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Comment by madjam002 | Hacker News Reader

I have a Surface Book 2 15” with the max specs and it is not worth the price to me. Compared to the new MacBooks I much prefer the Surface Book’s ergonomics and keyboard, but the performance is just too unreliable, it frequently thermal throttles and also randomly slows down to a snails pace. Plus now the back has been getting unusually warm even when idling on both my Windows 10 and Linux dual boot, it never used to do that. I’ve only had it for 13 months and it’s already showing its age.

I don’t understand how my desktop i5 4690k with an old SATA SSD is SO much faster than this laptop that has an 8th gen i7 8650u, DDR4, NVMe SSD, even for basic tasks like having more than 20 browser tabs open and just surfing the web.

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> I don’t understand how my desktop i5 4690k with an old SATA SSD is SO much faster than this laptop that has an 8th gen i7 8650u, DDR4, NVMe SSD, even for basic tasks like having more than 20 browser tabs open and just surfing the web.

The surface book is in a strange bind. the 8650 is much much weaker than your 4690k and has very little thermal room to play with. The thermals are particularly tricky because the CPU lives in the tablet portion; meaning there is a tension between cooling it properly, providing a touch screen and keeping it thin and light enough to not have awkward weight distribution.

Yup that's what I've found, unfortunately for me I realised this after purchasing it. It's odd that it's marketed as a high end performance laptop whereas it's more comparable to a low-mid range desktop.

Just from the power envelope (88W for the desktop vs 15 for the 8650u in the surface book 2, assuming it's configured to that setting -- edit: it is) the desktop part would be 80% faster, if all things were equal.

Now all things aren't equal. The mobile chip is going to be thermally limited, while a desktop chip has a huge heatsink and fan to it's service, and a lot of room to be "just warm". Despite whatever architecture improvements (and take those with a grain of salt, remember that skylake and its descendants are the most affected by the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations) you still have physics against you and the desktop part should be 50% faster simply because it can keep the turbos up and higher frequencies than a TDP-restrained mobile processor.

It'd seem that, today, only the AMD Renoirs are capable of pulling "desktop-like performance on a mobile budget". Let's hope AMD keeps bringing good chips out, and Intel wakes up and stands with something decent, unlike what they've been doing so far.

-- edit:

Since I was already editing: of course a Ryzen whatever is going to be also TDP-limited compared against other Ryzens, but AMD isn't really making the mobile parts completely equivalent to the desktop parts. So yes, calling a Renoir "desktop performance" is massively ignoring AMD "super powerful" desktop chips.

More reason to hope Intel gets up and starts giving a fight here. We need competition, otherwise AMD will turn the tables and will get back to a stagnant situation.

> It's odd that it's marketed as a high end performance laptop whereas it's more comparable to a low-mid range desktop.

That's true of nearly all laptops except maybe bulky gaming laptops. The thermal and power limits of laptops mean that they're not really "high performance", they're just high performance for a laptop.

I totally agree, I have the 13.5" and suffer from the same problem. MS Teams warns me that my audio quality will degrade because of the CPU load - on a machine that is essentially idling. Sometimes it takes tens of seconds to react to clicks (we're talking Outlook, not Paraview) when I'm in a conference etc.

Outlook can also take a second to react to a click on a high end PC. It feels terrible no matter what. You always have to bring an extra bucket of patience when doing anything with it.

To fix or at least improve some of the thermal throttle issues you could use an USB fan that's aimed at the CPU area, and/or use Intel XTU to undervolt the CPU (on my SB2 around -120mv is very stable, but varies a lot from CPU), disabling Turbo Short Boost helps a bit too. I think, as others have mentioned, the thermal issues are due to having the CPU and display as one part, the airflow is limited but display also produces some heat compared to normal laptops.

Honestly, that sounds faulty – I had a SB2 with similar symptoms and it generally means the thermal paste or something is bad. I was able to return mine for a full replacement, no questions asked.

I’ve had mine longer than the 12 month warranty though

Disable Anti Virus and Firewall. Helps a bit.

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