As a recap, Microsoft has outfitted the laptop with an Nvidia 965M – up from the previous custom 940M – which should provide “two times” the graphics performance. Meanwhile a 30% larger battery is said to provide a boost from a max of 12 to 16 hours of use.

The innards of the new base

That should give the Surface Book some crazy numbers for its category. This is a laptop that is only slightly larger and negligibly heavier than the current (about-to-be-replaced) MacBook Pro.

The improved specs come at only a tiny expense in weight, at 3.63 lb vs 3.48 for the old GPU model, 0r 3.34 for the one with integrated graphics. The base is also a bit thicker, but the laptop remains the same size when closed – the base largely fills up a chunk of the gap at the hinge of the older Surface Book.

The obvious question for anyone who cares about graphics performance in the first place: Why didn’t Microsoft go with one of Nvidia’s new 1000-series cards, with the much improved Pascal architecture?

Microsoft basically said “we ran out of time.” The company had certain performance goals that were met with the 965M, and implementing something like a 1060 – or even the lower end 1050, which is still officially compatible with Oculus’ new minimum VR specs – didn’t fit the company’s timeline.

Fair enough, I suppose. Still, certified VR gaming would have been very much welcome. Perhaps you can maybe eke out playable performance from the 965M with some tweaking, but benchmarks show the card performs a fair bit worse than the minimum of a desktop class 960 recommended for Oculus’ VR platform.