Microsoft at its October 2 fall event in New York City, not only announced the Surface Laptop 2, and the Surface Pro 2 tablet, the tech giant also refreshed its Surface Studio high-end all-in-one PC which first debuted about two years ago. Dubbed the Microsoft Surface Studio 2, the new high-end all-in-one PC features the same design as the first generation of the Studio PC, but not without some updated internals including more ports, more power, and an even better display.
Gizchina News of the week
The screen is still a 28-inch touch screen with tilt sensitivity for pen input, 4,096 levels of pressure, improved ink latency, but with a total of 13.5 million pixels, and is supposedly now up to 38 percent brighter, with 22 percent more contrast. The Studio 2 is based on Windows 10 Pro and is ditching the 6th-generation Intel Core processors for the year-old 7th-generation Intel HQ-series CPU coupled with Nvidia Pascal GTX 1060 or GTX 1070 graphics.
The RAM configuration remains virtually unchanged, while the SSD storage has been swapped for up to 2TB of raw SSD space. The new Surface Studio 2 gets a USB-C port, but it is not immediately clear if it supports Thunderbolt 3. It retains the built-in Xbox Wireless support as well as the ability to connect to an Xbox One controller.
The premium Surface Studio 2 is immediately available to pre-order in the US, at a starting of $3,499 (around £2,695). Microsoft is yet to detail availability and pricing outside of the USA.
” not immediately clear if it supports Thunderbolt 3″
This needs to stop…
Why on earth would it need a Thunderbolt 3 connection?
Every article talks about Thunderbolt 3’s importance, and this is misleading users. Thunderbolt 3’s bandwidth is already too low for eGPU and cannot future proof upcoming GPU options.
Unless you think most users are connecting the Surface Studio or any notebook/tablet to a $8,000 storage solution, stop telling people it is necessary.
Thunderbolt 3 is the Firewire of 2018.
If you think eGPU is a reasonable solution – you do realize the 1060 GPU offered is faster than ANY eGPU solution?
For notebooks, users would better off to take the cost of an eGPU and put it into the notebook that has a gaming class GPU – or buy a full desktop PC for gaming in the eGPU price ranges.
Even if you throw a Geforce 2080 in a eGPU case, the Thunderbolt 3 overhead and LACK OF BANDWIDTH will put the performance below what the internal Geforce 1060 or 1070 can provide.
Thunderbolt 3 is too slow for today’s mid-range GPUs as the BUS requirements are higher today than ever before. PCIe 2.x is also too slow. (Especially with Vulkan and DX12 that saturate the bus.)
The ONLY serious case to consider Thunderbolt 3 for the Surface Studio 2, is if the user wants to add a secondary GPU for SMP operations, and that is going to be rare, because even though Windows 10 will and can use both GPUs seamlessly, most games and design/rendering software cannot.