Microsoft has revealed the Surface Book, their first laptop. Promoted as a Mac Book killer, it already has an edge over Apple’s premier laptop – it can actually play your favorite games.
The 13 inch convertible eschews the Touch and Type Covers of Surface tablets for a machined magnesium backlit keyboard, with a similarly unique hinge that elevates viewing angles. You can separate the Surface to use independently, or reconnect it the other way as a tablet stand.
The Surface Book comes with a range of spec options, but here’s what you can get for a gaming capable unit:
· sixth generation Intel Core i5 or I 7 processor
· 8 or 16 GB RAM
· Nvidia Maxwell GeForce GPU, with 16GB GDDR 5 high speed memory
· 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB SSD
Now, regarding the Nvidia GPU, both Microsoft and Nvidia have been coy about just how powerful it actually is. It seems the GPU is completely unique to the device, and designed for productivity compute, rather than 3D graphics compute. What this means is it was designed to work with Illustrator and Lightroom, but may not necessarily be ready to play the most demanding games, like Arma 3 or Metro Last Light.
If this proves to be true, the laptop still stands to benefit from bespoke architecture, DirectX 12 and Windows 10 performance boosts, and most importantly, the sheer volume of Windows games. While Windows 10 has its own app store, most gamers will likely get their Steam accounts running on the system, which is still overwhelmingly populated by Windows games.
You can watch the trailer for the Surface Pro above and preorder it here, starting at $ 1,499.
