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Microsoft launches less expensive flagship Surface Book without an Nvidia GPU

Microsoft has trimmed the price on its highest-end Surface Book flagships by ditching the discrete GPU, but its Core i5 hardware is now the same price whether you buy a GPU or not.
By Joel Hruska
sURFACEBook

Microsoft's Surface Book has been an intriguing foray into laptops since the company first launched it back in 2015. The November 2016 update didn't really change much, beyond adding a GTX 965M option to the dock (Microsoft calls this its "Performance Base.") Now, Microsoft has tweaked its SKUs and, in the process, given its top-end systems a modest price cut.

Up to now, Microsoft has offered a range of Core i5 and i7 SKUs. While all Surface Books come with a keyboard, Microsoft's highest-end models have all shipped with a discrete GPU. Now you can buy a Surface Book Core i7 with 16GB of RAM for $2,999(Opens in a new window) (sans dGPU) or with the discrete GPU for $3,199.

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Weirdly enough, the $200 discount from leaving the GPU off isn't the same for every model. The Core i5 with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD is listing at $1,699 whether you get the dGPU or not.

Microsoft's Surface Book pricing has never made much sense, given that the company has no problem charging $600 for an extra 8GB of RAM and 256GB of additional SSD storage. Is there an advantage to opting for the flagship $2,999 system over the Nvidia-equipped $3,199 flavor? Yes -- but it's a fairly specific benefit.

Without a discrete GPU, the Surface Book is likely to get moderately better battery life and will run a bit cooler. Nvidia's Optimus technology should mitigate these issues in a GeForce-equipped system by routing workloads to the more power-efficient integrated graphics whenever possible, but pushing all workloads through the integrated GPU will save on some battery life. Of course, it also comes with a substantial downgrade to the hardware's GPU performance.

If you've got $3,000 to drop on a computer I'd get the GTX 965M anyway, since money is apparently little object. But if you need a system with absolutely max battery life, the non-dGPU version of the top-end Surface Book is a good place to get it -- assuming Microsoft has worked out all the hardware issues by now.

Microsoft claims the Surface Book without a dGPU can last up to 12 hours on battery, but as Hot Hardware points out(Opens in a new window), Microsoft previously claimed it could offer up to 16 hours of battery life on a system with the Performance Base. Then again, Microsoft's own spec sheets offer conflicting information on this issue, with some documents citing a 16-hour battery life for the Surface Book with Performance Base, while other places on the same page refer to a 12-hour video playback life based on tests conducted in 2015 with a Core i5 processor.

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