52 PCWorld MARCH 2020REVIEWS MICROSOFT SURFACE PRO^7
you to enjoy audio
over the tablet’s
speakers—still a rare
luxury in today’s
laptops.
DTS Sound
Unbound is a
surprise, a paid app
that’s bundled with
the tablet. It asks you
to pay a whopping
$15 to unlock
surround sound from
both your speakers
and headphones,
similar to what THX
offers for free with
Walmart’s Motile laptop (go.pcworld.com/
motl). To my ears, the DTS solution sounded
much better than what THX offered, and the
positional audio was the best I can recall since
Aureal Semiconductor’s HRTF positional audio
demo two decades ago.PERFORMANCE: TOP OF
THE TABLETS
It would be nice to wave away some of the
Surface Pro 7’s performance requirements, in
an argument that a simple tablet deserves
some concessions. That argument holds
more water with the Surface Go (go.pcworld.
com/sfgo), hovering around $500. Because
there’s a strong chance that our $1,200
Surface Pro 7 will replace a notebook PC as aprimary device, however, we can’t use the
same criteria.
We also can’t directly compare the
Surface Pro 7 to Microsoft’s recent Surface
Pro X in all but a small handful of
benchmarks. In large part, that’s because
the two devices use different
microprocessors: The Surface Pro 7 uses
Intel’s mobile Ice Lake chip, while the
Surface Pro X uses a custom chip based on
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon architecture. The
latter can’t run most benchmarks that we use
to test Windows laptops and desktops, but
you’ll see it in a few where they intersect.
Given the somewhat limited comparison
set, we’ve also included the Ice Lake-based
Surface Laptop 3 for Business. This laptopIf you buy a Surface Pro 7, check out the free 15-day trial of the DTS Sound
Unbound app. The positional demo is unreasonably fun.