Microsoft Surface Laptop 3

MICROSOFT HAS PITCHED AMD AND INTEL IN A LAPTOP BATTLE ROYALE BY POWERING EACH NEW SURFACE LAPTOP 3 WITH COMPETING CPUS. SO WHICH ONE COMES OUT ON TOP IN THIS DEFINING BATTLE FOR LAPTOP SUPREMACY?

WITH AMD DOMINATING the desktop CPU space this year, Microsoft has given it the opportunity to compete against Intel in the new Surface Laptop 3s. AMD was given the task of designing a custom CPU for the

15-inch Surface Laptop 3, while Intel was delegated the task of driving the less expensive 13-inch clamshell. Generally, laptop makers give the bigger units more grunt for creative professionals, while the smaller devices appeal to those looking for something that’s better value and more portabile – but because these units have competing chip makers driving them, they’re actually very different laptops that try to achieve different things.

Before we dig into the differences, these are both Surface Laptop 3s, so there are a lot of consistencies across the units. Both the

13-inch and 15-inch models offer a Black all-metal chassis or a Platinum metal clamshell with the iconic Alcantara keyboard surround a returning feature of the Surface Laptop 2. The 13-inch laptop actually offers additional Sandstone metal and Cobalt Blue Alcantara colourations for those that want to be a little more adventurous with colouring.

GETTING THE BASICS RIGHT

Both the Surface Laptop 3s come with identical, soft and responsive, glass trackpads and square ten-keyless keyboards that are easy to use. This combined with the device’s USB 3 Type-A, USB 3.1 Type-C, 3.5mm headphone jack and Surface Connect ports make it really versatile against some competitors – since you don’t need an additional dock. While there’s no fingerprint reader, Windows Hello Face is quick and secure enough to make for an easy sign in process.

If you look at the general display specs, both the monitors share the same 10-point multitouch PixelSense Touchscreen display in a 3x2 aspect ratio with a 201 Pixel Per Inch resolution. The smaller model has a 13.5-inch screen and an unusual 2256 x 1504 pixel resolution while the 15-inch version’s resolution is slightly higher at 2496 x 1664 pixels. This is definitely the sweet spot for laptop displays since it offers greater clarity for documents without taking the battery hit that you get by going full 4K. The screens look vibrant with an average brightness around the 400 nit mark, and while you do get access to

Windows 10’s HDR video streaming options in both variants, the screens can only reproduce around 63.4% of the Adobe RGB colour profile – so it’s not ideal for creatives or HDR playback.

BIG OLE BAG OF CHIPS

On the surface these two devices are identical in many ways, but because of the use of two distinct CPU architectures they are actually very different. Both the 13-inch and 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 devices can be configured with a choice of two processors from their respective manufacturers. So, the 13-inch Surface Laptop comes with either a (1.2 to 3.7GHz) Intel Core i5 1035G7 or a (1.3 to 3.9GHz) Intel Core i7 1065G7 CPU, which are both part of Intel’s recently announced 10th generation processor range and so come with the new Wi-Fi 6 support and faster Thunderbolt 3 connectivity.

The 15-incher on the other hand, can be configured with either a (2.1 to 3.7GHz) AMD Ryzen 5 3580U or a (2.3 to 4GHz) AMD Ryzen 7 3780U CPU, chips that were launched alongside the Surface Laptop 3 in October

“BOTH THE SURFACE LAPTOP 3S COME WITH IDENTICAL, SOFT AND RESPONSIVE, GLASS TRACKPADS AND SQUARE TEN-KEYLESS KEYBOARDS THAT ARE EASY TO USE.”

“BOTH THE 13-INCH AND 15-INCH SURFACE LAPTOP 3 DEVICES CAN BE CONFIGURED WITH A CHOICE OF TWO PROCESSORS FROM THEIR RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS. ”

2019. These new AMD processors have four cores and eight threads like their blue-blooded competition, but they miss out on the Wi-Fi 6, offering instead FreeSync capability (which isn’t all that useful on these moderately powered non-gaming PCs).

