Surface Book Discussion Thread

These are similar to an NVIDIA GT 650M/ GT750M.

 

Yea, I wonder if the separate thermal headroom (which is not an insignificant factor) is going to be the main performance advantage it has over iris graphics.

 

That's interesting - other than it is a beautiful piece of hardware with tablet and laptop - totally technolust-worthy, what will this have over the performance of the 2014-2015 Dell XPS 15 with quad core i7 and GT750 GPU with 2gb video ram - which is readily available as a Dell refurb with one year warranty for under $1500.

Am I missing something here...I know its not fair to compare a brand new, super hot tabtop (or is it a laplet because its a laptop first) to a year old refurb, but $1700 savings is 1700...

 

Performance wise... Nothing, but then again that should never have been expected. I can put a budget desktop together that would run circles around the SB for a few hundred bucks.

 

That's true, but I think those chips used the older SMX CUDA cores. NVIDIA claimed that 128 Maxwell CUDA cores (SMM) has 90% the performance of an older 192 Kepler CUDA cores (SMX).

Thus, it may be more similar to the NVIDIA GeForce 930M/840M. The 930M is being produced both with DDR3 and GDDR5. And the 930M has a 25W TDP, which fits with the extra 29 watts in the special power adapter of the dGPU SKUs. And the 930M has DX12 support with DX11 feature-level, also shown by the leak above.

That GDDR5 upgrade is no joke: we're looking at 40% to 70% faster performance compared to DDR3. Why was only 1GB included? I think space & power, actually. From the discussions on HBM, VRAM is kind of big and doesn't use an insignificant amount of power.

 

The people here wont understand our pain...we already have a base MSRP markup compared to the States, then we pay up the nose on any form of shipping, and then now we have an exchange rate tax of +33%. Great times, eh?

I tell ya, if I didn't love this country so much...

This table from the reddit thread gives the best estimation of the gpu prowess so far:

 

The pen and size reduction would be the two things in the Surface Book's corner. Though honestly, I think the Vaio Z Canvas is the closer competitor since it has the same quad core i7 and a host of ports like the Dell.

 

OK, but none of those match. We need 384 cores with GDDR5 in roughly 30W.

The 950M and 960M are pipe dreams. Those are 50-60W TDPs. The dGPU adapter only gives an extra 29W.

The only chip with 384 cores with GDDR5 is the 930M. And, interestingly, it's got a 30W TDP.

That's my prediction and I'll put money on it. (Wait, I meant to delete this sentence. But, it's already out there now. Ugh, curse my arrogance!)

 

OK all you graphics Gurus - what exactly are we getting in the SB anyway? I read that reddit thread, and they all speculated iti would be marginally better than the Iris graphics in the SPro 4...

 

So it's looking like a custom GT 930M with GDDR5 and a clock speed in-between the 940M and 950M.

In terms of raw performance, my prediction is it will be roughly on par with the 940M in the TPY14 / Yoga 3.

The top end SP4 i7-6650U with Iris 540, according to notebookcheck's estimates, is roughly equal to a 920M.

So going by 3DMark11 scores, the SB would be ~2300 and the i7 SP4 ~1800. So we are looking at about 25% more raw graphics power, plus the advantages of Nvidia driver optimizations for games and CUDA support for Adobe/CAD.

Still a significant upgrade, in my opinion.