Microsoft – Surface Book 3 15″ Touch-Screen PixelSense™ – 2-in-1 Laptop – Intel Core i7 – 16GB Memory – 256GB SSD – Platinum

Before starting I would like to say that I’m a member of the Tech Insider Network and reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews.
Pulling the Surface Book 3 out of the box it seems heavy for its size. They must have a lot crammed into a small package as it certainly has the specs. It looks sharp and feels premium and it should at this price point. As I went through the box looking to see what all came in the package I was upset to find there was no stylus included. At this price it should be included. Looking at the screen I noticed a sizable bezel. At first, I wondered why the bezel was so large before I realized it was probably for the attachment points between the keyboard and tablet.
Turning it on there is a short boot time thanks to the SSD. There is the standard Windows 10 setup, which goes quick with some assistance from Cortana. The mouse pad is standard, and the keyboard has a selector to light up the keys, which comes in handy. The screen is sturdily attached to the keyboard and only comes apart when you press the detach button on the keyboard. Reattaching is as simple as putting the screen back in its place as it locks itself together. I really like that there are no vents on the bottom of the keyboard. The vent is well placed on the top of the keyboard and it’s not very noticeable. I love that I can set the Surface Book on my lap and not worry about blocking a vent and causing it to overheat. There is also a vent that goes around the entire screen and the speakers are hidden on the left and right sides. It’s also quiet and I haven’t heard a cooling fan yet. Listening to music and watching some videos I was pleasantly surprised with the sound system. It’s not audiophile quality but for movies and music it’s unexpected and surprisingly good. The Dolby Atmos creates an exceptional sound stage. The charger attaches magnetically and is an improvement over a coaxial power connection you see on most laptops. There are two USB connections, a single USB type C connection, headphone jack, and an SD card reader. Missing is an HDMI connection, which would be nice to have.
I installed several programs, and each was quick to install and quick to open once installed. The SSD is nice and fast but it doesn’t appear to be interchangeable so make sure you get a model with enough storage space for your needs unless you plan to use external storage. Programs are also very responsive thanks to the i7 processor and 16 GB of memory. The touch screen is accurate and works well and the screen is sharp and produces good viewing angles. There are cameras on the front and back, but I mainly just use the front facing camera to identify my face to aid with the login.
I’m currently in the midst of a project for work to create a manual and I’m using Acrobat DC. I’m using a lot of pictures in the manual that I’ve taken with my DSLR. To help organize and prepare everything I also have Lightroom and Photoshop. I’ve been running all three programs at the same time and this thing hasn’t skipped a beat. I’m able to quickly import RAW image files into Lightroom since the Surface Book has an SD card reader. I currently have 90 images imported and I can easily browse all the photos I’ve taken for the project at one time and switch between the RAW images without any lag. I can quickly make the necessary lens corrections and white balance adjustments before exporting to Photoshop for finetuning the image and saving it to a reduced size for the manual. I can then import the images into Acrobat. The speed at which I’m able to go from one program to another is great and it really makes the project so much easier to complete. With 93 imported RAW images in Lightroom, 18 photos open for editing in Photoshop, and Acrobat DC open for editing a 110-page manual all at the same time there are no issues with performance and I have absolutely zero complaints over the performance of this machine.
One thing to note is that the Surface Book has two batteries. One in the tablet and one in the keyboard. Together they give you pretty good battery life but separate them and the smaller battery in the tablet will only give you around 3 hours of use.
Overall, I’m happy with the Surface Book 3. It’s more than capable to handle anything I can throw at it. I think a stylus and an HDMI port would have been nice additions. Better battery life for the tablet portion of the Surface Book would also be welcome. Otherwise it’s an excellent machine, although expensive, and I know I will get plenty of use out of it.

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I was provided with this Microsoft Surface Book 3 at no cost as part of the Best Buy Tech Insider program. Reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews and sharing their experiences with the product.
