For being the base AMD Ryzen model CPU/GPU it performs much better than I though it would. Hopefully you can get a Ryzen 7 version to test soon as well.
UHD 630 is the old Intel GPU(Gen 9.5) found on coffee lake. The new surface has ice lake chips has Gen 11 GPU, Iris plus with 64 EU. Supposedly twice as fast as the prior generation.
I am sure we will see cross comparison reviews, especially when someone gets Enterprise 15"(Intel version) to compare straight to consumer 15"(AMD).
Intel brags about "up to 64 EU IGP" then 99% of their SKU have 24 EU or less. One model has 64 EU and that's only their high end i7 K model. Who the hell is going to buy a $600+ CPU and run the IGP? Even if it is Intel's best IGP it's still below a 750 Ti.
"Why they don't show UHD 630 performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider?"
As you've correctly noted, the short answer is that it's very slow. Too slow to even justify the time benchmarking, unless you like framerates in the teens.
Ultimately the Ryzen APUs are fast enough that we treat them like low-end dGPUs, and that includes running AAA gaming benchmarks on them. The Gen 9.x GT2 GPUs, on the other hand, are decidedly a tier lower for intensive gaming workloads.
Good win for AMD not battery life is a bit underwhelming. With the new 1W display for new laptops (based on IceLake?), this needs some serious improvement. AMD needs Ryzen mobile on 7nm soon. A decent laptop but, 128 GB as baseline, really? Good to see they're not offering 4 GB RAM at least. Add another USB port and this is a good enough machine for light home usage.
Thanks for the review! Unfortunately, it confirmed several of my fears - the AMD version of the new Surface is definitely usable, but behind even the previous (Intel) generation of this premium laptop line. The Wifi choices made by MS are indeed questionable at best, while the low battery life points to the basic problem of using a chip not designed for mobile use in an ultraportable. Really wish AMD would roll out a true Zen2+ or better mobile APU with better power management. For now, it continues to play second fiddle to Chipzilla's offerings.
Microsoft is likely to be one of their first customers for this, too... in their consoles. Realistically we'll only start seeing new PCs with equivalent APUs around that time - most likely with 802.11ax Wi-Fi as well in the case of the inevitable Surface Laptop 4.
You make it sound like last gen Intel mobile products are such a step back when in fact they are identical to current products on the market and Intel's "next-gen" products as well. The performance gains have piddling at best. 8 and 9th gen products for all intents are purposes are the same architecture and nm process. You also left out the fact that an R5 mid range processor is beating some of Intel's i7 high end processors in CPU performance. Battery life could be better but have you done the calculation of performance per mAH of the battery? Or are you just assuming with considering the size of the battery and the performance being afforded? How do Intel laptops with similar performance characteristics and battery size fare? Like any laptop, battery life is dependent on more then just the chip on the device.
Your comment is misleading, intentional or otherwise.
Nah, AMD's battery life still isn't up to par against Intel's 25th Skylake revision, not even the original release.
AMD is kicking ass on the desktop but the mobile front is still a bit much. Intel has spent billions making laptops more efficient. They've done well. They got the laptop market under their thumb, even today, while they've effectively lost the performance desktop battle.
Not sure why AMD had such a hard-on to get a CPU that is evidently not mobile-focused, into an extremely mobile form factor. No support for LPDDR4, no built-in WiFi, and an iGPU that isn't powerful enough to make any tangible difference to an Intel offering, just makes for a "why".
Oh, Ryzen's iGPU does offer a tangible real life difference if the reviewer choses to include the right benchmarks and also show's the Intel iGPU results for them.
Tech Report's and Computer Base's Ryzen 2500u review do and they show that the tangible difference is 50 to over 100% better fps, greatly better frame times, i.e. the difference between a game being playable, or not.
If you have to include “the right benchmarks” to make your APU look good, your product sucks, and you are engaging in the very behavior you accuse anandtech of. Hypocritical.
Well that depends. The sample size is this review is rather small. Very small in fact. Adding more certainly wouldn't hurt. It's less about adding the right benchmarks then it is getting a more reliable dataset. If another review is showing data that more appropriately demonstrates the GPU's capability, that indicates that perhaps the test suite used here is not ideal.
One of the advantages of having a better iGPU is that it allows you to do things that you cannot do with a weaker iGPU. Casual gaming, particularly e-sports titles come to mind. Same for any GPU accelerated software.
If you do not include any of those in a review (e.g. just compare them on the basis of surfing the web and watching a few videos), then you are hiding these advantages.
