Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 23, 2014 3:55 AM ESTTablet Performance
The tablet performance comparison is as ridiculous as it's ever been. Surface Pro 3 is substantially faster than any ARM based tablet on the market. Web pages load quicker and you can play a completely different caliber of game on the device.
Tablet GPU Performance
All news isn't good though on the tablet front. Surface Pro 3 still struggles to behave completely like a tablet, despite finally gaining support for Connected Standby. Waking up the device from sleep still requires around 1300ms, a period that sounds small but feels like an eternity compared to an Android or iOS tablet.
WiFi
Marvell remains Microsoft's partner of choice when it comes to the WiFi implementation on Surface Pro 3. The updated design features a Marvell Avastar 88W8897 SoC supporting 2-stream 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0. The SoC also features NFC support but it's not leveraged in Surface Pro 3.
WiFi performance is better than on Surface Pro 2. Peak performance improves from around 160Mbps to 260Mbps when connected at an 866Mbps link rate. I didn't notice any weird behavior or poor performance when connecting to WiFi networks, although as 2-stream 802.11ac implementations go this is hardly the fastest.
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chizow - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link
Picked one up mainly for the wife's upcoming semester. But great device, thoroughly impressed and it fixed many of the original problems I had with the original (thickness, battery life, screen size). I ended up buckling on price but I think overall you get more RAM/storage than when it launched 16 months ago. I still think MS needs to include the Type Pad for free and introduce a cheaper version to really win the tablet market, but this is definitely the MacBook killer and laptop replacement for me.dehrman - Monday, November 17, 2014 - link
+1 on the grayscale issue. Deal-breaker for me. Took pictures at the local Best Buy to show how truly awful the grayscale rendering is:http://www.danielehrman.com/blog/2014/11/17/the-on...
Max22258 - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
After having bought a surface pro 3 without the keyboard, I decided to get the keyboard a week later. To my surprised to installed the keyboard and cover i had to do a complete refresh of the system otherwise I had errors loading the driver. In this day and age where I can add anything to my computer or laptop seamlessly i found that adding a Microsoft device to a Microsoft not a pleasant experience. I have found that their support is excellent thought. But I was always one step ahead of the support person but this is because I have been a computer geek for so many years. In case you are looking at this review I suggest that when buying a surface 3 you buy the overprice keyboard. In my book it should have been included with it. Actually I do not like windows 8, I wish there was 2 option when installing, one for tablet and one for PC or laptop. Come on Microsoft think outside the box a little. What about the license key that I cannot have, if I update this tablet in the future with a new window I do not get to keep the key for another computer????Max22258
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