PC World - USA (2020-11)

64 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2020

REVIEWS MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP GO

The JetStream benchmark measures a

browser’s performance on JavaScript and

WebAssembly and “rewards browsers that

start up quickly, execute

code quickly, and run

smoothly,” according to

the developers. We’re

testing hardware, not

browsers, here, and

there’s some variation—

some of these tests were

performed under Chrome

and the legacy Edge

browser, both of which

have evolved over time.

Still, it’s a decent measure

of Web

performance—and if you

consider these as

Chromebook

competitors, they’re an

important benchmark,

too. Here, the Surface

Laptop Go landed right in

the middle.

The Speedometer

benchmarks measure the

responsiveness of Web

applications, using demo

web applications to

simulate user actions such

as adding to-do items.

The Surface Laptop Go

posted one of the highest

scores in this test.

I played the pair of games mentioned

earlier to get a sense of how the Surface

CrystalDiskMark measures how well the Surface Laptop Go SSD

performs: surprisingly, pretty well, especially in sequential reads.

Unfortunately, the Surface Laptop Go’s SSD does not appear to be user-

accessible at all.