Product test
Fanless, purple 12-inch Microsoft Surface Pro review: generally good, but…
by Martin Jud
An ARM and a leg: the Microsoft Surface Pro X
12.12.2019
Translation: Patrik Stainbrook
Microsoft's Surface Pro X is doing a lot of things right. Not only is the nearly rimless display appealing, but the new induction-charged Slim Pen and the «pen garage» are also impressive. It is let down by the ARM processor, which severely restricts functionality.
The technical details:
Ingenious design
The Surface Pro X looks like a completed Surface Pro 7 to me. Thus you get a display that is 0.7 inches larger despite approximately the same 287 x 208 mm area, which is much closer to the edge of the tablet. It's also 1.2 mm thinner with a thickness of 7.3 mm. The Pro X weighs 774 g without the keyboard.
The Pro X lacks a microSD slot under the stand as seen with the Pro 7. You can insert a nano SIM card under the stand or change the SSD yourself. On the left side of the device you will also find two USB 3.1 Type-Cs as well as the volume rocker. The power button and Surface Connect connector are located on the right side. A classic 3.5 mm jack connection is unfortunately missing.
A sharp, bright display
The 13-inch high-gloss display with an IPS panel has a resolution of 2880 x 1920 pixels and comes in the typical Microsoft 3:2 format. Thanks to the high resolution, working with the pen in particular is a lot of fun – even if you lean in close, no pixels are visible.
To find out how well the display is illuminated I measured it with the x-rite i1Display Pro:
Officially, the display should have a luminosity of 450 cd/m². I measured an average of 490.66 cd/m², which is a very good value for a tablet or notebook. In addition, illumination is quite regular, the 25 cd/m² difference between brightest and darkest spot are not visible to the naked eye.
As far as colour space coverage is concerned, the sRGB display manages to display a spectrum of 94 percent. It's 64.8 percent for Adobe RGB and 66.7 percent for DCI P3. If I measure the black and white value, I calculate a crisp, static contrast of 1348:1. The dynamic contrast is 5841:1.
Accessories: a keyboard, pen garage and the new Surface Slim Pen
If you buy the Surface Pro X, the keyboard and pen are unfortunately not included. The Alcantara-coated keyboard, which turns the device into a notebook, is available in two versions. One with a pen and one without. If you order the version with the pen, you will also get an integrated «pen garage». The pen isn't only neatly stowed away – thanks to induction, it also charges itself.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is only selling the keyboard with a pen garage with a pen included. If you use a keyboard without a pen, there is no pen garage. If you buy a pen in the future, you can only load it externally. By the way, the pen is no longer round but flat, which is a great adjustment. This makes it even easier to hold. Drawing and writing is really fun.
The 310 gram keyboard can be used flat or slightly angled. The keys have three levels of illumination. If you type on the 29.5 x 21.7 x 0.5 cm keyboard, the keys spring back comparatively strongly and you feel a clear trigger point. I find typing pleasant and quiet. There's nothing wrong with the trackpad with multi-finger gesture support.
Loudspeakers
Battery power
Microsoft has added a 38.2 Wh lithium-ion battery to the Surface Pro X. I'm curious to see how long it can keep Youtube going, on top of trying to do a stress test and measure the runtime for office work.
Continuous Youtube streaming
Battery life under peak usage
In order to push all hardware to its limits, I normally run the stress test HeavyLoad and FurMark with the highest screen brightness at the same time. But unfortunately both programs don't want what I want.
Well, this device can't be stressed. But it's gradually stressing me, because that's how most programs are handled by this device. You must be aware of this before purchasing.
Battery life for office work
If I use the convertible as a mobile office and refrain from running Youtube in the background, I get about twelve hours of work in depending on what I'm doing. That's a good value for an office device. I can't say whether it's good for an ARM Windows device due to the lack comparable devices.
CPU and graphics processor
Microsoft SQ1 is a SoC based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform. It's manufactured using the 7 nm process by TSMC and has 8 cores (and 8 threads), half of which are power saving cores. Four cores are based on the ARM Cortex-A76 and can clock up to 3 GHz, the power saving cores are based on the ARM Cortex-A55 and are probably clocked with up to 1.8 GHz.
The SoC also includes an X24 LTE modem, navigation systems (GPS, Galileo and others), a video decoder and encoder for H.265, Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi 5, a memory controller and a graphics chip. The latter is an Adreno 685, which is probably clocked a bit higher than the standard model. Microsoft themselves are talking about a theoretical graphics performance of two TeraFLOPs.
Performance
To test the performance I would use PCMark 10, Cinebench R20 and Geekbench 5.
But unfortunately only the CPU benchmark from Geekbench is running. The other two only display nice error messages.
Surface Pro X Geekbench 5 results:
If I look for similar results in the Geekbench browser, this result actually corresponds to an Intel Core i5, as claimed by Qualcomm. However, not an eighth generation, but rather a fourth gen (Intel Haswell microarchitecture) from 2013.
In case you want to inspect these benchmark results closer:
My verdict: a beautiful but expensive office device
The bottom line is that the device scores the full score for appearance and workmanship. However, I cannot recommend it from a software point of view. You'd better pick up a Surface Pro 7, where the new Slim Pen also works, or another convertible.
Martin Jud
Senior Editor
martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.chI find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.
Computing
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