Microsoft Windows 10 hardware event Oct 6th 10 am EST

ToTTenTranz said:
You need more volume to dissipate the heat and/or faster spinning fans, but that doesn't forcibly translate to "thicker".
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To maintain battery life it'd have to be thicker. There's no two ways around it.

The "tablet" portion only contains what, 30-40% of the total battery capacity of this convertible. You want as low a power consumption as possible while having a CPU that gives you decent performance. Putting the GPU in the dock with the rest of the batteries makes sense if you're optimizing the weight of the tablet portion.

Move up to a 35W CPU and suddenly you're going to need significantly more battery (weight) as well as significantly more cooling (noise and bulk) which inevitably leads to a thicker, heavier, and noisier device.

Which then means your keyboard dock needs to be significantly heavier in order to not tip over easily every time you attach the tablet portion. And suddenly you find your device is likely 50-100% heavier, 50-100% thicker, and far noisier than the device you had before.

Ultrabooks with long battery life (which is basically what the Surface Book is) aren't gaming machines. There's a reason for that. And the Surface Book faces far more design challenges than an average Ultrabook.

Regards,
SB
 
Well we finally got some insight into the Surface Book dGPU...basically equivalent to 940M

microsoft-nvidia.jpg


Spec Details:

  • Operating System: Windows 10 Pro, 64-bit
  • DirectX version: 12.0
  • GPU processor: GeForce GPU
  • Driver version: 354.15
  • Direct3D API version: 12
  • Direct3D feature level: 11_0
  • CUDA Cores: 384
  • Core clock: 954 MHz
  • Memory data rate: 5010 MHz
  • Memory interface: 64-bit
  • Memory bandwidth: 40.08 GB/s
  • Total available graphics memory: 5081 MB
  • Dedicated video memory: 1024 MB GDDR5
  • System video memory: 0 MB
  • Shared system memory: 4057 MB
  • Video BIOS version: 82.08.4D.00.01
  • IRQ: Not used
  • Bus: PCI Express x4 Gen3
  • Device Id: 10DE 134B 00081414
  • Part Number: 2702 0001
 
Silent_Buddha said:
To maintain battery life it'd have to be thicker. There's no two ways around it.

The "tablet" portion only contains what, 30-40% of the total battery capacity of this convertible. You want as low a power consumption as possible while having a CPU that gives you decent performance. Putting the GPU in the dock with the rest of the batteries makes sense if you're optimizing the weight of the tablet portion.

Move up to a 35W CPU and suddenly you're going to need significantly more battery (weight) as well as significantly more cooling (noise and bulk) which inevitably leads to a thicker, heavier, and noisier device.

Which then means your keyboard dock needs to be significantly heavier in order to not tip over easily every time you attach the tablet portion. And suddenly you find your device is likely 50-100% heavier, 50-100% thicker, and far noisier than the device you had before.

Ultrabooks with long battery life (which is basically what the Surface Book is) aren't gaming machines. There's a reason for that. And the Surface Book faces far more design challenges than an average Ultrabook.

Regards,
SB
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well the gpu is in the dock while the APU is in the tablet. So you should be able to cool the gpu easily since aside form batteries there isn't much else in the dock

I don't think you need more battery life , most can realize that the gpu would decrease battery life .
 
eastmen said:
well the gpu is in the dock while the APU is in the tablet. So you should be able to cool the gpu easily since aside form batteries there isn't much else in the dock

I don't think you need more battery life , most can realize that the gpu would decrease battery life .
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Going from a 15W CPU to a 35W CPU in the tablet portion means you'd need more battery in both the tablet portion and the keyboard portion to maintain the battery life of the 15W CPU device. In addition to that you'd need a beefier and/or noisier cooling system in the tablet portion.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Going from a 15W CPU to a 35W CPU in the tablet portion means you'd need more battery in both the tablet portion and the keyboard portion to maintain the battery life of the 15W CPU device. In addition to that you'd need a beefier and/or noisier cooling system in the tablet portion.

Regards,
SB
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Yes but you can do a 15W APU and a higher wattage GPU in the base. I think they skipped out on the gpu to be quite honest. Its a $300 upgrade to the DGPU so its quite a large price increase for 1gig of gdr 5 and a gtx 640m .
 
Also as an aside , I just got my steam controller , if anyone is interested in seeing how certain games fair on a sp1 let me know , I will fire them up if I own them
 
It's not outlandishly expensive but that's major compromise for size and I'm not sure I see the appeal for games.
 
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eastmen said:
was just reading there is a 128gig /i5 / dgpu for $1700 / $1530 student .
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Damn that's tempting over the i7/8 GB/256 GB SP4 which I think is more expensive without the student discount.

