When the original Surface Pro launched,
no one quite knew how to classify the hybrid. Was it a tablet that was trying to be a
laptop? A laptop trying to be a tablet?
Well, call us contrarians: We’re going
to come right out and say the Surface Pro
line is neither and doesn’t need to be—
particularly in the case of the Surface Pro
3, which combines the best of both worlds.
At just 1.76lbs (2.42lbs with the optional
Type Cover attached) and 0.36-inches
thick, it’s one of the lightest and slimmest
x86 ultraportables we’ve gotten our hands
on yet. When thrown into a backpack or
shoulder bag, the Surface Pro 3’s barely
noticeable, even when on you’re on your
feet all day. And given its generous size—
the SP3 has a 12.1-inch, 2160x1440 IPS
screen—it’s a bit of a marvel that its internals include a Core i5-4300U CPU, 8GB of
DDR3 RAM, and a 256GB mSATA SSD. And
unlike its first-generation predecessor,
the Surface Pro 3 runs cool and, for the
most part, very quiet. Even when the fan
starts running under load, it’s still more
of a hum than the turbo-engine whirling
you’d hear in an SP1.
Of course, there are trade-offs for
cramming so much into so little space,
with the additional requirement of being
cool and quiet. While it performed slightly
better than our zero-point (the original
Surface Pro), during intensive loads we
saw a decrease in performance. We suspect this is due to the system favoring
thermals over performance—a way of
still improving on SP1’s well-deserved
reputation for running unabashedly loud
and hot when pushed. Don’t expect to play
triple-A titles on the SP3—or even farm
league games; we barely cracked 16fps
in Batman: Arkham Origins’ benchmark.
It did run the Little League–level Super
Meat Boyat 50 fps and Limboat 29.4 fps, so
there is some fun. Heavily threaded loads
also are best left to a beefier systems, as
our ProShow 5 benchmark (which is limited to four threads) took almost an hour
to complete.
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