It looks like the Surface Book 2 is having some issues with its battery. When used in heavy gaming the battery will drain, even when it is plugged into the supplied charger. This only happens when the laptop is set to high performance and uses the full power of the hardware, instead of being set to ‘best battery life’.
The Microsoft spokesperson has stated that the Surface Book 2 has been designed to deliver an amazing performance to anyone that wants a powerful device for their work. He said that is aimed at ‘STEM professionals (designers, developers, engineers)’.
The Battery Drains Even When the Laptop is Plugged Into the Power Supply
When set to ‘best performance’, the battery drains faster and when it is set to ‘best battery life’ the battery will last a lot longer and never entirely drain.
As for fast drain of battery while gaming, it all depends on what games you play, the screen resolution and the use of GPU. When setting the laptop for lower performance, the gaming experience rapidly drops.
The design of this laptop doesn’t allow it to get more than 95 watts of power from the charger and it cannot run all the hardware components a maximum. Only the processor needs 25 watts if you set performance in high mode and it can get higher, up to 35 watts. Add the graphics card (Nvidia GTX 1060) and it will eat 70-80 watts more and you get to over 100 watts which the laptop doesn’t get.
Microsoft tried to fix this issue by throttling the graphics chip, but the laptop is unusable after 10 minutes of gaming and users experience a drop in fps from 60 to 30 in different games. Use the laptop at max performance and connected to a power supply and your battery will drain about 10% per hour.
It is pretty clear that the Surface Book 2 is not a gaming laptop, unless you’re looking for keeping it plugged into the wall and at either lower resolutions or settings or by throttling the graphics card.
