12 PCWorld JUNE 2020NEWS MICROSOFT UNVEILS NEW SURFACE LINEUP
premium, but not too premium, experience.
Both the 13.5-inch and 15-inch Surface Book
3’s are based on Intel’s recent Ice Lake
10th-gen chips, both well-regarded mobile
processors with integrated graphics (though
AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 chips [go.
pcworld.com/rzm4] look even better).
Because the cheapest Core i5 Surface Book 3
doesn’t use a dedicated GPU, it relies on Ice
Lake’s graphics—meaning that Microsoft’s
couldn’t go with the faster, CPU-only Comet
Lake alternative (go.pcworld.com/clal).
Otherwise, the Core i5-1035G7 and Core
i7-1065G7 options will be married to either
an Nvidia GTX 1650 (Max-Q) or GTX 1660 Ti
(Max-Q). At the high end, there will also be
Nvidia Quadro RTX GPU options, too, for
those seeking more traditional workstation-
like performance. So yes, there will be
support for ray tracing—even if the GPU is
designed for creation, not gaming, and is a
slower Max-Q option at that. It gets a little
crazier in memory
and storage: up to
32GB LPDDR4X
memory, and a 2TB
SSD option for
United States
customers.
A number of
things have
remained
unchanged, for
better or worse.for every person, every work style and every
location, scaling from the most portable to the
most performant,” Panos Panay, chief product
officer of Windows + Devices, and Robin Seiler,
corporate vice president of devices for
Microsoft, said in a statement. The two said their
goal was “to give you devices that can switch
context as quickly as you do to take you from
work to play to everything in between.”SURFACE BOOK 3
Microsoft’s Surface Book has always been the
company’s flagship 2-in-1, combining the
power of a workstation with a unique design
that marries a tablet with a traditional
clamshell form factor. The Surface Book 3
won’t be cheap: Prices will start at $1,599.
The Surface Book 3 will ship May 21, in both
the 13.5-inch and 15-inch form factors of its
predecessor, the Surface Book 2 (go.
pcworld.com/sbk2).
For that price, Microsoft’s offering aThe Surface Book lineup is
unique: there’s currently
no other detachable 2-in-
in the industry. The design
allows for dual batteries as
well as a discrete GPU.