Wow...The Michigan Winter Shows Thermal Limitations of Surface Pro 3

[cbuchach]

I love my Surface Pro 3 that I have had for a few months. I have the 256GB/8GB i5 model and have no issues with its performance. I was curious about its 3D performance and used 3DMark to test. Its performance was quite poor indoors. Winter has come early to Michigan and ran the same tests with the Surface outside on our porch and recorded a nearly 25-49% performance increase! I don't intend to game on my Surface nor do I intend to game outside in my parka in 30 degree temps, but I thought the performance increase was interesting nonetheless.

Firestrike 388 --> 581
Sky Diver 1625 --> 2573
Cloudgate 3445 --> 4609
Icestorm 29358 --> 40612

 

[Crono]

There's too much power and heat for a lot (perhaps most) mobile devices for them to not throttle at least occasionally due to the small, constrained form factor and lack of cooling options compared to desktops or even laptops. Especially now with SoC's approaching the power of desktops and laptops of a few years ago.

But yeah, that's a significant difference for the SP3.

 

[gmaster456]

Michigan winters are great

 

[wilds]

Try using ThrottleStop and try to find the maximum frequency you can sustain.

 

[arandomguy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC8rCeDMqFw

The SP1 chassis (and cooling solution) was originally designed to accommodate a 17W TDP Ivybridge CPU under extended load without throttling. This was later dropped to a 15W Haswell CPU (and also had better power gating features) with the SP2 in the same chassis, since now the cooling was over engineered and so fan noise was reduced and was able to maintain no throttling.

So now they launched the Surface Pro 3 (thinner and lighter despite a bigger display!) with the same 15W Haswell as the CPU. While the launch "marketing" speak focused on improved design and construction to make a thinner device the actual reality is thermal dissipation applications in consumer products have barely advanced at all and defiantly not since the <2 years the original SP chassis was designed. So despite a higher fan speed (more noise) the new chassis cannot even prevent a 11.5W Haswell (i3 version) from throttling under extended load. The reason is the size improvements actually came largely from trading off cooling potential.

Now is this an issue? If your performance criteria (based on usage) is only mostly burst speeds than this is actually a good thing, since you obviously get a much easier to handle chassis for the display size (and the SP3 is a great improvement of the SP2/1 in this area). If you're actually expecting i5-4300u performance in line across all workloads with other devices (particularly ultrabooks) than no you won't get that (also the SP3 is not really faster than the SP2, as the latter for the majority of its life received a silent update to the same i5-4300u but doesn't throttle. Only the i7 version would be faster in bursts but be slower over extended).

But the other issue with this is you are still paying the large premium (margin + BOM) for these higher end CPUs that you can't actually fully use depending on your usage, and may not actually be all that beneficial ($200+ cheaper Baytrail version with 4GB memory anyone?).

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Recently I was flirting with buying a new iPad (Air 2) and based on the price for the 64GB Wifi+Cellular, I considered the Mac Air as an alternative. I then, naturally, started comparing the Mac Air to the Surface Pro 3 and was shocked. On one hand you have a lot of power (Surface pro 3) that is thermally limited but has good screen resolution. On the other hand you have the Mac Air that isn't over-done on CPU/thermal, but has the worse screen resolution--even compared to the iPad Air 2.

I later decided to buy nothing. All three options seemed mis-Q'd.

 

[arandomguy]

There's other options. Plenty of ultrabooks have high resolution IPS displays for example.

Not a big loss though. You'll probably see a large amount of new product offerings with CES since Intel is set to announce more Broadwell SKUs. You'll see more Core-M offerings as well likely. The SP3 and Macbook Air updates seem likely to get a Core-M treatment.

The SP3 seems to be mirroring the SP1, a CPU not quite the right fit for the chassis. Core-M should do the same thing Haswell did for the SP2.

 

[Midwayman]

At this point I wish the thinness wars would end. devices are thin enough. I'd rather see the better cooling and battery life.

 

[Roland00Address]

So with broadwell and the surface pro 4, do we want core m, fanless, and thus thinner?

Or do we want the 15w broadwell inside the surface pro 3 chassis with a mode where you can designate fanless (similar to battery saving mode) but you can put it on balanced or high power and suddenly use the fan?

 

[wilds]

I wouldn't say it's dishonest or a bad thing to see heavy throttling in the Surface 3. If I let my MacBook Pro's i7-3720qm turbo whenever it wants, it will try to hit 3.6 GHZ whenever it can, causing fans to spin up aggressively. I'd say it's Intel's fault for having an aggressive turbo when peak CPU performance is set to 100%.