MS Surface Book 13" 512GB 2-in-1 Laptop (S&D)


MS Surface Book 13" 512GB 2-in-1 Laptop (S&D)

I’m interested in this. I just checked the MS site, and they appear to be offering the same machine, certified refurbished with a pen and 1 year warranty for $1,499 (6th Gen Intel Core i7, 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM / dGPU, 13.5-inch PixelSense Display touchscreen). That’s quite a difference. Is this really worth $900 less? I’ve purchased lots of refurbished computers in the past and honestly I’ve never been disappointed.

Any personal experience with S&D computers from Woot?

Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples on the CPU.

i7-6600u has only 4802 for a benchmark. That wouldn’t be enough for me personally.

An i7 with only 4 threads? Man, Intel will slap the i7 mark on just about anything these days won’t they?

(traditionally, i3 is supposed to be 2 cores, 2-4 threads, i5 is 2-4 cores, 4 threads, i7 is 4 cores, 8 threads. The 6600U is 2 cores, 4 threads, which is closer in performance to an i5 or i3.)

Oh, and to answer the original question, I have never had problems with buying refurbs from Woot. My Galaxy S7 has some minor cosmetic scratches.

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I have the 15" version and let me tell you the software update situation from MS has been a real sh*t show. Nvidia graphics drivers only getting updated about every 9 months and you’re ONLY allowed drivers from Microsoft. If you’re planning on using this with any of the Adobe apps, especially Premiere or Photoshop, I suggest you google “Surface Book graphics driver issues” before buying.

I bought one of ebay a few weeks ago for about $600. It has the 2GB base graphics card. It is pretty amazing if you like tablet option. I would never spend what they go for new. If you have some crazy specific graphics requirement then you could probably figure out if this would work, overall it will handle 95% of everyday activities. I probably would’ve been fine with the i5 and 8GB ram which you can find for $300. Mine looks brand new. I’m thrilled with it for $600

The I3,I5,I7… nomenclature is mostly an efficiency rating, basically operations/work per clock cycle. So the I7 for a particular generation is going to give the highest performance per clock cycle (and today it even goes higher like I9…). The i7-6600u is designed to be a power efficient chip at 15 watts TDP with a passmark of 4802. For fun, compare that to an I5 desktop chip of the same generation the I5-6600. This chip has a passmark way higher at 7778 BUT its TDP is 65 watts. So per watt of power the I7-6600U 153 passmark points, while the I5 produces only 120 passmark point per watt. In this example the I7 produces about 28% more work per watt. The example of using passmark per watt might not be the most accurate comparison tool, but it gives you a general idea of why some I5s might outperform an I7, but in reality the I7 is the better silicon. Not to mention that there are also other enhancements that I7 chips have that the I5 don’t. In this surface book, you need something that is power efficient, hence this chip makes sense because it’s the best compromise between computing power and battery efficiency for this particular type of laptop of this generation.

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Is this the performance base?

Scratch and dent from Woot means straight up used. I bought a S&D MacBook that I was going to give as a gift and it still had the previous owner’s cover…like the type that’s a sticker that goes over the whole thing.
Will never buy S&D off here again, unless others have had better experiences. Seems like they just get old used laptops and reload the OS fresh and call is S&D.

Here’s a review from Notebookcheck: