For the original German translation, click here

After our extensive review of the i5-based Microsoft Surface Laptop, we now move on to examine the more powerful variant, the Microsoft Surface Laptop that is based on the Intel Core i7-7660U. At a first glance, the Surface Laptop i7-7660U appears to be a more capable sibling of the Microsoft Surface Laptop that comes equipped with the Intel Core i5-7200U, only with a premium of 350 Euros (~$406) over the i5 variant with the same SSD capacity and amount of RAM. Had things really been that simple, Notebookcheck would have had much less work to do. But upon closer examination and after new intensive tests, we have found that the devil is, as always, in the details and is invisible to most consumers. When thinking about the Surface Laptop i7, one should keep the following points in mind: Although the Intel Core i7-7660U comes with the more capable Iris Plus Graphics 640 GPU, the i7 cannot reach its full potential due to throttling. Microsoft's new laptop is equipped with a faster SSD from Samsung, instead of the slower SSD from Toshiba that we found inside the i5 variant.

Therefore, in our review, we lay emphasis on the benchmark results in the areas of performance and graphics power, in order to better show the differences. On this occasion, we have also thrown the Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) into the mix, which is equipped with the same Intel Core i7-7660U processor and should be comparable, in terms of CPU power to the Surface Laptop i7. It has been known at least since our review of the Surface Pro (2017) that the Core i7-7660U cannot use all of its power, because after a few minutes of operation performance starts to deteriorate and the clock rate drops to the levels of an Intel Core i7-7500U.You can learn more about this in the “Performance” section.

At first, we will take a look at the available configurations. Unlike the i5 variant with its top SSD capacity of 256 GB, the i7-based laptop provides a larger selection of SSD capacities, offering SSDs with 512 GB and 1 TB of storage space, which are only available in combination with 16 GB of RAM. For this reason, the upper price bracket extends all the way up to a hefty 3099 Euros (~$3606) for the 1 TB version, which comes solely in the “Platinum Grey” color scheme. For those who seek a more reasonably priced i7 variant: The MSRP for the i7 version with a 256 GB SSD and 8 GB of RAM is 1799 Euros (~$2094). A direct price comparison between the i5 and the i7 processor with the same 256 GB SSD and 8 GB of RAM shows that the i7 luxury is going to cost one an extra 350 Euros ($407).

So the question in the room is: Whether or not the i7 processor is worth that extra 350 Euros (~$407). We try to answer that question in the following sections.