The current main competitiveness of Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 is reflected in 3 aspects: high quality workmanship, excellent performance configuration and long battery life. If you have mobile office needs in the near future, and you are particularly concerned about the three characteristics of workmanship, lightness and battery life, Surface Laptop 5 will be a mobile office device worth buying in the current thin and light notebook market.
Surface Laptop 5 specs and features:
- 13.5/15-inch LCD screen
- 2256×1504 pixels display
- Intel Core i7 1255U CPU
- 8GB/16GB RAM+512GB SSD
- 9-18 hours of battery life
- €1,462 – Check latest price on Amazon Germany (13.5-inch), Amazon Germany (15-inch), Amazon UK (13.5-inch), Amazon UK (15-inch)
Simple design combined with exquisite craftsmanship
From the outside, Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 adopts a minimalist design. There is only a classic Microsoft logo on the A side, and there are no other exaggerated elements, but the body is made of high-quality anodized aluminum metal process, so the texture is quite good. Surface Laptop 5 is available in two different size versions of 13.5 inches and 15 inches. This review is a 13.5-inch product, which is indeed lighter than the 15-inch version. The overall weight is only 1325.3g, and there is no obvious sense of heaviness in the hand.
Since it is a thin and light notebook for office, the interface configuration of Surface Laptop 5 is not very rich. The left side of the fuselage is equipped with a USB-A 3.1 interface, a USB-C interface and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Only one Surface Connect magnetic suction power interface is provided on the right side. Fortunately, this USB-C interface supports the Thunderbolt 4 standard, which can not only connect to a 4K display, but also charge the notebook.
Perhaps in order to ensure the integrity of the keyboard area on the C side, the up and down arrow keys are not made in full size, and the keyboard does not provide fingerprint recognition. Fortunately, Surface Laptop 5 supports the Windows Hello face recognition login function, and users who do not want to enter a password can also log in quickly. The keyboard also provides a backlight function, and the patterns on the keycaps can be seen clearly when used in a dim environment. The operating experience of the touchpad is also very good, and the response speed of clicking and sliding operations is very fast.
Touch Screen
Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 uses a 13.5-inch Sharp LCD touch screen without a narrow bezel design and a resolution of 2256*1504. Since it is a product for office use, it is natural to look at the quality performance of this screen. Although the main needs of a large number of office users are typing work, after all, there are still some users who have needs in professional fields such as photo editing or design. If the performance of the color gamut and color accuracy is not bad, it can be used in emergency in these aspects.
Through the display analysis of SpyderXElite, it can be seen that this screen supports 96% of sRGB color gamut, 71% of Adobe RBG color gamut and 71% of P3 color gamut. The sRGB color gamut shared on the Internet basically meets the needs. In terms of color accuracy, the minimum value of ΔE is 0.81, the maximum value is 8.99, and the average value is 3.31. Friends who want to use Surface Laptop 5 to retouch or color can only dispel this idea, or use it as a tool mainly responsible for typing.
It should be noted that this screen also supports 10-point touch operation, but since it does not support 360° screen flip, it cannot be used as a Windows tablet. In terms of daily office work, keyboard + mouse is obviously more efficient than touch screen operation. In addition, there is a 720P resolution camera above the screen, which is convenient for users to communicate with others in online meetings or distance education. It’s just a pity that the configuration with 1080P resolution is not used, and the camera has no physical hidden design, and can only be set in the privacy call permission of the Windows system.
Performance Testing
After the introduction of the appearance, let’s take a look at the performance configuration of Surface Laptop 5. The CPU is Intel Core i7 1255U, 10nm process technology, 10core 12thread. 10core is 2 performance cores and 8 energy efficiency cores, which belong to high-end processors in the field of thin and light notebooks. The single-core score of CPU-Z is 520.1, the multi-core score is 3474.3, and the running score in CineBench R23 is 1135pts for single-core and 7796pts for multi-core.
The notebook is not equipped with a discrete graphics card, and the computing processor for graphics processing has to rely on the Intel Xe Graphics core graphics card equipped with the i7 1255U processor. It has 96 execution units, a base frequency of 300MHz, and an acceleration frequency of 1400MHz. It can realize 8K video content output, and has passed Intel’s EVO official certification.
In terms of storage configuration, Surface Laptop 5 is equipped with 2 memory sticks. In AIDA64’s memory stick performance test, the read speed of single-channel 8GB memory is 59598MB/s, the write speed is 63348MB/s, and the memory copy speed is 68650MB/s. The hard disk is equipped with a 512GB SSD, and the CrystalDiskMark test shows that its maximum read speed is 3563.17MB/s, and its write speed is 2479.32MB/s.
Battery Life
Since the main direction of thin and light notebooks is battery life rather than extreme performance, we will focus on the office performance, battery life and single energy consumption performance of Surface Laptop 5. First of all, in the comprehensive performance test of PCMark 10, Surface Laptop 5 scored 8209 in basic, 5425 in productivity, 4771 in digital content creation, and 4278 in total. This result shows that the performance can meet the needs of users in daily office use.
The official promotion of Surface Laptop 5 can last up to 18 hours of battery life, but 18 hours is certainly not the environment most workers use daily. Relatively speaking, the battery life test results of PCMark 10 are more meaningful. The backlit keyboard will have a certain impact on the battery life of the notebook. Therefore, in the endurance test environment, we turned off the keyboard backlight function of the notebook, set the screen brightness at 70%, and turned off the power saving mode of the computer. In this state, it takes 9 hours and 29 minutes for the laptop to go from 100% to 0%, and there is no problem with a day of high-intensity office work.
Let’s take a look at the individual performance test results. Under the 30-minute test, the temperature of the WSAD button area commonly used on the C side of the notebook is 46.3°C, and the middle area is also obviously heated. The temperature of the CPU is controlled at around 60°C, and the power consumption is basically maintained within 15W. The scheduling strategy can be said to be quite conservative. Of course, as an office notebook, battery life is much more important than performance, which is also understandable.
It is worth mentioning that the Surface Connect power interface is not very magnetic. I’ve had a few accidental disconnects while charging with the Surface Connect port. When you are too focused on your work, you may be surprised by the sudden low battery prompt, so I will use the USB-C interface for charging without an external monitor. Bringing a Type-C cable and a GaN charger when you go out to work can solve the battery life problem of mobile phones and notebooks, and it is much more convenient to use than the standard charger.
Finally, let’s talk about the audio-visual experience of Microsoft Surface Laptop 5. What surprised me is that its external sound quality is very good, and it supports Dolby Atmos. And thanks to the excellent loudspeaker effect, you can clearly hear the content of the other party during the communication process of the remote meeting, thus improving the efficiency of remote meeting communication in terms of sound.
Check Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 price:
- Check latest price on Amazon Germany (13.5-inch)
- Check latest price on Amazon Germany (15-inch)
- Check latest price on Amazon UK (13.5-inch)
- Check latest price on Amazon UK (15-inch)