Microsoft Surface Book?

Was curious if anyone had any initial thoughts on the recently announced Microsoft Surface Book laptop? Looks like a pretty promising machine with all the benefits of a touch device with beefier specs. Wondering how this might work with TouchDesigner? Definitely interested in one myself.

microsoft.com/surface/en-us … rface-book

I was so close to getting a Surface. I’m glad I didn’t because they are changing so fast. The Book does look nice. I’ll have to see how feels with it in my hands one of these days I venture to the mall.

NVIDIA GeForce GPU with 1GB GDDR5

Not bad for a little laptop/tablet. 13" is a nice size for me, just a bit larger than a letter.
I would suggest having a specific thing/chore for it to do and do often. They buy it, test it and return if you’re not happy. Maybe get them to void a restock fee if they can’t answer your performance questions or you could talk them into installing Touch Designer and bringing a Kinect V2 or something.

Apparently the nvidia chip is a custom 940M chip, which isn’t very fast. It’s definitely better than nothing, but at that price point…it’s pretty rough. You’d hope for at least a 960M or something along those lines.

Also the worrying thing is that because its a custom chip, it may not be able to take straight updates from nvidia, as some early reports suggest it doesn’t even have Geforce Experience on the surface book (which according to nvidia, will soon be the only way you can upgrade the drivers on geforce cards). There’s talk that Microsoft will be in charge of updating the graphics driver for the surface book chip through Windows Update.

I was also eyeing the surface book heavily, but am a bit disappointed with the specs considering the cost of the machine. Instead of going to grab one of these when they come out:

aorus.com/Product/Features/X3%20Plus%20v5

BOOOO!

Yahhh!
Nice laptop. Can’t believe they packed that all in there. Notice you can only select SSD drives. Not enough room for a classic drive? Venting reminds me of my Asus 17" ROG.
And it’s only 4lbs! (without battery?)
Let us know how you like it for sure! It would be great to have a Surface Pro be this powerful.

I don’t need spinning drives much these days so I opted for that, only slightly bigger screen and you can get this with a spinner in it.

originpc.com/workstation/la … o15-s-pro/

And I believe the 4lbs is all in, battery and all.

One thing worth noting with the Surface Book is that the GPU is in the keyboard half of the creature so, if you want to do virtual window-style augmented reality etc., you have to keep the keyboard attached. I’ll try to install touch on one if my employers will let me near it.

Rod.

I have my hands on a Surface Book through my employer.

I have not put it thorugh its paces yet, so please suggest test I can to to see how it bears up. For example, I’d really like to know whether it starts throttling once it warms up and how to keep things cool. I have the model with the nvidia card inside, 16Gb system RAM and 500Gb SSD.

generally, it’s a lovely machine (a few weird quirks aside) but the insanely high resolution of the screen make Touch almost unusable for me without having a pair of reading glasses on hand at all times.
IMG_20160113_smaller4.jpg

(That’s my pinky finger folks!)

IS there a way to fix this that I have missed? the uioptions trick helps with the parameters but messes other things up.

Rod.

just updating a bit after playing with it more.

I definitely think that there should be settings to get menus a bit bigger to cope with the new small but crazy hi-rez latop/tablet screens. for Win 10 users with this problem, don’t forget that <+/=> combination runs the zoom feature on the surface (you might have to first enable Magnifier in accessibility settings), and ↔ zooms you back out. There are several other shortcuts for working with the magnifier too:
[b][url]http://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-magnifier-windows-10[/url][/b]

Having the Nvidia card in the keyboard half of the machine has pros and cons…

It means I can’t have the graphics power in tablet mode without the keyboard attached. It is possible to attach it reversed, but that obscures the rear camera that I want to use for augmented reality stuff (I’m thinking about making a small periscope?).

However, it also means that the CPU and the GPU are not in the same airspace so the GPU keeps relatively cool and would respond to one of those cooling fan pads underneath if needed.

The Intel HD graphics let me run Touch happily without the Nvidia/keyboard part attached.

because extra batteries are in the keyboard too, running touch with just the screen will run the battery down pretty fast.

I’m enjoying it so far but have not really put it through its paces.

Once again, I’m happy to do any tests with people’s .toes on the thing to test for suitability for particular tasks. :slight_smile:

Rod.

Have you tried dragging the little slider to the right in the Display section of the settings app in Win10? also if you click advanced twice (yes more layers of control panel plz) you can click “set a custom scaling level (not recommended)” and change that to see if it affects TD, which it might not since it’s UI is all done on the GPU, right?

Also you can just set your internal display to a lower resolution and deal with fuzzy pixel interpolation. Or does the Book not let you do that (or any of that?)

Also I’m curious how TD handles you removing the keyboard while it’s using (especially heavily) the NVidia GPU in the keyboard. I know Windows is built to gracefully switch to the integrated intel GPU but I’ve read that some GPU heavy programs (games) will just “gracefully crash” if you do that to them.

I’ve certainly been eyeing the Surface Book with GPU keyboard for a while… Don’t praise it too much, my wallet can’t handle that right now.

Just addressing some of Peeet’s questions…

I’ll mess with the custom sizing but I suspect it won’t help in touch, as you mentioned.

Touch works fine without the separate GPU (without the keyboard), but obviously limited and steams through the battery pretty fast.

when using Touch, sometimes it lets me detach the screen on-the-fly, but usually, it locks the detaching mechanism to prevent it happening.

about 30% of the time, it crashes on detaching anyway, so I tend to shutdown or hibernate if anything important is going on.

Like TD crashes 30% of the time you detach while it’s running? Or the COMPUTER (windows) just crashes on the whole 30% of the time you are using it regardless of what program is running? The second one would be disappointing, but not surprising as I have a couple Surfaces and they seem to have fits of crashing when the keyboard gets removed or snapped on regardless of how many firmware updates I’ve seen get installed. Makes that goofy commercial where people are having a keyboard snappin’ orgy just look all that more ridiculous and unrealistic. youtube.com/watch?v=iB5txqIl8jQ

I imagine the first because it probably doesn’t handle the GPU shuffling very well, since 1 gpu is in keyboard, when you detach, graphics processes will have to get handed off to the gpu in the screen.

Sorry for the late reply. it seems to happen without Touch running as well.

I’ll try to do more rigorous testing but I’m held back by the parameter box and the menus being too small to read because of the 3000x2000 13" screen. >:|

R: the commercial. Eeek! Cannot be unseen!

Nobody invites me to keyboard-snapping orgies. I guess Australia isn’t the wild place it once was… or I’m just getting old…

Old post so you probably figured this out but…

This is the same for all UHD screen like Surface Pro, Macbook Retina, Razor etc in Windows. Please reduce your resolution to 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 (depending on your aspect ratio) and it will be fine. This is done in the Windows>Display Settings>Advanced options.

Soooo I got a Surface Book and it’s actually a relatively nice TD machine.

The screen won’t let you detach (it’s software controlled, which is bad in so many other ways but not this one) while anything that needs the graphics card is running.

I found a registry hack that allows me to set to a resolution of 1496x1000 (4 pixels shy of exactly half the native resolution. You can’t tell) and that’s a very reasonable size of text and buttons to use. blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dancha … solutions/

I still regularly get hot bag syndrome or "black screen of death"s which is where the computer just doesn’t wake from sleep, despite all the MS patches and stuff. Also occasionally the pen and touchscreen stop responding, and there are other issues I have with Windows 10, but all in all, a net positive experience.

Nice, thanks for the info. Still interested in these for all kinds of uses. Hoping one day they make some kind of docking station you could plug it into with some larger graphics cards or something. Appreciate the update!