Poll Who's got an i7 and hasn't had any overheating?

[Wingren]

I have had my i7 / 256 SP3 for almost 2 weeks now and it has shown the thermometer twice...
Both times has been when installing Windows updates.

 

[HvT]

No problems with my i7 SP3. It got warm the first day installing everything - but not hot. After restoring all the data, it also got warm for a day or so. I assume the search indexer went over all the files.

 

[Len J]

Ive had mone (I7/512) for 5 weeks or so.

I've never seen the thermometer icon. I get throttling and the fan when I'm ingesting and rendering raw files onto Lightfoot & when video conferencing (especially on Google+ hangouts).

Heavy 9hr/day office user and photographer.

No real complaints here.

Len

 

[Moonsurface]

Yes mine throttled when rendering previews in lightroom, but not too badly. I was happy with the performance for what essentially is a tablet!

 

[malberttoo]

I have had my i7 / 256 SP3 for almost 2 weeks now and it has shown the thermometer twice...
Both times has been when installing Windows updates.

Hi Wingren, welcome.

You should also be aware that there was an issue where the SP3 were displaying the thermometer but were not in fact even close to being that hot. I believe the issue was resolved in one of the very last updates. If the fan is roaring away and the back is alarmingly hot then yes you probably have an issue. Otherwise it was just a fluke.

 

[macmee]

update for me: when I installed what I thought was not a CPU heavy game (braid), my fans were on max and I was quite alarmed. The device was incredibly warm but no thermometer.

 

[msolok]

update for me: when I installed what I thought was not a CPU heavy game (braid), my fans were on max and I was quite alarmed. The device was incredibly warm but no thermometer.

Yeah, don't be alarm. This is 100% normal. Just because it feels hot DOES NOT mean it is overheating. The back of the Surfaces are metal in order to help dispel heat. They are effectively a big heat sink, which means they feel warm/hot, but that is 100% normal.

I just finished a session of gaming on my i7 Pro 3. Played a 2-2.5 hour session of The Elder Scrolls Online (which the Surface Pro handles REALLY, settings are much higher than I thought I would be able to manage). Yeah the fan was on (but it's really not very loud), but was to be expected, and the back got hot. But no restarts, no complaints and no slow downs. It was great!

 

[lnwj]

I've had the i7/256 since launch day and have had 0 shutdowns from thermal issues. I do get some pretty heavy throttling under load, but the CPU doesn't seem to ever go past 90 C.

I do a lot of gaming on my SP3, I found that disabling Turbo on the CPU during gaming sessions keeps the thermals low enough to not throttle the GPU as much.

I have a few gripes, but over all I am happy with the SP3. It does what I need it to do.

 

[Aegeas]

I play a lot of games as well as Netflix and I have never had a thermal issue. I went through 7 different laptops before I bought this SP3. I tried Lenovo, Dell, Sony, Samsung, and Asus. Each of them had some little issue I couldn't get past. It was either that they didn't have TPM, didn't have Windows Pro, were too heavy, battery was terrible, keyboard was terrible, or some other such issue. I am finally content and I am so glad to finally stop looking.