16 TECH ADVISOR • JANUARY 2020MICROSOFT SURFACE EVENT
as well as competitive notebook PCs from third-party
manufacturers. The performance graphs below show
the Surface Laptop 3 in red, with Microsoft’s previous
Surface Laptops in shades of orange.
The Surface Laptop 3 that Microsoft shipped us
maximized battery life and minimized performance
using the power/performance slider available via
the Windows taskbar. We thought that was odd until
we saw the anaemic battery-life numbers. But we
wondered how dialing up the performance, especially
when plugged in, would affect the rankings. So you’ll
see a red outlined bar indicating the benchmark
recorded under ‘Best Performance’ settings, too.
One real-world performance note: while other
reviews note that the Surface Laptop 3 struggles
with 4K/60 frames per second playback on sites like
YouTube, there’s some nuance to that, based on our
tests. Plugged in, the Surface Laptop 3 plays back
4K/60 smoothly. Unplugged, 4K/30 video plays
smoothly, which is still the bulk of 4K video on YouTube.
Unplugged, 4K/60 video has some chop to it, which
you’ll notice more on high-motion 4K/60 videos like
this New York City stroll, rather than the calmer nature
videos on the site. We’re not sure if this is something
that can be fixed with an update, or if it’s a limitation
of the GPU, which runs at about 93 percent utilization
during these tasks.
We test using a series of synthetic and real-world
benchmarks, beginning with the PCMark test suite.
Though there’s several to choose from, we’ve selected
three: the PCMark 8 Work and Creative tests, as well
as the updated PCMark 10 benchmark. Both of the16 TECH ADVISOR • JANUARY 2020MICROSOFT SURFACE EVENT
as well as competitive notebook PCs from third-party
manufacturers. The performance graphs below show
the Surface Laptop 3 in red, with Microsoft’s previous
Surface Laptops in shades of orange.
The Surface Laptop 3 that Microsoft shipped us
maximized battery life and minimized performance
using the power/performance slider available via
the Windows taskbar. We thought that was odd until
we saw the anaemic battery-life numbers. But we
wondered how dialing up the performance, especially
when plugged in, would affect the rankings. So you’ll
see a red outlined bar indicating the benchmark
recorded under ‘Best Performance’ settings, too.
One real-world performance note: while other
reviews note that the Surface Laptop 3 struggles
with 4K/60 frames per second playback on sites like
YouTube, there’s some nuance to that, based on our
tests. Plugged in, the Surface Laptop 3 plays back
4K/60 smoothly. Unplugged, 4K/30 video plays
smoothly, which is still the bulk of 4K video on YouTube.
Unplugged, 4K/60 video has some chop to it, which
you’ll notice more on high-motion 4K/60 videos like
this New York City stroll, rather than the calmer nature
videos on the site. We’re not sure if this is something
that can be fixed with an update, or if it’s a limitation
of the GPU, which runs at about 93 percent utilization
during these tasks.
We test using a series of synthetic and real-world
benchmarks, beginning with the PCMark test suite.
Though there’s several to choose from, we’ve selected
three: the PCMark 8 Work and Creative tests, as well
as the updated PCMark 10 benchmark. Both of the