Latest Surface Pro i5 vs Surface pro 3 i7

[Moonsurface]

I've been very quiet here for a long time, simply because I have had no need to be on here and no issues with my 2014 surface Pro i7

However... as I have just become a student again, the potential discoutns at the Microsoft store are tempting. I was wondering if I could/should update my Surface to one of the newer models for quieter running (mine is a bit of a fan -blower... not a problem just a little bit embarrasing in quiet places) and longer battery life.

I was wondering about the performance of the newer i5 vs the older haswel i7 in my Pro 3... is it an upgrade in performance?

Just curious really - I feel like I'm being unfaithful to my Pro 3 as really there's nothing at all wrong with it, it's still the best computer I ever owned!!

 

[Moonsurface]

Well I'll find out for myself soon as I just bought one. I can then directly compare looooool!!

Weird offer on MS store for i5 with type cover for about £100 less than the tablet alone. I already have a pro 4 pen so I'm fine in that regard.

 

[efinimazda]

What is the warranty status of your device? I just managed to get my Pro 3 i7 upgraded to the Pro 2017 i7 at the Microsoft store... straight exchange because I have the complete warranty.

 

[Moonsurface]

What is the warranty status of your device? I just managed to get my Pro 3 i7 upgraded to the Pro 2017 i7 at the Microsoft store... straight exchange because I have the complete warranty.

Was there something wrong with your Pro3?

Mine is over 4 years old so no warranty and also nothing wrong with it.

 

[efinimazda]

Was there something wrong with your Pro3?

Mine is over 4 years old so no warranty and also nothing wrong with it.

thermal shutdown, otherwise a solid device

 

[Moonsurface]

thermal shutdown, otherwise a solid device

I never had that problem with mine. Even when ai had it rendering high quality previews from 36mp raw files in lightroom. It got hot but never shut down.

 

[Moonsurface]

I can add to this myself now. I'm in love with my new i5!!

I am doing a masters degree in bioinformatics and have been playing with bioinformatic software for a while. recently I realised that the easy way to run things was to try the new Windows subsystem for Linux so I installed the app and enabled the feature on both of my Surface devices. SOOO Much better than the VM I was using but that's another story (well done Microsoft on enabling this brilliant feature!).

I recently ran an analysis on whole bacterial genome files on both computers. Computationally this is demanding as it's a lot of data to process and uses several tools to do so. My old i7 surface pro completed the analysis using the subsystem in 3 min 50.

The new i5 surface completed it in 1min 50!!! I was astounded at the difference. There may have been slight variations in overhead on the machines as the older one has more software installed and potentially more background processes running but that is an enormous difference. I wonder how much thermal throttling on the i7 impacted the performance? On paper the i5 is about 30% faster not >100% lol..

Suffice to say i'm VERY happy with the performance of my new device.

 

[Sdelliott31]

I am an SP3 upgrade to SP (2017) (5) convert as well and a returning college student in my adult years. I just received mine through an eBay auction and am very pleased. No fan, battery is very strong compared to the SP3 even with the SP3 degradation of battery it still held solid and this is better. Love not having a fan as I have the i5/256/8gb model and yet not any CPU throttling that I've noticed. I haven't pushed it much, Netflix and just downloading updates and installing program. The screen size and increased resolution makes even my eyes see the sharp content at standard setting, which opens up screen real estate and makes it seem larger. Very please. Had the SP3 then went to a Lenovo Yoga 720 which did nice battery and keyboard-wise. Typed a lot of papers on the Lenovo in the fall, but it was only a 4gb model. This, I think is the sweet spot.