Today Microsoft had a pretty major set of unveilings, including the one of the Surface Book 3, a more powerful laptop, that still doesn’t have a Thunderbolt 3 port. It does bring up to 32 GB of RAM and NVIDIA RTX graphics, though. We have details and the price below.
The new and improved Microsoft laptop comes in two diagonal versions: 13.5 inches and 15 inches. It also comes with up to 32 GB of RAM and your choice of GeForce GTX or RTX graphics. There’s no Thunderbolt 3 port here, as Microsoft has only upgraded the USB-C port from USB 3.1 Gen 1 to Gen 2. Keep in mind that this product upgrade was long overdue, since the Surface Book 2 was unveiled back in October 2017 and only slightly upgraded in 2019.
The new models have Intel 10th Gen U Series processors, storage going upt o 1 TB for the 13.5 incher and 2 TB for the 15 incher. Of course, some people would have liked to see an AMD CPU on board, but you don’t always get what you hope for. The 15W U Series CPU also sounds rather modest for a premium laptop. That does come with a silver lining: up to 15.5 or 17.5 hours of typical device usage on the 13 inch and 15 inch models respectively.
The 13.5 inch laptop can be configured with Iris Plus or NVIDIA GTX 1650 Max-Q GPUs and the 15 incher starts off with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and also adds a Quadro card option. If you want ray tracing there’s the Quadro RTX 3000 available. There are 2 USB-A ports here, one USB-C, UHS-II SD card reader and Surface Connect port.
Microsoft Surface Book 3 will be available from May 21st, priced at $1600 and up. The smaller model with GTX 1650 is $1999 and ht ebigger unit with GTX 1660 Ti is $2299.