The Intel-based Surface Laptop 3 can be configured with either of the Intel chips mentioned above, 8 or 16GB of RAM, and between 256GB and 1TB of onboard storage, and costs between $1,699 and $3,949, depending on what you opt for. AMD’s Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 Surface laptop variants start at $1,999 for the Ryzen 5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, while the Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM and 1TB storage version comes in at $4,399. With such a broad overlap in configurations the Surface Laptop 3 is a great experiment.

PUTTING THEM TO WORK

We tested the Surface Laptop 3 13 with the Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB PCIe SSD that retails for $1,999 and a Surface Laptop 3 15 with a Ryzen 5 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB PCIe SSD that costs $2,799. While the latter has double the RAM allocation and a 1.5-inch bigger screen, it’s $800 more expensive, when those two factors really only account for about $500 of the price bump, so AMD is already on the back foot in terms of value.

When you actually pit these two processors against each other in performance benchmarks, the 13.5-inch Intel i5 model beat the 15-inch AMD Ryzen 5 version on almost every single parameter. For PCMark 8 and PCMark 10 benchmarks the difference was less than 10%, but for HWBot x265’s CPU heavy media encoding benchmarks, the Ryzen 5 had between 15 and 25% lower frame rates than the Intel Surface Laptop 3 13.

A lot of this can be explained by the temperatures that the processors are operating at. Since the 15-inch AMD device didn’t peak above 78 degrees in any benchmark, while the Intel 13 incher regularly spiked all the way up to 100 degrees (and potentially beyond since the sensors stop reading at this point). Intel has undoubtedly done some work in overclocking the Surface Laptop 3’s chips for maximum performance, a response we assume was prompted by the new AMD competition. Normally we would also conclude that AMD

“WHILE BOTH THE NEW SURFACE LAPTOP 3S SHOW BETWEEN 15% AND 30% CPU PERFORMANCE BOOSTS OVER THE SURFACE LAPTOP 2 INTEL CORE I5, 3D MARK GRAPHICAL TESTS SHOWED IMPROVEMENTS OF UP TO 112%. ”

didn’t do much to optimise these chips, but the one parameter the Surface Laptop 3 15s outperform their smaller siblings is in battery life, and the lower operating temperature is likely to be part of the explanation for that.

POWER AND PERFORMANCE

Both CPUs run, on an average, at 15W and have roughly a 46Wh battery capacity. They also have screens that are pretty close in total pixel count so, all things considered they should have comparable battery lifespans. However, in PCMark 8 Home Battery the Surface Laptop 13 gets 4 hours and 37 minutes, while the Surface Laptop 15 ran for a total of 9 hours and 40 minutes on a single charge. When it came to 1080p movie playback the difference wasn’t quite as drastic, but the

Surface Laptop 15 still lasted 19% longer than the 13 inch model, with a total of five hours and 56 minutes. This is a considerable difference for two devices with similar performance and goes a long way to justify the performance loss you see in processing tasks on the AMD 15-inch Surface 3.

While both the new Surface Laptop 3s show between 15% and 30% CPU performance boosts over the Surface Laptop 2 Intel Core i5, 3D Mark graphical tests showed improvements of up to 112%. The new Intel Iris Plus Graphics and the AMD Radeon Vega 9 Graphics are still a long way off being gaming-grade GPUs, but we were able to get more than double the framerates on light games like Rocket League. We had a few glitches with the new Intel GPU and some 3DMark benchmarks and while the AMD Surface Laptop 3 got 85fps averages on Rocket League in 1080p performance mode, the Intel Surface Laptop 3 got just 55fps. Both show improvement on the Surface Laptop 2’s 40fps average using the same settings but if you want a little extra gaming performance then the AMD unit takes the cake at the moment.