i3 SP3 Anandtech early review

[be77solo]

Nice early look of a review in process by Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8287/first-look-the-799-microsoft-surface-pro-3-with-core-i3

Seems it performs quite well, even faster than the i5 SP3 in DOTA test, which means the GPU doesn't throttle near as badly. Good read.

64GB is definitely the limiting factor for my usage, but for those that don't install much or save a lot of data, looks great.

 

[mcsenerd]

Yep... which lend further credence to the somewhat controversial opinion that the i7 is gonna be almost for naught. It's all fine and dandy that it can ramp up to higher clocks and has a "somewhat" faster GPU...but if it's sitting there throttle down to keep the thing from melting... exactly what are those things gonna do for ya? If they offered the i3 in 256GB with 8GB of RAM...I might have just gone that route myself.

 

[mtalinm]

can't wait for anand's i7 review.

 

[Kif]

Interesting read. Thanks!

 

[wynand32]

As always, it comes down to what you want to use the machine for. If you want a mobile gaming system, then the i3 looks like the better option (equal performance, lower price) if you can live with 64GB. My huge caveat to that conclusion, however, is that I don't really see the SP3 as a gaming system at all. These benchmarks don't say that the i3 SP3 has _good_ performance, only that the performance is comparable to the i5.

On the other hand, the i5 provides measurably better CPU performance, and really better performance overall. So if you want to use your SP3 as a productivity machine, then the i5 remains the better option. And, I don't think these results support the proposition that the i7 won't be proportionally better than the i5--except for in gaming.

I'm guessing that i7 gaming will be the same as the i5 and i3, because perhaps Intel has the GPU on all of the processors running at essentially the same speed for thermal reasons. Certainly, the thing that heats up my SP3 the most are the modern UI games that I play, implying that it's the GPU that produces most of the heat.

 

[Kif]

The elephant in the room is what does this mean for the i7 performance. Anandtech seems to have a working theory that the thermal constraints in the SP3 is going to limit the performance enhancements of a i7 processor with the iris 5000 GPU.

 

[wynand32]

I was thinking a little more about this, and really do think that the GPU on both the i3 and i5 is deliberately limited to a certain clock speed, which is why i3 and i5 gaming performance is roughly the same. In this case, the games are strictly GPU-limited, meaning it doesn't matter which processor is installed. I think the i7 will likely be the same, and you won't see any gaming performance difference between any of the processor configurations.

I don't consider this a bad thing, because as I mentioned earlier I think it really comes down to how you want to use the SP3. I don't care a wit about gaming on the machine, because I have a desktop for that and don't play anything but casual modern UI games when I'm mobile (which perform just fine). And, I'd submit that if you want a mobile gaming system, the SP3 simply isn't the machine for you--and neither would be any Ultrabook using the Intel integrated graphics.