PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of
the system’s boot drive. This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again,
higher numbers are better. Most modern laptops with SSDs perform roughly
equally on PCMark 8, while any PCMark 10 result above 4,000 or 4,500
represents excellent performance. In anecdotal testing over the course of a few
days, I experienced no sluggishness with the Surface Laptop 3 when opening or
closing apps and browsing resource-intensive websites.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to
make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the
CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary
score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Here, the
Surface Laptop 3 performed slightly (but not meaningfully) better than both the
ZenBook 13 and Apple MacBook Pro.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial,
another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well
with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they
transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo
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better. The Surface Laptop 3 trailed its competitors here.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an
early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series
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operation and add up the total; as with Handbrake, lower times are better. The
Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also
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systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The Photoshop test results were more closely clustered than they were in the
Cinebench and Handbrake tests, though the Surface Laptop 3 outperformed the
MacBook Pro by a meaningful margin.
Graphics Tests: The Surface Laptop 3’s Iris Plus integrated graphics are
quicker than the Intel UHD Graphics of its predecessor, but they still fall behind
an entry-level discrete GPU such as the Nvidia GeForce MX250 in the Asus and
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