Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 23, 2014 3:55 AM ESTBattery Life
Microsoft made no sacrifice in battery capacity in pursuit of Surface Pro 3's thin chassis design. The new tablet features an integrated 42Wh battery just like the previous two models. Charging duties are handled by an external 31W charger with a brand new magnetic connector. Microsoft never seemed to get a good MagSafe clone working in the previous models, so Surface Pro 3 abandons the previous design entirely in favor of something a bit more sensible.
The new connector no longer looks like an oversized MagSafe connector, and instead features a thin plastic insert that mates with the charge port on Surface Pro 3. Charge time hasn't changed, you can fully charge the device in around 2.62 hours:
The device-side connector features 40 pins but you only need 12 of them to charge the device. The remaining pins are used for Gigabit Ethernet, USB, DisplayPort (up to 4096 x 2304) and audio. Microsoft seems hell bent on avoiding Thunderbolt at all costs so instead of embracing the standard it has created a custom alternative of its own doing. The benefit to Microsoft's connector is it can obviously deliver more power than Thunderbolt can, the downside is that it can't send PCIe and thus you don't get support for any ultra high bandwidth external storage devices. I still would rather see Microsoft implement Thunderbolt as there's at least an existing ecosystem built around that but here we are three generations into Surface and if we haven't seen it by now I don't think we're ever going to.
The supplied power adapter includes a USB charge port capable of delivering 1A at 5V.
As Surface Pro 3 is designed to be both a laptop and a tablet I've run it through both our Windows laptop battery life tests and our tablet battery life tests.
Laptop Battery Life
As a laptop, Surface Pro 3 delivers comparable battery life to other optimized Haswell ULT designs. I threw in Sony's Vaio Pro 13 into the mix because it has a similar sized battery (37Wh vs. 42Wh) and is one of the most power efficient Windows Ultrabook platforms on the market. Surface Pro 3 manages to deliver similar battery life, which means it's a little less power efficient but the two are within the same range at least.
Compared to Surface Pro 1 and 2, Surface Pro 3 at worst delivers similar battery life and at best increases range on a single charge by up to 20%. We're looking at 3.75 hours - 7.6 hours of notebook usage on a single charge depending on usage.
It's worth noting that there's a substantial advantage in battery life if we look at the 13-inch MacBook Air running OS X. I only mention this because of Microsoft's insistence on comparing Surface Pro 3 to Apple's popular line of notebooks.
Tablet Battery Life
Tablet workloads are going to be far more display power bound than anything else. Here we see 7.58 - 8.03 hours of continuous usage, a slight regression compared to Surface Pro 2. Video playback remains more power hungry than web browsing, which is something I've noted in previous tablet-evaluations of Intel's Core silicon. I don't believe Intel's Core processors are very optimized for video decode power consumption. If anything is going to change with the move to Broadwell and Core M I suspect video decode power may be it.
274 Comments
View All Comments
theuglyman0war - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
N-trig? so will it work with photoshop zbrush and Maya on day one? Got tired of waiting a long time ago. I guess I will have to sell my soul for the price of a wacom tablet in the end. I miss the 90's when half of all the gear seemed to be tailored for artists. Now that all the lemmings r on android... shouldn't this stuff be made fer professionals again?kyuu - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link
Yes, the SP3's N-Trig will work day one with zbrush and Maya.basroil - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link
already has wintab drivers...And photoshop is dumping wintab for the proper pen input handler in CCtheNiZer - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link
Great review Anand, but why not compare Surface Pro 3 to the Macbook air 11? seems more even and relevant.Anyway, MS is making good progress with the surface line in short time. Finally good MS news
Razzy76 - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link
Well I am assuming the 13 inch 2014 MacBook Air is the i7 version... I expected better review than this. =\priyamehra - Friday, June 27, 2014 - link
Its a really nice review, i will definitely buy this gadget.http://www.yaconmolasses-reviews.com/
anandbiatch - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
"Lapability"?What a joke. Who the heck uses his laptop in his lap?
bkydcmpr - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link
sp3 i7 256gb for $719? this site is a joke.ewpelleg - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
WHO WOULD PUSH SO HARD WITH THE PEN!??! I have a SP3 and I would never dream of pushing that hard for fear of breaking the TIP. That was a ridiculous demonstration and is a disservice to any reader put off of the SP3 for fear the screen warps under pressure.vision33r - Saturday, July 12, 2014 - link
Problem with Surface Pro is that it's a very compromised device.-Not a good e-reader, terrible battery life and UI is too difficult to be an easy to use e-reader
- Not a good laptop, it maybe small but many apps do not scale with the hires and the keyboard and kickstand does not support properly on your lap nor tricky surfaces. Keyboard is still too cramped
- As a tablet, i really fight with Metro UI a lot and switching back and forth with Desktop is just over complicated compared to an iPad.
- As an IT device it really can't cut it, the performance aren't there enough to run VMs or do some scripting easily.