JANUARY 2020 • TECH ADVISOR 15Unfortunately, we weren’t given a 13in Surface
Laptop 3 for review – or, even better, a 15in Surface
Laptop 3 for Business version. Both of the latter
use Intel’s 10th-gen ‘Ice Lake’ Core chip, and would
have allowed a direct comparison between the two
architectures. As you can see from the spec list near
the top of the review, the Surface Laptop 3 for Business
uses an improved memory type, LPDDR4x, and Wi-Fi 5
(also known as 802.11ax).
As it is, we made do with benchmarks from a Dell
XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 we’re currently reviewing, which
uses the same Core i7-1065G7 ‘Ice Lake’ chip as the
high-end Surface Laptop 3 for Business does. Our
Ryzen 5 wasn’t designed to directly compete with a
Core i7, but the pricing difference may be small enough
to be tempting. We’ve also included the Surface
Laptop 2, of course, for a gen-over-gen comparison,We tested the
Surface Laptop 3
using the default
settings (shown
here), but also
adjusted the
performance to
see what effect it
might haveJANUARY 2020 • TECH ADVISOR 15Unfortunately, we weren’t given a 13in Surface
Laptop 3 for review – or, even better, a 15in Surface
Laptop 3 for Business version. Both of the latter
use Intel’s 10th-gen ‘Ice Lake’ Core chip, and would
have allowed a direct comparison between the two
architectures. As you can see from the spec list near
the top of the review, the Surface Laptop 3 for Business
uses an improved memory type, LPDDR4x, and Wi-Fi 5
(also known as 802.11ax).
As it is, we made do with benchmarks from a Dell
XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 we’re currently reviewing, which
uses the same Core i7-1065G7 ‘Ice Lake’ chip as the
high-end Surface Laptop 3 for Business does. Our
Ryzen 5 wasn’t designed to directly compete with a
Core i7, but the pricing difference may be small enough
to be tempting. We’ve also included the Surface
Laptop 2, of course, for a gen-over-gen comparison,We tested the
Surface Laptop 3
using the default
settings (shown
here), but also
adjusted the
performance to
see what effect it
might have