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The Microsoft Surface Book 3 is an extremely well-engineered, high quality, high performance notebook that literally flew through almost every Adobe Photoshop task I threw at it as part of my daily work regiment. It easily handled all my MS Visual Studio development work with ease and the 15” inch PixelSense display’s 3:2 aspect ratio helped to keep more text on the screen – in addition to also being great for photo editing and long form document viewing. The PixelSense screen produced excellent Adobe RGB color accuracy out the box. Everything from the minimalist industrial looking magnesium alloy case, to the well-spaced and perfectly back lit keyboard screams quality and well thought out engineering…. However, there is significant room for improvement. The main areas I felt needed the most attention was centered around design and performance decisions made by Microsoft to keep the Surface Book 3 “the premier” 2-in-1 notebook in the market. The detachable tablet design results in a lot of sacrifices to maintain that unique form factor. There was a noticeable amount of screen wobble due to the top end heavy design of the display. Audio and sound takes a minor performance hit due to the relatively weak and hollow sounding speakers embedded into the display unit (but not the base unit oddly). More importantly, while I found the unit whisper quiet under normal operation – it got notably noisy, and even a little whiny, under full sustained processing loads, such as encoding in Adobe Premier Pro, or while testing out the graphical processing prowess in some light gaming action in Fortnite. Sadly, all of the currently available configurations are non-user serviceable/ non upgradable which means that you need to seriously calculate the amount of RAM and SSD storage you may need for future application usage and development – or risk having to acquire a whole new unit later on down the line.
Detailed Observations after a regular usage:
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My team and I create training photos, video content, coded programs, and virtualized network/server infrastructure to meet our organization’s needs. I am fortunate to regularly work with others that often live on the “bleeding edge” of technology and this results in inevitably swapping machines between team members many times over throughout a project to work through our tasks. This provides for a great opportunity to compare the performance of many different machines essentially running the same tasks over and over. I primarily utilize Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Premier Pro, MS Visual Studio, and VMware Workstation Pro as part of my regular work routine… with a healthy heaping of PC gaming on the side. I wouldn’t say I am a “Artisan” Photoshop/Premiere Pro user, but my team and I utilize the programs enough to be more than well versed in what they have to offer. For reference, I predominately work with 8-16 Megapixel uncompressed JPG images with average bit depths of 8bpc per image. I rarely utilize more than 10 layers in any of the images I work with – and in that regard this 16GB of RAM model is more than enough to tackle any filters or renders that I throw at it in reasonably quick amount of time. I kept a close eye on the RAM and system resource utilization – and it never peaked above 80% under the above circumstances – even with 10-15 Chrome tabs and streaming music services running in the background as well. I added a photo in the gallery for reference. In all honesty, I feel that if you are planning on working with predominately RAW Images or any 16bpc (or greater) JPG images AND/OR rely on more than 10 layers – you should definitely be looking at the Surface Book 3 with 32GB of RAM over this configuration. The battery life was decent and lasted about 5-7 hours with moderate to heavy use in a single day of my type of usage. I imagine this is due in part to the two separate batteries in the in the base and in the Surface Book Display unit along with the low voltage 10th Gen Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor. The keyboard is spacious, has great key travel, and uniform back-lighting…What more can you ask for?
I regularly create/maintain VMware virtual machines as part of my development work to test and verify functionality of features I am working on. Interestingly – although this machine has the graphical, and computational horsepower to serve as a dedicated VMware or VirtualBox workstation – it requires a little tinkering out of the box. Due to native Windows 10 Security settings AND the Surface Book 3 default BIOS configuration – resource conflicts occur with the native Level1 Windows hypervisor and the Level2 VMware/VirtualBox virtualization software you are trying to use. “Credential guard” errors resulted every time I tried to load a VMware or VirtualBox VM. Without going into granular technical detail, technical – the Surface Book 3 BIOS lacks the ability/option to easily view or enable/disable “Virtualization” features of the Intel Chipset – even though it is a natively supported feature. I was able to rectify the situation by making edits to the Windows Registry to disable the conflicting services and I also had to modify the Windows 10 OS Security settings to allow the sharing of virtualized privileged system resources/core memory functions. There are a few Microsoft Knowledge base articles that you can search for to address this if you run into this similar issue, and it would have saved me several hours of my time had I known in advance.
Interesting things I noted:
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– The Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti is a decent solution for 1080p Gaming with “High” detail settings (and possibly some “very high” depending on the Game)
– Its nice to have a full-sized SDXC card read directly in the device
– even under heavy load, the keyboard and palm rest stayed nice and cool – the back side of the Display unit got noticeably warm at times when I would pick up or move the unit to another area.
