Switch modes to the Surface Laptop Studio at will
At Microsoft's fall new product launch in September last year, the Surface Laptop Studio made a stunning appearance. On February 14, Surface Laptop Studio officially opened pre-sales and bookings in the domestic market, as the successor of surface Book, how does it perform? This article will bring you a detailed experience.
The Surface Book, which debuted 7 years ago, is synonymous with quality and performance in Microsoft's Surface products, and the avant-garde design of the screen and keyboard base that can be split has become a classic of a generation. In 7 years, the Surface Book was updated for three generations, and 7 years later, the new Surface Laptop Studio was launched, as the successor to the Surface Book 3, the name suffix of "Studio" is also intuitively indicated, which is a productivity tool designed for creators.
Compared to the Surface Book 3, surface Laptop Studio has undergone a huge change in appearance design, no longer distinguishing between 13.5 and 15-inch versions, but only offering a single size for a 14.4-inch screen. However, the design style is still familiar with the "field" flavor.
When we turn on the computer normally, surface Laptop Studio seems to be unremarkable, in addition to the thickness of the fuselage, other details are not much different from the Surface Laptop series notebooks.
Surprises appear here in the screen structure. Different from the traditional notebook, the A/B side of the surface Laptop Studio's fuselage can be "semi-split", which is the form of the above picture from the side.
Microsoft separates the back shell (A-side) of the screen from the middle, and the reel along the midline position can achieve the front and back flip of the screen. The hinge, named "Dynamic Weave Hinge", allows surface Laptop Studio to switch freely between traditional laptop, entertainment mode, and canvas mode, enabling YOGA form in a non-360° flip design. We've seen this design in Acer's ConceptD 3 Ezel.
We can use it like this: when you need to share the screen content to a friend on the other side, just flip it over and the face can easily see what you want to share.
It can also be used in this state: in this state, the bottom edge of the screen is aligned with the gap between the keyboard and the touchpad, and when adjusting this posture, it will give you a clear feedback of "clicking" in place. At this point, you can have a very solid artboard that, with a stylus, can easily click, write, or draw.
When the screen is completely pressed down, the Surface Laptop Studio transforms into a tablet, but more like a tablet on a book where you can create as much as you want.
In terms of screen quality, the resolution of this screen is a bit surprising, only 2400 * 1600, compared with the Surface Book, the PPI is much lower, but the refresh rate can be supported to 120Hz. And all "2202" years, Microsoft is still very restrained in screen design, slightly thick border is still incompatible with the current popular "full screen" (if you look closely, you will also find that the corners of this screen are not right angles, but rounded rectangles, just like the current smartphone screen).
In terms of color performance, this screen of surface Laptop Studio performed well, covering 100% of the sRGB color gamut, 81% of the Adobe RGB color gamut, and 83% of the P3 color gamut in our tests. The average color deviation ΔE is only 1.14, which is already close to the level of professional-grade displays.
From the side, the body structure of Surface Laptop Studio is like a sandwich sandwich, the flip mechanism of the screen plus the bottom boss design, visually this notebook is composed of four layers, the thickness is up to 19mm, plus 1.82kg weight, portability is very general.
As for the expansion interface, the machine is equipped with two USB 4 interfaces that support Raiden 4, support external dual 4K displays, and also equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack and a Surface Connect port. This is much stronger than the Surface Book 3.
Intel XI H35+RTX3050Ti has excellent performance
In terms of hardware configuration, Surface Laptop Studio is equipped with Intel 11th generation Core H35 processors, providing i5 and i7 specifications, and intel torque Xe core graphics and RTX3050Ti discrete graphics in terms of graphics.
AIDA64 CPUID
The i7-11370H used in the models we tested were used by many high-performance thin and light notebooks and gaming notebooks. The specification is 4 cores and 8 threads, the base frequency is 3.3GHz, the maximum dynamic acceleration frequency is 4.8GHz, the L3 cache is 12MB, and the TDP is 35W.
CINEBENCH R15/R20 test
In the test of CINEBENCH R15, surface Laptop Studio's CPU multi-core score was 948cb, and the single-core score was 221cb; In the test of CINEBENCH R20, the multi-core score was 2324pts, and the single-core score was 581pts, the overall performance was still good, but it was not outstanding in the same configuration.