MS segmented their surface laptops into "business" (Intel) where the better battery life is an advantage when you are using it for email, powerpoint, Word, Excel but most likely not causal gaming or content creation.
For this you have have the AMD based consumer platform with its faster iGPU - have a look at the PC mark scores to see how it scores there. You can also check other reviews for Laptops with other Ryzen APU to see that they do offer a tangible advantage over Intel's iGPU when it comes to being able to still play a game or not.
That advantage is paid for with lower battery life in idle / low load situations (not necessarily true for higher load), so it really comes down to what is more important to you. I know that for my work laptop, I would value the extra battery life, for a personal one the ability to do a bit of casual gaming would be worth having a shorter battery life (which is still decent, we are not talking Bulldozer here).
So not hypocritical imho. Just pointing out that a review should include tests for what it was built for / is aimed at.
All the benchmarks I have seen so far, the ice lake iGPU is equal or better than AMD APUs for same TDP. On the otehr hand the CPU is tangibly faster with much better battery life and connectivity (wifi6 built-in).
Intel doesn't have built-in wifi either. current offering actually still use smaller RF module, due to Intel CNVi. I don't get why Microsoft doesn't release AMD with latest ax chipset, because Intel AX200 does works on AMD system too.
I get that we always want the best but I honestly don't know why it's harped on about how this device "only" does ~315 which is about as fast as a SSD can handle anyway - 1G connects for a single machine just don't matter in real life. More important to me is how reliable the connection is, which according to this review is solid.
I'll give that the GPU is compelling but all other aspects of the APU are mediocre, especially the battery life which worse than average. I would like to see how the ice lake version compares to this APU. I think this machine proved why Intel still dominates the low power/thin and light laptops market.
Did you look at the system performance benchmarks? Ryzen 5 does pretty well there (second place overall in PC Mark 10) and the list does not include any Core i5, only core i7.
The only laptop that has a higher score is the top of the line Surface Book 2 with an i7 plus nVidia dGPU. The Ryzen model tested here is the base model, btw.
Yes, battery life could certainly be better (although they do not test how well it does under load), but Surface Book Ryzen us not the worst - there are Intel based models that do less well.
Yeah, if you consider this is the middle-of-the-road APU (R5) from AMD being benched against the top-of-the-line CPUs (i7) from Intel, it does really well. For most of the CPU benchmarks, it's right in the middle of the i7 pack. For most of the GPU benchmarks, it's better than the iGPU, as good as the MX150 dGPU, although not nearly as good (as expected) as the 1060 dGPU.
Would be interesting to see how this APU compares to i5 versions of these laptops.
Would also be interesting to see how the R7 APUs compare to the i5 and i7 versions of these laptops.
this is 8th gen, meaning we are comparing to the past products, you talked about r7 but from what I've seen we are talking 100-200mhz difference (so 5% difference at most ). also the TDP will get up as clock speed goes up which equal to more heat,worse battery life etc. many test that it did perform good is due the GPU as I said it is compelling but is it enough I would say no, and for testing battery life under load I would say while it might have some use cases most people will use the laptop on battery for basic tests like browsing the web, watch videos, edit documents or other light use programs. if the r5/r7 had lower price I would give it more favor but as it stands out it does not give us any discount, it may have been due Microsoft pricing tactics but it does not change the fact. also we need to see how it compares to ICL version of this machine. I would guess it would still have the better GPU but the gap would shrink significantly, and CPU would not be it strong side either.
Decent showing against previous generation Intel options, meaning it wasn't as far behind as I expected. Unfortunately for AMD, Ice Lake offers better than 2x the iGPU performance of 8th gen chips, and there will also be a minor bump on CPU performance, battery performance, and memory speed.
People overreacting should understand this is the base model, for a base model it competes very we with top end models of last year I would be really excited to see higher end models of surface laptop 3 AMD VS INTEL COMPARISON Felt that surface should have integrated ZEN 2 ARCHITECTURE INTO THESE LAPTOPS
Except this "base" model has worse IRL GPU performance, worse batery life, and worse wifi. It is a step backwards. AMD GPUs are supposed to be better then intel, but the graphs here show that is not hte case unless power isnt a consideration.
Kind of hard for MS to use ZEN 2 ARCHITECTURE APUs when they refuse to make them. AMD is just crippling themselves here.
eh, it shows the igpu as the most powerful one, even beating mx150 which is a dgpu on some scenario. too bad the graph still hasn't show Intel gen11 graphics. so I don't get what do you mean by worse irl gpu performance.
of course, as expected, it won't beat gtx 1060 due to sheer amount of difference both in tdp and die size.
