Microsoft's Surface Laptop Studio 2 has a 13th-gen Intel CPU and RTX 40 series GPU options

During its annual fall event on Thursday, Microsoft announced the (previously leaked) sequel to the Surface Laptop Studio, and it appears to come with plenty of much-needed improvements.

For starters, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 will offer twice the CPU and GPU power of its predecessor, thanks to Intel 13th-gen i7 H class processors and NVIDIA RTX 4050 or 4060 GPUs. Those GPU options are geared toward speed and gaming, but can be traded for RTX 2000 Adas for those doing intensive graphical rendering work. During a demo of the machine during the event, Microsoft made a point of showing it smoking the M2 Max MacBook Pro in Blender.

The Surface Laptop Studio 2 can also be loaded with up to 2TB of storage and 64GB of RAM. It will sport an adaptive touch-enabled trackpad, and come packed in with the Surface Slim Pen 2. The touchscreen will still clock in at 14.4 inches, with a 120Hz refresh rate, Dolby IQ and HDR. And, yeah, the screen tilts forward. Because of course it does. As for battery life, Microsoft is claiming the Surface Laptop Studio 2 will get up to 18 hours of runtime on a charge.

Notably, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 will also feature a neural processing unit, which can power AI effects - seemingly the first Intel NPU in a windows laptop . And just for good measure, it'll host a USB-A port, two slots for USB-C and a microSD card reader.

The Surface Laptop Studio 2 will be available for customers on October 3, and starts at $1,999.

Follow all of the news live from Microsoft's 2023 Surface event right here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsofts-surface-laptop-studio-2-has-a-13th-gen-intel-cpu-and-rtx-40-series-gpu-options-152547778.html?src=rss