Early Surface Book owners reporting GPU, display-related issues

The forums are stacking up with complaints, many of which seem to be related to various aspects of the system display. Forum user Ericspt rounded up his own set of problems, shown below:

• Dell 34″ U-Wide cannot be used with the dock. Screen goes black every 2-3 minutes for 10 seconds or so
• Cannot boot with the dock. Monitor never comes on and my Kef X300 speakers just click over and over. Have to boot without the dock, then plug the dock in
• Strangest problem is color temp changes on web pages as you scroll. Goes from a light white screen to a purple or yellow hue once you hit a certain point in the page, happens consistently on long pages and easy repeatable. Happens on both the external monitor and the laptop screen.
• Playing MPEG files on the laptop works fine, playing them connected to the dock will give an unable to decode error sometimes, program closes other times, and plays. After it errors out 2-3 times it refuses to play until reboot.
• Going to a web page where there are a lot of animations or movement causes a black screen, won’t come back until you undock/redock
• Cannot detach dock, says I have to close SearchUI but its not a running service that I can find, have to reboot again
• After using for a while cannot run any program getting a Run32DLL error.

Videos of the color temperature problem have already been posted to YouTube, and it’s a decidedly odd problem. You can see the hue on the page change as the individual scrolls. Other users are reporting the same greenish hues, periodic driver issues, and problems with battery drain when using Connected Standby. Some users have problems with the electric grip mechanism, with one side of the device releasing easily and the other gripping extremely hard.

Not every user has disclosed which model of Surface Book they purchased, but all of these problems sound like issues that can be fixed in software. The GPU hand-off between the Nvidia and Intel chips inside the system likely requires some sophisticated driver wizardly, since this kind of simultaneous switching model is different than anything we’ve seen deployed on a system before. The screen color-shifts are an odd problem, but since the display does start off the correct color, hopefully Microsoft can simply patch up whatever issue is causing rendering issues as the mouse moves farther down the page. It’s also not clear if this is an issue with every browser, or just with Edge, Chrome, or Firefox.

So far, these problems seem like minor teething issues, not showstopping flaws, but there’s one fly in the ointment that appears to be frustrating some buyers. When Microsoft took to the stage, Panos Panay, the corporate VP for Surface Computing, said the following: “By adding the discrete GPU, two extra processors, it fundamentally makes Surface Book two times faster than the MacBook Pro.” Since the SB doesn’t have two GPUs, the “two extra processors,” in the system certainly seemed to be referring to a quad-core processor. Intel makes quad-core Core i7 chips in low-power form factors, and one of these could’ve been tapped for the Surface Book.

It’s now clear that this isn’t what happened. The $2699 top-end Surface Book uses a Core i7-6650U, a chip with a core clock of 2.2GHz, a max boost frequency of 3.4GHz, and Intel Iris 540 graphics and 64MB of EDRAM. Now, granted, that’s still an impressive chip overall, but the MacBook Pro that MS compared against does feature a quad-core CPU. Granted, that’s a chip with a 47W TDP compared with the 15W TDP on the Surface Book, but it still sets an upper bar on what you can expect from these two equivalently priced systems in terms of raw performance. There are going to be CPU-centric workloads where the MacBook Pro wins by a significant margin, thanks to its ability to leverage those other cores. Users who are interested in the Surface Book should keep in mind that it trades some raw performance to hit its weight and thinness targets.

Hopefully Microsoft will resolve these issues in short order and issue software updates that repair the problems. While none of the bugs are enormous, in aggregate, they add up to a less-than perfect rollout.