Still I think the SP4 fits my uses better for student/portability reasons.
 
Anandtech has benchmarks comparing the Core i5 GT2 Surface Pro 4 to the Core i7 + 940M Surface Book:

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The Core i7 for the SP4 uses the GT3e which has pretty much twice of everything there is in GT2 + 64MB EDRAM.
Unless the GT3e is severely TDP-limited (the GT2 in the Core i5 doesn't seem to be, but it's a smaller GPU), there's a good chance that the Surface Pro 4 with Core i7 actually surpasses the Surface Book with the external nVidia GPU.
 
ToTTenTranz said:
Anandtech has benchmarks comparing the Core i5 GT2 Surface Pro 4 to the Core i7 + 940M Surface Book:

The Core i7 for the SP4 uses the GT3e which has pretty much twice of everything there is in GT2 + 64MB EDRAM.
Unless the GT3e is severely TDP-limited (the GT2 in the Core i5 doesn't seem to be, but it's a smaller GPU), there's a good chance that the Surface Pro 4 with Core i7 actually surpasses the Surface Book with the external nVidia GPU.
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Thanks for that. Also, there are a lot of vid reviews for SP4 out today. I wonder if MS requested a certain date for the people they gave review copies to.

I still haven't seen one talking about throttling (there or not) on the SP4. Some of the reviews are pretty in depth, while others are garbage (the Verge). Hopefully more benchmarking vids and indepth performance tests soon.
 
I think you missed the best part however

It’s a bit tough to see because PCMark auto-scales each graph individually, but the Surface Pro 4 performs much better than the Surface Pro 3. The biggest difference is that the temperature of the CPU is much lower. The Surface Pro 3 approached 80 degrees Celcius, but the Surface Pro 4’s Skylake processor doesn’t even hit 60 degrees in this test. Part of this is the new 14 nm processor but the new cooling system is also doing a nice job.
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Its running about 20 degrees cooler. That is a huge improvement .


I do wish he threw the other surfaces (1 and 2 or at least 2) into the benchmarks . Would have made it easier to compare.

I also wish he tested more than dota . Civ would have been great and even something like skyrim. I can play both of those decently on my surface but would have liked to see how the new chips compare

Also the screen seems to be a major step up

[QUOTEUltimately what we see with the Surface Pro 4 is that Microsoft has taken the display tech and moved it well past the Surface Pro 3. Color accuracy is fantastic, whites are whiter, blacks are blacker, and the panel almost feels like it is flush with the surface of the tablet. Microsoft put a lot of tech into the entire Surface Pro 4 display stack, including the panel itself and the custom PixelSense digitizer which handles both touch and pen. After several years of almost getting the display right, with Surface Pro 4 it looks like they have finally succeeded.][/QUOTE]


Even the battery is amazing . 7.83 hours web browsing with wifi , 9.37 for video playback and a charge time of just 158 minutes

HOnestly I wish there were portable battery packs that would charge the surface. That would greatly increase the usability of the device for long trips.
 
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I heard some chic and pompous colleges in the US and Europe demand their students to buy expensive macbooks and ipads to even be able to attend the classes.
At least a $1500 Surface Pro 4 would be a choice.



eastmen said:
HOnestly I wish there were portable battery packs that would charge the surface. That would greatly increase the usability of the device for long trips.
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Even more if this battery pack came with a keyboard that doubled as a cover with more I/O ports!
:D
 
swaaye said:
Students buying $1500+ notebooks. Hmmmmmm :D
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I saw students get laptops when they reached about 1000 euros. Around $1500 was once the price for any laptop at all, and that was without useless features such as wifi or bluetooth.
A friend had such a laptop, with at least a real GPU (not a fully dedicated one, but based on radeon 9000 tech not some SiS junk where nothing works)
 
Unf. I really, really want the i7 / 16Gb / 512Gb model but just can't really justify the $2k price tag right now. If I recall correctly (I didn't check before posting this, so I may be wrong...) the prior Surface Pro i7 models had better battery life than the i5's. This was a combination of better binning for the i7's (on average ran at lower voltages when at lower usage levels) and was also related to work getting done faster via turbo / more threads which then allowed the CPU to idle sooner.
 
Surface Pro 4 prices without discounts via MS website.

I7 / 16gb / 1024gb = $2700
I7 / 16gb / 512gb = $2200
I7 / 16gb / 256gb = $1800
I7 / 8gb / 256gb = $1600

I5 / 16gb / 512gb = $1900
I5 / 16gb / 256gb = $1500
I5 / 8gb / 512gb = $1700
I5 / 8gb / 256gb = $1300
 
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