Face Off: Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Core i7 vs. Surface Pro 4 Core i5 vs. Surface Pro 4 Core m3

[Redaktion]

Same face, faster hardware. Is the highest-end Surface Pro 4 really worth the investment? We give you the raw benchmarks for you to decide on your own.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Face-Off-Microsoft-Surface-Pro-4-Core-i7-vs-Surface-Pro-4-Core-i5-vs-Surface-Pro-4-Core-m3.156031.0.html

[Ricardo Tituala]

what do you thing? does the surface pro 4 core i5 have enough power to manage slight tasks autocad 3d?

[Jilly]

Audio gets a 60% but isn't mentioned at all, not even in cons??

[db]

typo?:
in Stress section - "CPU and GPU scores of 2370 and 4761 points, respectively" 
CPU and GPU are flipped

[systemBuilder]

Wow the 540 Iris GPU simply falls apart in scaling up by 1.8 from 1366x768 to 1920x1080.  The pixels increase by 2x, but performance plummets by 4x, from 41fps to 11fps.  This shows me it's a memory bus bottleneck and that Intel GPUs will probably never play FUllHD games at acceptable speeds.  What a waste of GPU power, they need a dedicated memory for these integrated GPUs.

[LYY]

 :o
It is unbelievable that the idle and max. temperature of i7 are much lower than those of i5. Could you recheck it?

[dumbfire]

Audio gets a 60% but isn't mentioned at all, not even in cons??

I agree that this score is low and unjustified. I find the audio quality to be surprisingly good on the surface pro 3/4 with the speakers positioned higher than almost any other ultrabook. The audio is definitely better than a macbook air which garnered a much higher score on this site.

[DavidC1]

Wow the 540 Iris GPU simply falls apart in scaling up by 1.8 from 1366x768 to 1920x1080.  The pixels increase by 2x, but performance plummets by 4x, from 41fps to 11fps.  This shows me it's a memory bus bottleneck and that Intel GPUs will probably never play FUllHD games at acceptable speeds.  What a waste of GPU power, they need a dedicated memory for these integrated GPUs.

No, its not due to memory BW. It's due to available power, and the throttling that results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkruVUvcg0g

Power throttling limits *realistic* performance to ~30%. Not worth the outrageous price increase, unless you are in a pretty high income bracket.

In higher settings its likely it's using the GPU to the full more than the CPU, and the GPU is the power hungry part.

It makes no sense it can be memory BW limited on a 15W part when Intel's test showed that eDRAM is responsible for 35%+ performance increases alone. But on a 15W, after the CPU runs out of power headroom, its merely 30% better than HD 520.

[Paladin Tech]

It was articles like this that prompted me to remain loyal to the Surface Brand and upgrade to the 4. I was very pleased with my Surface 3, traded up for an i7 SP4 but have not been able to get one that actually works long enough to do anything productive.

1) Both of the i7 8gb 256 SP4's I have had had light bleed along the lower edge of the screen.
2) The 1st one would go to sleep and not wake up. After it finally just went to sleep with the fan on one evening after viewing some YouTube Videos it just never woke up. Dead.
3) The replacement which took about two weeks to get using a UPS, would crash to a black screen. After holding the power button down for 10 seconds I could turn it off and then power it back on to get back up and running only to have it black screen again.

At what point do you just call it quits and move on? My issue is there is no other device that matches the Surface Pro 4 in features, except the Surface Pro 3. I may actually downgrade and pick up and older model as it actually works and doesn't have light bleed...

[MaKla]

Would you maybe consider another testrun for the stress-test and/or the GPU-test since there are rumors about significantly worse throttling-behaviour with the latest firmware (at least for the i7-model)? That would be great :D I prefered the Surface over the xps 13 due to the better throttling and the better graphics-performance but maybe this is no more :/

[Edward Ong]

The battery idle time of 899 minutes for the i5 looks wrong.

On the other battery parameters the i5 is between the i7 and m3.
But on idle time it is off the charts.

And this 899 minutes is the most frequently quoted for the Surface Pro because most convertible reviews in 2016 benchmark vs the i5.