3DMARK 11 test
In terms of graphics performance, Surface Laptop Studio is equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX3050Ti graphics card, based on 8nm ampere architecture, CUDA units up to 2560, and equipped with 4GB GDDR6 independent video memory, the performance level has reached the level of entry-level game book. In the test of 3DMARK 11, in The Performance (P mode), the score was 13190 points, which was significantly higher than the Surface Book 3 equipped with GTX 1650 last year.
SPECviewperf 13 test
Stronger graphics performance makes Surface Laptop Studio more efficient in 3D modeling, graphic rendering and other creative design work, in the SPEKviewperf 13 test (1920 *1080 resolution), The 3dsmax-06 scored 96.9, the Catia-05 scored 70.26, the CREO-02 scored 10477, and the Maya-05 scored 139.67, which is also very good and can better cope with creative work.
CrystalDiskMar test
However, it should be noted that the hard disk performance of Surface Laptop Studio is average, and the NVMe SSD from Samsung with a capacity of 512 GB in the test of CrystalDiskMark has continuous read and write speeds of 2300.48 MB/s and 1220.25 MB/s, and 4K random read and write speeds of 37.93 MB/s and 134.22 MB/s, respectively, in the current mainstream PCIe 3. 0x4 SSD is no longer numbered. Considering that creators generally have frequent large-capacity material reading and writing requirements, there should be higher requirements for hard disk performance.
PCMark 8 Creative accelerates performance testing
In the creative acceleration test of PCMARK 8, surface Laptop Studio scored 5256 points, and the performance of the whole machine was not bad, which could easily meet the daily office, creative design and other work.
PCMark 8 battery life test
In terms of battery life, the Surface Laptop Studio has a battery capacity of 58Whr. We start with 100% charge, select the recommended option (Windows 11 X64) for the battery performance plan, screen brightness of 60%, keep WiFi and Bluetooth on. The test score in the PCMARK 8Creative Conventional scenario is 5h32min, which is a normal level. Under normal circumstances, the continuous battery life of Surface Laptop Studio is about 7 hours, which can meet the regular mobile office use.
Surface Laptop Studio charging curve
In terms of charging, surface Laptop Studio comes standard with a 102W two-stage power adapter that comes with a 7W USB-A charging port. The measured charging curve shows that in the first 60 minutes, the power can be charged from 5% to 84%, almost full in 90 minutes, and slightly longer in the subsequent trickle, and it takes 111 minutes to fully charge.
The well-positioned Surface Laptop Studio starts at 12188
Overall, Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio is a multi-mode notebook with an excellent comprehensive experience, and the product design is innovative. Its positioning is very clear, that is, professional designers and creative people, of course, light gamers can also be satisfied. If you're developing during the day and playing games at night, you might have chosen a high-performance thin and light notebook or a thin and light game book, but now surface Laptop Studio can also meet your needs. However, the author feels that surface Laptop Studio is more suitable for users who have the need to use a stylus or pen tablet such as the original artist.
Because honestly, the configuration of this machine is not enough to be called a high-performance creation book, compared with XPS 15, Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme and other models, the performance level of Surface Laptop Studio can only be said to be enough, whether it is the processor or graphics card performance is not much advantage, in video editing, animation effects and other loads performance is not good enough. Even game brands like ROG have started to launch designer laptops like the higher spec Phantom 14, which are equally competitive. In fact, in my opinion, surface Laptop Studio must at least have an Intel H45 processor and provide graphics options for RTX3060 or higher.
In addition, Surface Laptop Studio has some regrets, such as the heavy screen bezel, stubborn magnetic charging port and power adapter. The Surface pen accessory also does not come with the stand-alone package and needs to be purchased separately.
Surface Laptop Studio has opened pre-sale and reservation on the Microsoft official store today, with a stand-alone starting price of 12188 yuan and five configurations. This price is expected, but the initial configuration of the storage is only 256GB, it is really a bit shabby, Microsoft really does not know how big the creators' material capacity is? And the span of the storage configuration is as confusing as ever, in the two i5 configuration versions, the difference between 256GB flash memory is 1500 yuan, and in the three configurations of the i7, the 1TB flash difference is 2900 yuan, so I believe that for users who really take this machine to create, the i7/32GB/1TB version should be the best-selling SKU.