Microsoft’s Surface line has long served as a guiding light for other quality standards. laptops and (especially) 2-in-1 manufacturers should look. With the Surface Laptop 5, it feels like Microsoft has spun on its axis, creating a machine that sees itself as a Dell XPS competitor and with a more affordable design than the base. Chromebooks. It’s a strange area for Microsoft to be in, especially when their prices are at the upper end of the market.
The Surface Laptop 5 series starts at $999 for a model with a 13.5-inch display, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an Intel Core i5-1235U processor. For a model with a Core i7-1255U, 32GB of RAM and a 512GB storage drive ($200 more than the comparable Dell XPS 13 with 1TB storage drive), that goes up to $1,699. The 15-inch model only ships with the high-end Core i7 processor and ranges from $1,299 for the 8GB+256GB model to $2,399 for the 32GB+1TB model and is once again very close to the fire that is Dell’s XPS 15. . The XPS 15 series also transitions to higher-performance H-Series variants for U-series processors and may include custom graphics while staying below Microsoft prices.
Let’s take a closer look and see what Microsoft has really put on the table.
Surface Laptop 5 – Design and Features
The Surface Laptop 5 feels well built, with a tough aluminum construction that doesn’t give it much. There’s little in the way of style to design, though. Any way you look at it, it’s a large, flat slab of gray-on-gray metal – even looking from above, below, and into the keyboard dock, you’ll find large examples of bare aluminum. Do not try anything interesting with the form. The corners have a large radius and the base tapers slightly towards the front edge, but that’s it.
Just below the display hinge is the vent along the rear edge of the base. The speakers also go completely under the radar, hiding in the hinge area. The design should make it harder to accidentally choke cooling systems in some common situations, like placing the laptop on a pillow or sofa, but it’s still a lot easier to do than on a Zenbook 14 OLED or similar laptop. Ventilation from the side or from the top.
When the laptop is opened, the Surface Laptop 5 fully reveals its blandness. It just wastes tons of space. The trackpad is quite large, measuring around 4.5 x 3 inches, but only slightly larger than that found on the Dell XPS 13, a much smaller laptop, and even lags behind the touchpads on the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED and MacBook. Also smaller laptops Pro 14 inch. By the way, there is a ton of free space around it.
Microsoft also went with the simplest keyboard layout. While some compact laptops may be excused to go with only the essentials as there is no room for more keys, the Surface Laptop 5 has more than an inch and a half on either side of the keyboard to spare. Functions like a column for Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down, or perhaps a numpad are compressed. Instead, just more free space. All this space makes for an uncomfortable placement of keys as well. The keyboard starts incredibly far from the chassis, which can lead to the soft texture of the wrists resting on the edge of the laptop instead of the palm resting on the sides of the trackpad.
Pressing the keys feels a bit tedious, it just doesn’t have the same kind of pop that some other devices offer. It’s still easy to type for quick text input, but doesn’t feel as fun to use as the ZenBook 14 OLED’s keyboard. Similarly, the trackpad isn’t particularly eye-catching and is on the verge of going bad. It’s not uniformly depressing (to be fair, almost none do), and the result is an inconsistent feeling.
With 0.4-inch bezels on the sides and top and more than a half-inch bezel on the bottom, the screen is even more guilty. This not only makes the screen area look incredibly old, but also makes the laptop larger than it needs to be. The diagonal of the bezel is 16.25 inches, but it only offers a 15.0-inch display (not the 15.6-inch you might be used to seeing when you encounter a 15-inch laptop). For comparison, the Dell XPS 13 Plus only has a 0.1-inch bezel around its screen. At least Microsoft continues to add a Windows Hello facial recognition sensor to the top bezel… but Dell has also done it in half the space.
The Surface Laptop 5’s display has followed the 3:2 aspect ratio that Microsoft has been pushing for recently, giving it extra vertical screen space that’s handy for documents and the like. It also achieves a sharp resolution of 2,496 x 1,664 with touch and stylus support, but the clamshell laptop design isn’t well suited for great touch or stylus experiences.
The screen is a bright one that can reach up to 420 nits for HDR content and keep it at around 392 nits for non-HDR content. It can do this alongside a fairly dim black level as low as 0.32 nits, providing a slightly better contrast ratio than you’d usually see on an IPS display. While the screen supports Dolby Vision IQ, a version of Dolby Vision that takes ambient light into account and optimizes the picture, the laptop doesn’t appear to have system-wide HDR support. The problem here is that not all services recognize the laptop as HDR capable like YouTube. While the display will manage to put on a great show with bright highlights and vibrant colors, it would probably have better (if not more accurate) visuals if it were actually receiving HDR metadata. As good as it is, I can’t help but return to the DisplayHDR 600 True Black-certified panel of the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED, which simultaneously offers brighter highlights and significantly darker blacks in a much lower-cost laptop from Microsoft.
