Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 23, 2014 3:55 AM ESTLaptop Performance
Just like with battery life, we need to evaluate the performance of Surface Pro 3 as both a laptop and a tablet. As a laptop, Surface Pro 3 delivers performance comparable to other Ultrabooks of similar specs - assuming we're talking about short bursts of performance. In prolonged workloads you'll see a bit of a gap, and even a slight regression vs. Surface Pro 2 due to the thermal design targets for the new chassis.
With the exception of the Work suite in PCMark 8 v2, we're mostly looking at performance in the range of a 13-inch MacBook Air - the prototypical Haswell ULT notebook. Surface Pro 3 is definitely in good performance company. In the Work suite however the MacBook Air (running Windows) is able to deliver around 16% better performance than Surface Pro 3. I'm guessing this has to do with thermals more than anything else.
We see a similar story if we look at GPU performance:
In terms of playable games, with some tweaking to detail settings you should be able to average 30 fps in titles like Dota 2. Running at the panel's native resolution is generally out of the question but for lighter titles on Steam like Transistor, you can have a reasonable experience. The higher end Core i7 Surface Pro 3 does ship with Intel's HD 5000 graphics instead of HD 4400 in the Core i5 review sample I tested. It's entirely possible that we see better gaming performance or thermal management (more EUs at lower voltage) in that design.
Just like in previous designs, Surface Pro 3 integrates a SATA SSD (likely M.2 this time). In this case Microsoft uses an OEM version of Samsung's SSD 840 EVO, a 3-bit-per-cell MLC design that we've found to be a pretty good value. I am disappointed we didn't see a move to PCIe storage but for general use I doubt there's much value in it. PCMark 8 v2's storage test isn't particularly stressful but it does show that Surface Pro 3's SSD is at least competitive with its predecessor and the MBA despite moving to TLC NAND.
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nerd1 - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
I won't touch anything with that terrible resolution TN screen, even with a stick.TEAMSWITCHER - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
I have one...and I love it!!I use a desktop as my daily workhorse (OS X and Windows) but always need a laptop for traveling or when I want to get out of the office for a while. I don't need much power to edit source code so I went for extreme portability: I surprise people when I pull it out of the case I'm holding - they mistake it for an iPad.
Yes, the screen is small but workable with full screen apps. The color is good - I never even realized it was a TN screen. The 16 x 9 aspect ratio is nice for Air Playing content to my Apple TV. When not traveling it doubles as my living room computer.
I'm really looking forward to the next iteration of the MacBook Air. A 12" retina screen in the same 2+ lb portable clamshell design with better battery life would be a nice upgrade.
GC2:CS - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Nice comparison but well the MacBook Air still stacks up incredibly well in first three categories if we asume that it's the design from late 2010... That's like ancient history ! And still a tablet PC has problems in leapfrogging that in "Weight" and "Thickness". Now let's go back into 2014 and imagine how thin and light can Air go with today technology ? It will be dangerously close to a surfice without type cover ! Yeah it just can't even compare to such laptop.ymcpa - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Will that Air have a touchscreen? It will probably get the higher res display finally. The heaviest component is the battery and that really hasn't changed much over the years. They might make it thinner, but with the higher res display, the battery will probably stay the same and the weight of the Air will also probably be the same.basroil - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
OSX doesn't natively support touch screens at all, and their native input pipeline is incapable of differentiating a touch command from a click command.cjs150 - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
NO SD/MicroSD card slot no sale. $200 more for moving from 64Gb SSD to 128Gb. They are having a laugh.It astounds me that yet again we see a tablet that assumes that everyone can always access everything via WiFi in the cloud. I assume the designers never leave an urban environment and assume that anyone living in sticks is a complete irrelevance
phantomstache - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
It does have a MicroSD card readerphantomstache - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
It does have a MicroSD card readerUpSpin - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
That's an odd upgrade.They switched from Wacom to N-Trig to reduce the costs. I don't think there's any other reason.
Wacom requires an inductive coil 'behind' the screen to work, in front of the screen the capactive touchscreen. N-Trig requires the capactive touchscreen in front of the screen, which gets also used for the pen. So the reduction of parallax would have been able with Wacom, too, because both need the same stuff in front of the display.
The pen lag is most probably a Windows issue. The reason the lag is less in Photoshop is mostly due to the fact that Photoshop uses some proprietary driver to communicate with the pen. At least that's on my Wacom based Tablet PC the case. Once in Photohop the typical Windows specific pen flicks and pen specific events don't work any longer.
The display size on the Surface Pro 3 looks to be much better for a Windows based tablet. It's also great to see they reduced the thickness. But it's an absolute no-go, that they increased the fan noise and fan on-time. Ideally a tablet PC should be dead-silent, thus passively cooled. What MS did on the SP3 is a no-go. Again, the only reason I see is to reduce production costs. You need only one fan instead of 2, only one heat-pipe instead of two, only one heatsink instead of two. Because of the worse thermal design, as can be nicely seen on your thermal images how poor the heat gets spread across the 'surface', they thermally throttle and ramp up the fan. That's a joke.
So I like some changes, but the majority of changes, to reduce cost, made this device worse for my taste. If they continue in this reduction, reducing production costs whatever it takes, the next revision will be total garbage.
ymcpa - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
The review mentioned why they went with N-trig. Wacom requires a thicker display. N-trig allowed them to reduce the thickness so it became more comparable to tablets. As this review and the one from penny arcade mentioned, there really wasn't any lose in functionality from the switch to N-trig.