Couldn’t agree more with this. Even Apple doesn’t charge that much for an SSD upgrade. The base model is good value but shame about the prices of the upgrades.
THIS x 10^3. Keeping a 128GB base was one thing 2 years ago when NAND prices were still through the roof, but today? And their prices to upgrade are even more insane.
Excellent review as always, Brett! Is the Surface Pro 7 also in the pipeline for a review here? I'm quite curious to see your analysis of the GPU performance.
Ice Lake is two pieces of silicon. Intel 10nm yields are low. Ice Lake is expensive to make, and that gets passed onto laptop price. Yes, the Ryzen is $1200. The Ice Lake models will be closer to $2000. How much do you want to spend?
The Ice Lake Version is cheaper with a starting price of $999 compared with $1199 for the Ryzen version (admittedly this is a somewhat apples to oranges comparison as it is 13.5” vs 15”). This is in the table on the first page of the article.
It may be worth mentioning this in the article or showing it in the graph as N/A. The really odd thing about the review is that the compared systems are not consistent across tests (i.e. 5 are included in some but not others).
> "The addition of an extra Vega core in the semi-custom Ryzen APU does help in some scenarios, but is still somewhat held back by the Zen CPU cores in real-world games."
The GPU is probably held back by 2400MHz RAM, but it is DEFINITELY not held back by the CPU performance.
It's an integrated APU, both the CPU and GPU need to share the same thermal environment (and power environment). Any inefficiencies in the CPU have a knock-on effect on the GPU performance budget, and the choice in where the CPU/GPU split is placed also affects real-world performance.
Ryzen will auto manage power between CPU/iGPU, so I don’t think that’s much of an issue. Memory bandwidth, though, has always been a limitation on AMD iGPUs. You can find benchmarks on desktop APUs with higher memory speeds and the gains associated with that.
Problem is, if MS used DDR4-2933 that Zen+ officially supports, power consumption would increase on both SoC and memory, reducing overall battery life further.
We are eagerly waiting for the 15 inch surface (AMD custom ryzen) vs 15 inch surface Business (Intel ice lake) vs 13 inch surface (Intel ice lake) comparison.
It would have been interesting to post benchmarks for e-sports titles. My kid can play Fortnite very well on my Matebook D with a Ryzen 2500u @1080p resolution and medium details. I am sure there are many similar titles like Overwatch and others.
This would have been much more interesting than testing games where using the iGPU practically comes to to a slide fest even at low resolutions, i.e. they are unplayable regardless if you get 17 or 25 fps avg.
This would also have allowed you to include Intel iGPU results in more games.
Yeah, I don't get the sample games a lot of sites use. I want a spread - from simpler stuff all the way to the latest. Great, can't play Doom 9 but can I play Plants vs Zombies?
What I don't get is why they didn't take advantage of what should be a tiny PCB, since Picasso is a full-fledged SoC, to at least put a massive >70W.h battery in there.
It's a 15" 3:2 large laptop, RAM is soldered, SSD uses the tiny 2230 M.2 form factor and they're using a SoC with no need to eGPU, southbridge, USB controllers, etc. Yet Microsoft managed to put in there a small battery even for 15" standards.
Also, what exactly are the optimizations made on the hardware level, other than just ordering APUs with one extra CU enabled? Actual hardware tweaks should have included support for higher clocked DDR4, like all those 1.2V DDR4 3000-3200 modules being sold right now. As it stands, the extra CU in there makes little difference since it's bandwidth starved. 128bit DDR4 2400 is giving it almost the same bandwdth as the Snapdragon 855 smartphones.
All of this could be excused if this was a low-budget device, but the cost is way too high to fail on these things, IMO.
While they save some space by bringing the GPU on-package, they lose it again with an off-package chipset. Intel's Y and U series bring that on-package, which saves a lot of overall PCB space (and have an on-die GPU anyway, albeit a smaller one until Ice Lake).
The biggest significance here is that Microsoft has moved partly away from the Wintel alliance. Otherwise, it doesn’t mean much for AMD’s direct sales, as estimates of Surfacebook yearly sales is about 300 thousand to at most, 500 thousand.
Will it stimulate other Windows OEMs to follow? Well, those that are already using AMD chips will continue doing so, and the rest will most likely continue doing what they’ve been doing.
AMD was always hobbled by OEMs coupling the former's CPU with single channel RAM, shoddy build, HDD instead of SDD,etc. I agree that the Ryzen Surface is underwhelming but it's by far the best AMD notebook and hopefully spur some higher end AMD notebooks.
