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From the Surface 2 to the Surface three, Microsoft has completely overhauled the tablet'south hardware. The company has completely ditched ARM hardware, allowing Windows RT to die a quiet death, in favor of Intel Within and fully-fledged Windows 8.1 with an easy upgrade to Windows x in a month's time.

The Surface three is powered by an Intel Atom x7-Z8700, which is i of Intel'southward new 14nm Blood-red Trail SoCs built on the company's 14nm manufacturing procedure. The chips are a decent upgrade on the Bay Trail products nosotros've seen in the market since 2022, bringing faster CPU cores, ameliorate ability direction and faster graphics along with full 64-chip back up.

The Atom x7-Z8700 features iv Airmont CPU cores clocked at ane.6 GHz with a Turbo frequency of 2.iv GHz. The SoC comes with two MB of L2 enshroud, a dual-channel LPDDR3 memory controller providing 25.6 GB/south of bandwidth, and 8th generation Intel Hd Graphics based on the same GPUs the company used in their Broadwell CPUs. The GPU in this SoC is clocked between 200 and 600 MHz.

Microsoft claims the Surface 3 "offers more than 80% of the functioning of Surface Pro 3 with Intel Core i3 processor", which is a big claim to make because the significantly reduced TDP of this Cantlet chip. Intel says the Z8700 has a "scenario pattern power" (SDP) of 2W, versus an 11.5W TDP for Haswell-Y.

The Surface iii comes in two SKUs: a model with 64 GB of NAND and two GB of RAM, and a 128 GB model with 4 GB of RAM. I'd ideally similar to see all Surface three'south come with iv GB of RAM because this tablet can run x86 desktop apps that tin can employ a fair bit of memory. Interestingly, for this review Microsoft sent me a 64 GB model with 4 GB of RAM, which as far as I can tell is an SKU not available for purchase.

Other hardware institute in the Surface three includes Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/north/air-conditioning connectivity, Bluetooth 4.0, a 3.5-megapixel front facing camera, and an 8.0-megapixel rear facing camera.

During my time with the Surface 3, there's no dubiousness that this tablet has some serious power under the hood for everyday tablet tasks. Loading apps was snappy, browsing the web on Internet Explorer felt surprisingly fast, and there was no time while using Modern apps that I felt the Surface iii was underpowered. Compared to the ARM-based Surfaces, the Surface 3 is certainly a hell of a lot faster.

Due to the size of the Surface three, I didn't utilize the desktop all that oftentimes, aside from checking out Chrome's functioning and running a few applications. This isn't really the sort of device I would run Photoshop or video editing tools on, and when I did test out Photoshop, it performed acceptably then long every bit I wasn't applying any crazy filters or working with massive files. Video editing and other high operation tasks – large Excel spreadsheets slowed down the Surface quite a flake, for example – are basically out of the question on the Surface 3 due to limited CPU ability.

Gaming on the Surface 3 is an interesting one. Of the Windows Store apps I tried on the tablet, all worked perfectly fine at the device's native 1920 x 1280 brandish resolution, which isn't hugely surprising. Nevertheless, equally this device runs full Windows eight.i, you can also install basically any PC game you like, for ameliorate or worse.

As you might expect, the Surface 3 seriously struggles when faced with a GPU intensive game, which basically rules out nigh games released in the past 5-8 years. Some older titles may work at low quality settings or lower display resolutions, and information technology's nice that you can at least try to play some PC games on the Surface 3, merely I'd typically stick to Windows Shop titles or less intensive games bachelor through Steam.

In general we're seeing a thirty-40% improvement in CPU performance compared to Intel'south previous-generation Bay Trail SoCs, which is pretty impressive. Graphics functioning has also improved quite significantly, as you lot can come across from the Surface 3's 3DMark results.

However,we're seeing the performance of the flagship Red Trail SoC in the Surface 3 trail Intel's Cadre K CPUs by around 25-thirty%. This leads to a pretty meaning difference between Cherry Trail and Haswell, as you lot'd expect considering the big deviation in TDPs.

The Surface 3'southward NAND speeds were particularly disappointing, falling well behind some of the other laptops and tablets I've reviewed recently.