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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Klimax - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
According to Reddit AMA Microsoft will release tool for changing pressure curve.As for touch on desktop, no problems. (Used original Surface Pro and desktop was quite usable)
Anyway, good and interesting review.
joaoasousa - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Anand: "I don't know how big the professional productivity tablet market is, but it's a space that Microsoft seems to have almost exclusive reign over with its Surface line."I would love if my company started issuing these. I'm a consultant and mobility is a must. I keep going to meeting, have to take a lot of notes, but also need a computer that runs full excel and tools like Visual Studio and Eclipse. This would be much better then our current "tank" laptops that are hardly mobile worthy.
brnpttmn - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
I have pretty much the same type of work environment, and live in OneNote, Outlook, Word, Excel, and some data analysis tools. I just found out a couple weeks ago that I'm one of a couple people in the office in line to test out SP3s. After playing with one at Best Buy for about an hour yesterday, I'm confident that it will be great. In fact, I liked it so much that I pre-ordered the i3 (which is now an 8/1 delivery date) with the student discount for home/school use. I figure I'll just swap the type cover I get with my work model.extide - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Ouch, I think the i3 is a bad buy. No Turbo means only about 50% of the maximum CPU performance, that's pretty significant.basroil - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
Also means much lower power use at maximum, so you might see the heavy workloads numbers shoot up to above 6 hours!mkozakewich - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
Either way, really. I've got my i5 running at 800 MHz, usually, except when I'm gaming and really need to drive it hard. An i3 would usually be low, with no possibility of upping it when needed.zodiacsoulmate - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
80% less pressure sensitive, 30% better CPU, 25% less latency.... not very impressive...joaoasousa - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Forgot the reduced thickness, weight, improved display quality....Drumsticks - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Let alone the fact that he's completely ignoring Anand's "the pen is better" in favor of a single spec that he noted that he couldn't notice.Anand may not be an artist, but I imagine he has a better eye than the average user, at least.
UpSpin - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
You mean the pen which is heavier, requires two batteries, is not interchangable with more comfortable models and less accurate than the Wacom version?You mean the reduced thickness in favor of a thermally throttling CPU and more frequent and more penetrant fan noise?
Yes the larger display is indeed better, sadly they forgot to upgrade the used GPU.
The SP3 has some advantages over SP2, but sadly they added made a lot of compromises to do so, too many for my taste.