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

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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Superb

  • Incentivized
  • Verified Purchaser
  • My Best Buy® Member
  • Owned for 1 week

  I am a case manager/ service coordinator for families with children with special needs. I needed a multi functional laptop that can handle a variety of tasks and run smoothly whether on the go or at the desk. I love that I can use this as a typical laptop but also as a tablet and even a detached tablet. The detached tablet is very light weight and still gives me the option of a keyboard which is nice. Most of my job is basically logging in notes to state portal reporting systems and use of Microsoft Office. I was told I was buying a very high end computer for what I need but it runs so smoothly. Love how office seems to be the best version I've seen on this Book. I was able to link to my phone and printer easily. I'm working on downloading fax app which I really wanted and needed for work, and was excited about rear camera for the purposes of easy scanning. I have loved the ease of doing what I need to do and multitask on a larger screen with ease. I do love the windows 10 on here as well and ability to manipulate documents with the stylus, which is also very easy to get accustomed to from a little use. I've even played around with some of the functions all the artists out there love and have been creative with my records designing my own forms, and have loved using the stylus. The art professionals will love the graphics. The Book 3 was actually recommended to me by a family I work with who are in the arts and have the Book 2 and absolutely have loved transforming their hard copies to digital with beautiful graphics. Something we both found we love about the Books, runs quiet and keeps cool to the touch. Battery life for me has been about a workday; I haven't tested it to the point of completely dead. For the artist with the 2 he remarked about 4-5 hours. I am truly happy with my purchase and feel like I made a great decision. It also helped that I was able to price match and given discount.

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  Posted 5 years ago by eiProfessional

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Very good laptop with a very premium price tag...

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  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.

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  Posted 5 years ago by AtlantaGreg

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Faster, more powerful, and better than ever

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  ==================================================== 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. ==================================================== 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: =================================================== 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: =========================================== - 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: ========================================= 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.

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  Posted 5 years ago by Solrak