– Microsoft really should include a Surface Pen at this price point – it really adds to the capability of the device and helps to strengthen one of its key advantages over other machines
– The screen is bright enough to work easily with in direct sunlight – even if it can have touch too much reflections at times
– While the 10th Gen Intel Core i7 1065G7 inside of this model is more powerful than its predecessors – it is not the best performing (nor best priced) processor for content creation on the market. Microsoft should really consider offering the latest AMD Ryzen 4000 series processors in this model or in future revisions or at least try to consider using a non “low voltage” based processor to compete with AMD.
– I have mixed feelings about the “mechanical” button mechanism that detached the tablet from the base. I accidentally engaged it the first day I used it and the mechanism made a weird sound and the tablet sort of wobbled. Nothing broke, but makes me ponder the longevity and fragility of the mechanism over long term repeated use.
– The trackpad looks small – and is small – but it was more than adequate in my usage. I think it doesn’t help that there is so much “unused” space in the palm rest area on both side of the base. Maybe place extra Speakers to improve sound while plugged into the base?
Closing thoughts:
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As I mentioned – I work in a team, and some my team mates regularly switch out their notebooks in a quest the find “the one” that tries to do everything they need. This is where I think the Surface Book 3 starts to lose some of its luster and appeal. There are faster/more powerful notebooks and 2-in-1’s for content creators and developers out there – for lower MSRP. They are often more customizable, with better performing hardware and equally impressive displays out there – for lower MSRP. I physically witnessed 15” inch AMD 4800U and a 14” AMD 4900HS powered notebook -with similar Nvidia GTX GPUs- perform many of the same tasks in 20%-30% faster time frames, along with more system RAM, SSD storage … for less than half the price of this models MSRP. Even taking all that into consideration – there is still something special about the Surface Book line that can’t be quantified. Thanks to the detachable screen, I found new ways to collaborate and make on the fly edits/adjustments with my team. I was able to gather input that would not have been possible with any other machine thanks to the added flexibility. Using the Surface Book 3 in tablet mode with an optional Surface Pen is where this device really shines. Sadly, there is NOT one included in the box – I borrowed one from my personal Surface Pro 4). As configured with 16GB of RAM, and at retail MSRP – I think the Surface Book 3 is an outstanding machine that can tackle light – to – medium weight content creation tasks and workloads, with the added bonus of lightweight gaming on the side.
It looks and feels like a premium device – but it costs significantly more than (mainly AMD) devices that can outperform it on almost every level. In my mind, it boils down to “needing” the tablet functionality for the added cost –or- heavy Photo editing/collaboration with the PixelSense Display and a Surface Pen – which again is oddly optional at this price point given lower priced “Surface Pro” models can be purchased with a pen as part of the configurations.

In under 30 days, after doing a restart it loaded in to a system repair and locked in a loop that wouldnt fix its self. Now I’m doing another wipe and going to return it.

The newly released Microsoft Surface Book 3 replaces the Surface Book 2 with some noteworthy upgrades. My unit comes with a configuration of a 10th generation 1.3 ghz i7 Intel processor, 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM, a 256 gig SSD hard drive, and Nvidia GTX GeForce dedicate graphics processor with 6 gigs of dedicated video. A bright 15 inch “Pixel Sense” detachable monitor with a resolution of 3240 x 2160 pixels rounds out the major features. Microsoft can configure this generation of Surface Book in a number of ways from a 13 to 15 inch monitor, i5 or i7 processors, or up to 32 gigs of RAM and more powerful graphics, so depending on your needs, there will be a variation of this you can configure that’s best for you (at a cost, of course).
Full disclosure: Best Buy reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews. I will always provide my honest opinions on all products reviewed. .