The screen is also held back a bit by its movement. All that’s available here is 60Hz (or 59Hz to be more accurate), while last year’s Surface Pro 8 saw Microsoft bump it up to 120Hz to provide extra smooth motion, which can be quite nice when navigating content, but that feature isn’t available here.
At least the speakers are somewhat noteworthy. They deliver punchy, clear audio that’s great for listening to narrated content because it sounds so good. It manages to stay clear even during intense music playback, where other laptop speaker systems can be prone to crunch and sound more like a racket than music. There’s even a modest stereo separation.
Despite its large size, the Surface Laptop 5 takes cues from other ultrabooks by offering a truly lackluster port selection. The left side of the laptop has one USB-A 3.1 port, one USB-C 4.0 / Thunderbolt 4 port and a headphone jack. Meanwhile, on the right is Microsoft’s proprietary Surface Connect port for charging and dedicated docks only. There’s certainly plenty of room for more ports, but that would go against the laptop’s seemingly dead space theme. At least the USB-C port supports charging, so you don’t have to rely on the Surface Connect port.
Surface Laptop 5 – Software
As you’d expect from a Microsoft product, the Surface Laptop 5 comes pure, unmodified Windows 11. There are no special embellishments or extra software packages to make the Surface Laptop 5 experience unique, and this might be the best. Many manufacturers use software that does not always serve the user, and may sometimes offer settings that conflict with operating system-level settings.
Surface Laptop 5 – Gaming and performance
The Surface Laptop 5 wasn’t built to be a performance beast. It would be nice to see a little more impact, but this laptop goes for a marathon rather than a sprint. Its large size makes me think it might be packed with a large battery, but Microsoft only uses a 47Wh battery, which is smaller than the 50Wh battery found in the compact Dell XPS 13. The true battery champion is Microsoft’s choice. U-Series processor that doesn’t always ask for too much power from Intel. In PCMark10’s battery test, the Surface Laptop 5 was able to stretch for an impressive 13 hours and 15 minutes. It also charges quickly.
I can feel low performance levels fairly consistently, some apps take long enough to start up, and I’m wondering if the computer is recording my double click. There are also occasional stumbles, such as when the screen sometimes seems to lag or slows down the refresh rate, causing an unpleasant experience to navigate and navigate. The 60Hz refresh rate is disappointing enough at this price already, and a slow pixel response time doesn’t make it any better, but the inability to even keep it consistent is a real disappointment. It can also struggle with multiple video streams. If I hovered over a YouTube thumbnail and saw the thumbnail preview of the video, the video in the main player would gush.
If you want a laptop for gaming but not streaming from the cloud, you can almost forget about it on the Surface Laptop 5. There are loads of laptops for similar prices spitting across this one. You may not enjoy as much battery life as gaming laptops, but you can see performance several times faster. For example, the Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition cost around $1,650 when we reviewed it and outstripped the Surface Laptop 5 while maintaining a respectable nine hours of battery life in our tests.
The Surface Laptop 5 performed poorly in our 3DMark and Unigine Heaven benchmarks, failing to even beat a single-digit framerate average running our Total War: Three Kingdoms benchmark at 1080p Low settings. For comparison, the aforementioned Asus ROG laptop averaged 89fps at 1080p Ultra in the same benchmark.
Considering how expensive the Surface Laptop 5 could be, it’s almost a curiosity how advantageous Microsoft thinks this laptop is. It may have a big screen for a 3.44-pound laptop, but it’s a bit bulky and there are more exciting displays for less (like the ZenBook 14 OLED, which goes all the way to $500). It doesn’t offer a high value for its performance as there are Dell Inspiron systems to run on it. The Inspiron 16 Plus packs a 12th-gen Intel Core H-Series processor (two performance levels on the stack), double the memory, double the storage, and dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics for $200 less than the configuration Microsoft sent me for testing. brings. Meanwhile, an Inspiron 16 with specs close to this Surface Laptop 5 would be just $1,049. Heck, there’s even a Dell XPS 15 with a Core i7-12700H, 16GB of DDR5 memory, 512GB of storage, and an RTX 3050 Ti GPU for $50 less than the model I tested, and it’s not even a pound heavier. For comparison, the Surface Laptop 5’s SSD performs on par with many PCIe 3.0 SSDs, not just the PCIe 4.0 SSDs you can get from other laptops.
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