ratio, and support for 10-point multi-touch. That pixel count would qualify as 4K if it were a 16:9 display, but instead it uses the taller 3:2 ratio, which is rare among laptops in general, though standard fare on Microsoft’s PCs. Not only is 3:2 useful for some digital artists, but it lets you see more of a webpage or other vertical document before you have to scroll.

Like its predecessor, the Surface Book 3 also features two cameras. There’s a 5-megapixel front-facing camera with IR sensors to allow face-recognition logins to your Windows account, and there’s a second 8-megapixel rear shooter located on the upper left portion of the back of the display, near the power button. Both cameras offer 1080p video quality, and although they’re not as sharp or capable as most high-end phone cameras, they offer an improvement over the noisy, dull video that most 720p laptop webcams capture.

The speakers are on the two top corners of the tablet; there are none in the keyboard dock. For tablet speakers, they do an admirable job. They’re loud enough to be heard from a moderate distance, if not exactly booming.

How Does the Surface Book 3 Perform?

To judge a laptop’s computing performance, we normally compare its scores on benchmark tests with those of other comparably priced laptops in the same category. But because the Surface Book 3 defies categorization, I’m taking a slightly different approach. Below are the specs of the comparison systems, including the Apple MacBook Pro, the HP ZBook Studio x360 G5, the Lenovo Yoga C940 15-Inch, and the Microsoft Surface Book 2.

While the Yoga C940 is significantly cheaper ($1,699.99 as tested), it’s still a large laptop that converts into a tablet and is aimed at digital artists. Meanwhile, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is significantly more expensive ($3,899 as tested), but it’s also a large laptop aimed at artists, and a good chunk of its lofty price comes from its gargantuan 2TB SSD. The same is true of the Surface Book 2 and the ZBook Studio, content-creator-class laptops each sporting a 1TB SSD. A Surface Book 3 configured with a 2TB SSD but otherwise identical components to the one tested here costs $3,399.99.

Overall, the Surface Book 3 performs slightly better on CPU-intensive tasks than its predecessor does, as you’d expect. But the Apple, HP, and Lenovo outclass it on most of our CPU-intensive content-creation tests. The MacBook Pro and the Yoga C940 have more powerful eight- and six-core processors, while the ZBook Studio has a Xeon CPU. Where the Surface Book 3 really shines is on 3D graphics performance. (See how we test laptops.)

The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use this Windows-only benchmark to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing.

All of the comparison systems are up to the task, as we consider anything above 4,000 on this test to represent excellent performance. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s storage subsystem. This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better, and all of the systems perform roughly equally, helped along by their speedy SSDs.

The Surface Book 3’s relative performance suffers when it comes to CPU-intensive tasks like rendering an image, though. Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads in rendering a complex image.

The MacBook Pro, ZBook Studio, and Yoga C940 are the standouts here, since they have more cores and threads. The same is true of transcoding a 12-minute clip of 4K video to 1080p using the Handbrake app…

When it comes to image editing, the Surface Book 3 is much faster than its predecessor but still slightly slower than the other three competitors…

Our image editing test involves applying a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We use an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version for Windows machines, while Macs are tested on the latest Photoshop CC version.

Looking at Surface Book 3’s Robust GPU

All of the comparison systems here have discrete GPUs instead of relying on the integrated graphics processing capabilities of their CPUs. But the Surface Book 3 stands out, recording the best performance on all but one of our graphics benchmarks. (As mentioned earlier, that’s when the tablet is docked and using the GeForce graphics in the base.)

The first test, 3DMark, measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.

Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s done in the Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, and a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.

While the Surface Book 3 is by no means a gaming laptop, its graphics potential shows that you could use it as one. Microsoft even encourages this. Support for the Xbox Wireless Controller is built-in, and the company claims that the Surface Book 3 “is the best Surface for immersive gaming.” But you’d also derive a great benefit from the graphics oomph if you frequently run an ISV app that uses the GPU acceleration to run more efficiently. These include scientific and AI apps, in addition to some multimedia content creation ones.

Testing the Surface Book 3’s Battery

The Surface Book 3 lasts for close to 16 hours on our battery rundown test, which involves playing a locally stored 720p video file at 50 percent screen brightness in Airplane Mode until the battery dies. While 16 hours is a long time, it’s less than the nearly 20 hours the Surface Book 2 achieved, and also slightly less than Microsoft’s claim of up to 17.5 hours of battery life.

We ran our battery test with the Surface Book 3 docked, taking advantage of both the battery in the keyboard base and the one in the display. Normally, laptops are very good at detecting when you’re performing a task with light computing demands like watching videos. We also leave the Windows taskbar power slider at its factory defaults when doing the battery test, to further ensure that the laptop manages its power use as it was designed to do.

Despite the decrease in hours of battery life compared with the Surface Book 2, 16 hours is very good, and suggests that you should be able to use the Surface Book 3 with the keyboard base for an entire day of light work without needing to plug it in.

I also ran a second battery test on the display portion alone, detached from the keyboard base. It lasted just 4 hours and 17 minutes, which suggests that you’ll need to keep the charging cable close at hand whenever you operate in detached mode for very long. Less than five hours is poor battery life in the tablet world, but then again, there’s virtually no other standalone tablet that must satisfy the power-hungry, high-resolution (near-4K) 15-inch display of the Surface Book 3.

An Ambitious, Category-Defying Device

The Surface Book 3 is an ambitious device that seeks to combine the best qualities of all three current laptop genres into a do-it-all machine. Digital artists and on-the-go professionals who need the flexibility of a detachable tablet and some significant graphics horsepower will probably appreciate it most. But anyone with deep enough pockets could delight in the unique capabilities of this category-defying device. There’s nothing else like the Surface Book 3, from Microsoft or any other mainstream laptop maker. It has a credible claim to being the ultimate Windows device.

If you’re on a more reasonable budget, though, the Surface Book 3 isn’t for you. Several other members of the Surface family, including the Editors’ Choice Surface Pro 7 and the Surface Laptop 3, offer some of its capabilities for a lot less money. And if you prioritize CPU power above physical flexibility, better-performing large laptops for similar money do exist, including the 16-inch MacBook Pro and a whole host of workstation-class Windows laptops.

For these reasons, the Surface Book 3’s most probable destiny is to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors: an inspiration for what Windows mobile PCs can do when their designers are given a sky’s-the-limit mandate. It’s an undeniably brilliant piece of technology, but it’s more work of art than workhorse.

Microsoft Surface Book 3 (15-Inch) Specs

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