One of the main reasons people get these are for the versatility. The screen (which houses some of the laptop’s guts) can be detached and used like a tablet on it’s own, with it’s own battery supply built in. When used with the Surface Pen (which unfortunately they do NOT include with these units), your creative juices can go wild with the bright, colorful, high-res screen. The backlit keyboard unit has a battery of it’s own as well, and when the two are attached, you get some pretty good battery life as well as much improved graphics power as this is where the graphic card is housed. A note though – a 17 hour possible battery life is quoted in specs, and in reality, I found it to be a bit less than half of that when running the screen at least at 50% brightness and doing “real world” projects and uses. Your mileage may vary depending on how you use it. You can use it as a standard laptop, or detach the screen and re-attach it backwards to use in tent mode or as a tablet with the keyboard attached, or just carry around the screen as a standalone tablet (with less power as the graphic card and one of the batteries are again, housed, in the keyboard section). One minor issue is that with the monitor holding several components inside, it can get a bit warm in use, but it never gets so hot that it’s worrisome. The keyboard and track pad feel rock solid, and the Surface 3 has a nice typing feel to it, and has the ports most need; two USB-3 ports, one USB-C, SD card reader, headphone jack.
Speakers are standard in terms of volume and clarity – nothing outstanding but much better than on lesser machines. The web cam is very good being true HD, and has very good lower light clarity. A “rear” camera (in the upper corner of the lid) is also of good quality if you have need of it. The microphones are clear, though I did find I had to speak up just a bit louder than on some other machines for them to pick me up and react. A magnetic connector on the charger helps prevent accidents if someone or a pet walks by and accidentally pulls the power cord while in use – it just pops free of the machine, preventing it from being dragged off of the table.
Processing power overall is good. The Surface Book 3 breezed through Paint Shop Pro projects even with multiple layers being applied to photos, large resizing of pics, and having several projects open at once. I decided to try to tax the system by using an old Microsoft screen capture program called Expression Encoder – it allows you to take screen captures of video up to 10 minutes in length (free version), and when converting and saving those clips to your computer, can really tax a system. My mid-range desktop will whine and whirrrr (fan) when using it, sounding like it’s near death. It can take several minutes to process even shorter 4-5 minute videos. The Surface Book handled this pretty well. I took some 3-5 minute grabs and encoded them to save, and while the fan did come on and it was still pushing some limits, overall it did a very good job handling this. The i7 processor and dedicated Nvidia graphics worked well together. The machine did get a little warm during the processing, but not “hot”. I don’t think this will give people any issues when using it for video processing and conversions, especially if you configure it with a bit more RAM. 4K video playback went without any hiccups. I wouldn’t give it an award for processing power, but it’s about what I would expect from any laptop with this configuration of hardware.
Because you are dealing with a thin laptop with cooling considerations that a desktop may not have, I think the processor operates at a lower wattage than it’s cousins used in desktops, because while again, the processing power is “good”, a very similarly configured desktop I use at work seemed to work a bit faster as it of course has cooling fans, and more room for air circulation. Not a problem for daily tasks, photo editing, basic video editing, etc. If you want to get more serious, you’ll want to configure a machine with more RAM and higher Graphics. If you will be using this quite a bit in tablet mode, consider the 13 inch option, as while the 15 inch model is great for desk and office work, it’s a bit bulky to use as a tablet – the 13 inch version would be your option if you are in the field, traveling, or holding that screen a lot.
Glitches? Only one so far. You can as with many Windows laptops now, configure your login so that the web cam recognizes your face and speeds up the login process. Twice, I’ve had it do this, yet the web cam will stay ON, along with the on light and red Windows Hello cam light next to it. Trying to go into the camera app to turn it off didn’t work and I’ve had to reboot to reset it correctly. It’s only happened twice but hopefully will be fixed in a firmware/software update at some point.
The Surface Book 3 is not inexpensive. It’s a well spec machine with a bright, beautiful, removable screen, and is built very well, and you do pay for that, along with it’s various special features. In order to justify the price tag, you should be someone who will take advantage of those features. This would necessitate having the Surface Pen, and that’s one of my big gripes – that they don’t include it. The approx. $100 pen is an additional feature, which in my opinion, should be included with EVERY Surface Book configuration. The retail price for my configuration hovers around the $2,300 range. You do get excellent build quality and a premium screen for that price, but in my opinion, I think for this price, the SSD drive should be at least 512 gigs (or even 1 TB?) and again, the Surface Pen should be included. I’ll be greedy, too – an outstanding extra would be a basic protective case you could slip the monitor in when in tablet-only mode to protect it and prop it up while in use (I can dream, can’t I?). Only you can decide if the price is justified for your specific needs and uses, but if it is, you should enjoy the investment. If not and you just need the basic specs, shop around as you can get something without quite all the bells and whistles for a few hundred less.