24 TECH ADVISOR • MAY 2020
REVIEW
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
forBusiness.Thislaptopanditstabletcousinactually
beara close resemblance on paper – they share the
same exact processor and GPU, clocked identically. As
you’ll see from the CPU-specific Cinebench test below,
theCPUperformanceofboththeSurfacePro7 and
theSurface Laptop 3 are close.
OurdailyexperienceswiththeSurfacePro 7
- everydayOfficeuse,webbrowsingandthelike
- weremorethanacceptable.TheSurfacePro 7
alsooffers ‘instant on’ capabilities, waking almost
instantly with a combination of the Windows Hello-
enabled camera and a fast internal SSD.
Our first test is the older PCMark Creative
benchmark, used in part because we could pull results
from a couple years’ worth of tablets. It measures light
gaming, photo and video editing, and web browsing.
Not surprisingly, the Surface Pro 7 excels.
Note that the default behaviour for the Surface Pro
7, like the Surface Laptop 3, is to prolong battery life,
sometimes at the expense of performance. That’s a
perfectly acceptable choice, but we also tested while
