PC World - USA (2020-01)

JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 81

elevated performance
levels over time.
Finally, we get to see
how well AMD’s mobile
Vega chip performs in
3D graphics. I didn’t
have time to play many
games, but the
benchmarks show that
you should be able to
play everything that we
tested on the Ryzen 7
version of the Surface
Pro 3, and then some.
(Both Wolfenstein II: The
New Colossus and
Crackdown were
playable. With
Wolfenstein’s presets
set to Low, the game ran at close to 60 frames
per second at 720p resolution, and about 30 to
34 fps at 1080p resolutions.)
The 3DMark Fire Strike scores indicate
that the Radeon Vega 9 GPU compares with
the downclocked Nvidia GeForce MX150,
which is impressive for integrated graphics,
with Core i7’s Iris Plus a bit above it.
The surprisingly heartening number is
battery life. Microsoft has traditionally portrayed
the Surface Laptop as an always-on, always-
connected device, and the first two Surface
Laptops performed quite well in this regard.
Even the Ryzen 5-powered Surface Laptop 3
pushed over 8 hours. The Ryzen 7 version fell

short, at 7 hours, 25 minutes. But the Surface

Laptop 3 with Ice Lake came in at just about 10

hours, which is a business day and then some.

Higher-resolution screens tend to

consume more power, and pushing

performance can negatively affect battery life

and other performance numbers. Screen

brightness also matters—we test using a

comfortable 250-260 nits of luminosity, but

Microsoft tests at 150 nits. This could all be

offset with a larger battery. But the 45.8Wh

battery inside the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 is

the same as on the other models, so we’d

have to ascribe the battery life improvements

largely to the Intel’s Ice Lake processor.

The slightly higher scores exceed the Surface Laptops with Ryzen chips,

but by just a handful of frames per second on most games. They’re still

comparable to low-end discrete GPUs.

Huaw(Core i5-8265U)ei Matebook 13

M(Core i7-1065G7)icrosoft Surface Laptop 3

MPerf icrosoft Surface Laptop 3 (Core i7-1065G7)

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3

(Ryzen 7 3780U SE)

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3

Perf (Ryzen 5 3580U SE)

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3

(Ryzen 7 3780U SE)

Acer Sw(Core i7-8565U)ift 3 (2019)

M(Ryzen 5 3580U SE)icrosoft Surface Laptop 3

3DMark Sky Diver 1.0 Overall

(Demo Mode Off)

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

11,705

8,902

10,120

8,766

11,0 69

8,898

9,439

8,382