The Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 15-Inch Review: Refreshing Ryzen
by Brett Howse on May 6, 2021 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
On the Surface Laptop 3, the battery life disparity between the AMD Picasso and the Intel Ice Lake was a big enough factor on its own to make it difficult to recommend the AMD-powered Surface Laptop 3 over the Intel version. However, for this generation the tables have turned. Microsoft’s recommendation when choosing AMD versus Intel, is choose the Intel for single-threaded performance, but choose the AMD not only for multi-threaded performance, but for battery life as well. While the gulf between Tiger Lake and Renoir is not as dramatic as it was between Picasso and Ice Lake, that is still a very interesting change in marketing.
Microsoft has said that they worked very closely with AMD on increasing battery life on the Surface Laptop 4, and these improvements will only benefit all AMD buyers for any device, which is why it was such good news to see AMD get a design win in the Surface Laptop 3 in the first place. With the Surface Laptop 4, those improvements to the APU design, coupled with tweaks to the operating system, have really paid dividends.
Battery Life – Web
The battery life provided by the Surface Laptop 4 is really quite incredible when you factor in that this is a 15-inch notebook, and the display is always the source of most of the battery drain, and when you consider that Microsoft is only including a 46 Wh battery, which is very small for a 15-inch device. At over 11.5 hours, the Surface Laptop 4 offers very solid battery life in our web test, which is quite demanding.
Looking at the normalized results with the battery size removed from the equation, and it shows just how efficient the Surface Laptop 4 is. Despite having a larger display than the Dell XPS 13, it almost equals that device in terms of power draw. It is very impressive.
PCMark 10
UL’s PCMark 10 suite added a battery life test as well, and it works by looping some of the workloads from their performance tests in ten minute loops, but it takes into account performance as well by having a fixed workload per ten minutes, so if a device gets the task done quicker, it will have a larger percentage of the ten minutes that it can idle. The results are still excellent, with the Surface Laptop 4 offering one of the best results we have seen so far.
Movie Playback
Media playback is often one of the least demanding tasks on a modern processor, because all of the video decode functionality is handled by very power efficient fixed function hardware in the media engine, and as such, generally results in the longest runtimes of any test. Here, the Surface Laptop 4 delivers a very solid result, although the Tiger Lake MSI, and the Surface Book 3 with its massive battery, are both able to beat it in terms of overall runtime.
To get a feel for what these results mean, our Tesseract score divides the movie playback runtime by the length of The Avengers. You could watch The Avengers six times in a row, which is likely enough times for anyone but the biggest fan of the movie.
Charge Time
Microsoft ships the Surface Laptop 4 with a 65-Watt power adapter, which magnetically attaches to the right side of the device on the Surface Connect port. Microsoft continues to provide a 5-Watt USB Type-A port on the power adapter itself, which works great to charge an ancillary device such as a phone from the same charger, and is a great feature. This leaves 60 Watts for the laptop from the power adapter.
There is also a USB Type-C port on the left side which will allow you to charge from a USB Type-C cable if needed.
Charge time is about average, despite the small battery and fairly large charger. The previous generation completed this task a bit quicker when it was tested. The first 50% only took 41 minutes to complete.
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Eletriarnation - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
It really is. You don't actually need any at all, this little company called Apple was the first to figure it out.hanselltc - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
They've also figured out how to make touchpads that makes everything else feel like compressed trash dug up from an abandoned landfill, so there's that.Gam3r01 - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
Having purchased a 2nd hand Surface Laptop 3 last week, in my experience one USB-A was limiting. I do not own a single USB-C device and re-installing Windows and installing Linux from a USB stick without the use of the built-in keyboard and trackpad was annoying. As was backing up the system with a USB bootable recovery program (that also lacked the wifi driver).To install Windows, rather than use the latest image, I resorted to the official MS SL3 recovery USB, which included the drivers during setup, but incurred hours of Windows updates. For Linux I used the Grub ‘toram’ option and fumbled with swapping keyboard and mouse in and out of the single port, as well as using the onscreen accessibility keyboard. Then for a backup/recovery (lacking input drivers and a wifi driver), I repartitioned the drive and backed up to a spare partition.
Easy when you know how, but it was frustrating, especially as I sold by only USB hub (built into a monitor) last month.
Be Safe, peace.
Alistair - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
Well said, that's an example of the kind of problem I've had also.Dug - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
So what you are saying, is you didn't prepare. You used the wrong software, and you don't have a usb hub that 99% of the population has.Holliday75 - Monday, May 10, 2021 - link
He also explained a situation in which 99% of computer users would not even understand let alone run into. Been in IT 20+ years and rarely have to work like that. If vendors considered these things they would probably be throwing away millions in profit.dontlistentome - Friday, May 7, 2021 - link
That's why Apple give you none.This is a premium device. People who can afford it buy a bluetooth mouse or a mouse with a usb C dongle.
I've had thinkpad laptops with thunderbolt for 4 years now. I use a TB3 dock at home and work, have usbc charging cables for my Android and ipad and have multiple usb drives that have dual a/c connectors. Heck, my car is all USB-C now for Android auto.
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Friday, May 7, 2021 - link
I have an HP x360 2in1 with a ryzen 4700u and 8GB of ram that I will upgrade to 16-32GB here soon but besides the point, it has a power dc jack, USB-c with HDMI, DisplayPort, power and data transfer, an HDMI port and a headphone jack, ohh and an sd card slot that I basically never use but anyway I dock it with a USB-C hub and a monitor over HDMI all connected to a usb-c hub that I have with 3 USB 3.0 and 1 HDMI and another sd card slot, I plug into power using the dc power jack and im set to go with 2 cables to plug in. point is, on the go I maybe use a wired mouse if I game, but most of the time I use a USB port for data transfer and that about it, 1 USB port with a USB-c and another power jack is honestly perfect for me at least.ballsystemlord - Tuesday, May 11, 2021 - link
I agree. We need at least 2 USB-A ports.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
Thanks Brett! Agree on most of your points. Questions, comments: Is the memory user upgradable? It doesn't seem to be, which would be a major minus for a "premium" laptop. Other Comment: Regarding your Handbrake tests, I would stay away from the "Hardware" ones unless you can add information on the size of the resulting file and the quality. One aspect where NVIDIA is (still?) far ahead of AMD's GPUs is the encoding ASIC; since Turing, NVENC has become downright usable (comparable quality to software encoding at about 1.2 x the file size, much faster) whereas AMD's solution is clearly inferior in quality. If that has changed in recent months, I'd love to know.Lastly, I didn't like AMD replacing the number of iGPU cores with cranking up the frequency (from previous Ryzen APUs), and it's now biting them in the rear. An 10- 11 core design like the older gen would have beaten Xe.