Though a visual delight, the new Surface Book isn't doing anything to buck the trend of notorious hardware headaches that has become the norm across the Surface lineup.

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When Microsoft unveiled the Surface Book 2 in October, the press was enamored by its sleek looks and multi-mode features that appeared to check all the right boxes over the original 2015 Surface Book. From our point of view, however, we had immediate reservations about how Microsoft was able to cram a non-Max-Q GTX 1050 and GTX 1060 into such a thin form factor detachable to begin with without some behind-the-scenes drawbacks.

Now that systems are finally shipping to consumers, we've had a chance to play around with our own 13.5-inch unit and have been documenting our findings on our preview page here. As it turns out, Microsoft had to cut some deep corners in order to fit all that power under the hood.

First, our initial CPU stress tests confirm that the quad-core i7-8650U CPU throttles heavily following just a single run of CineBench R15 Multi-Thread as shown by our graph below. The Kaby Lake-R processor scores a respectable 675 points on its initial run only to nosedive to 503 points by the fourth loop to represent a performance drop of just over 25 percent. For comparison's sake, the dual-core i5-7300HQ commonly found on most entry-level gaming notebooks is just slightly faster with an average score of 515 points despite having half the parallel threads as the i7-8650U. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we noted similar behavior on the recent Surface Pro 5 i7-7660U tablet as well.