Surface Book 3 Is In The House

It only took some two and a half years, but Microsoft has officially announced the Surface Book 3. Not much has changed for the device in terms of external design, but internal circuitry is where it’s at.

This newest addition to the Surface family was formally unveiled alongside the Surface Go 2 today.

And the detachable PC finally got the long overdue refresh.

Microsoft decided to go with the latest Intel 10th generation CPUs, codenamed Ice Lake. There was talk that the company might opt for the Comet Lake processors. Both are 10th generation chips, but Ice Lake is made on a 10nm process, while Comet Lake is 14nm.

Yet, the Comet Lake lineup is more powerful of the two, as Intel had to tone down the clock on Ice Lake.

Nevertheless, Ice Lake makes up for this with its Iris Plus Graphics. More so, as the Surface Book comes with a detachable screen. Ice Lake processors give you this boost in graphics while using it as a tablet, which makes up for it all.

As for the CPU options, we have the Core i5-1035G7 and Core i7-1065G7 available. The Core i5 models don’t offer dedicated graphics, while the 15-inch variant of the Surface Book 3 only comes in the Core i7 flavor.

GPU got a real look, too. The 13.5-inch Surface Book 3 gets you the 4GB Max-Q variant of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, while the 15-inch one comes with a GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q with 6GB. The latter is good enough for many of the top games that are available for Windows.

Commercial customers will also have the option of choosing the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 GPU for their mobile workstations.

On the display side, we have a 3000 x 2000 screen on the 13.5-inch model, while the 15-inch one offers a resolution of 3240 x 2160.

Microsoft also claims that the Surface Book 3 has the best battery life of any device it has made up until now. It’s rated at 17.5 hours on the 15-inch model and 15.5 hours on the 13.5-inch variant.

Some neat improvements when it comes to port selection, with both the USB Type-A and Type-C ports now being USB 3.1 Gen 2, meaning you get 10Gbps instead of 5Gbps. There is also a Surface Connect port on both the base and the tablet, to go with the 3.5mm audio jack in the tablet.

All these enhancements mean that the starting price of the Surface Book 3 is a bit higher at $1,599.

It will be available on May 21.