"AMD did state that of all the work that has gone into the Surface Laptop 3 co-design, around 50-70% is going to directly benefit the state of other Ryzen Mobile hardware in the ecosystem."
Agreed, but there are people that will only buy one computer and if the Surface Laptop is that one system AND they play PC games, it will end up happening. I do doubt anyone will pick up a Surface Laptop mainly for gaming though. There are other systems that are less expensive and better suited to the task that can also handle any Surface Laptop workloads.
Edge has issues with playing 4k videos on integrated graphic cards from a long time. if you have a better discrete graphics card, it would use it and scale the resolution. i have been facing this issues from 2018, upgraded to a 1080ti and it works well. i think it is on browser's end and idk if they have fixed it yet.
"Unfortunately AMD doesn't offer an equivalent here, so Microsoft is using a Qualcomm wireless adapter in the AMD-based 15-inch Surface Laptop 3."
They could have just used the Intel wireless instead. They offer non-CNVi versions. If you see AMD motherboards with integrated WiFi they all feature Intel wireless.
I would really love if this review was able to compare with the 15" Ice Lake variants they sell in the business store. Or at very least compare it to the 13.5" version so we can see the basic differences in performance between Ice Lake and Zen+. I have a sneaking suspicion that ice lake wins out in almost every metric including battery life on the 15" model, but I'd love to see that actual comparison.
This is too bad. I really like the form factor. Very light for a 15". Great screen, great aspect ratio, keyboard, and touchpad. But with poor battery and wifi, it just doesn't make sense. I'm one that really likes the alcantara on the deck, and would miss that. It always feels nice, and does not get dirty like the utubers want you to believe.
So why exactly does amd wait 9 months to release the mobile verisons of their now 9 months old cpu's? This is a very bad showing of zen aside ice lake.
I'm somewhat disappointed by the AMD performances. Yes it delivers much better graphics than Intel's IGP, but it's still a joke compared to a graphic card. MS is to be lauded for offering AMD as a choice though.
Ultimately, it's not a gaming laptop - and the resolution is higher than most, which compounds the issue if you want to run native. But some of game results are also a little misleading.
Realistically you'd probably *not* run Civ on Ultra on this hardware unless you don't care about FPS. Memory bandwidth will be hurting. I'd take native res and lower settings to reduce texture size/particles - which might also speed the game itself up, not just its rendering.
Kudos to MS for starting to use AMD chips. I think the overall performance is good and if you include the GPU performance in your consideration, I would say the performance of the platform is on par with Intel's. The only letdown I see is battery life. I feel that Intel still holds the mobile crown for this particular reason.
This is a great option for work and games. I work for https://technovolume.com/, where I was given this laptop. Every day is so much easier for me, it's great!
This is a great option for work and games. I work for https://technovolume.com/ , where I was given this laptop. Every day is so much easier for me, it's great!
The whole ultrabook idea is no longer valid with the benifit vs costs. Was a user of surface book 1 and surface book 2, but recently switched back to a Thinkpad P1 Gen2. I get more flexibility for the P1 with optional 64GB ram, 2x2TB SSD and lower costs. Mobility is almost the same, the surface book 2 is 1.632kg with 0.381kg of power supply. With the P1, the weight is 1.718kg but I can use the 65W lenovo thunderbird power supply which weights less than 0.15kg. Not to mention the P1 has 4core/6core/8core options for the processor and a better Nvidia graphics card.
You can make similar argument with the Surface Laptop 3 15inch.
It is so hard to understand this text. Why u just cant write easier? "Convertible functionality" - are you serious? What it even means? Please just use regular words. It is so hard to read this.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
91 Comments
Back to Article
Marlin1975 - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
For being the base AMD Ryzen model CPU/GPU it performs much better than I though it would. Hopefully you can get a Ryzen 7 version to test soon as well.Rickyxds - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
The AnandTech is protecting Intel and UHD performance, Why they don't show UHD 630 performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider?they don't show but I will tell you! in the same configuration the UHD 630 offer only 20 fps.
You can search on web the uhd 630 performance on Rise of the Tomb Raider, internet can show!
cyrusfox - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
UHD 630 is the old Intel GPU(Gen 9.5) found on coffee lake. The new surface has ice lake chips has Gen 11 GPU, Iris plus with 64 EU. Supposedly twice as fast as the prior generation.I am sure we will see cross comparison reviews, especially when someone gets Enterprise 15"(Intel version) to compare straight to consumer 15"(AMD).
justin.anthony.hall - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
mine is delivered tomorrow, i7 version. I'll let y'all know.mooninite - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Early tests of Ice Lake Iris show it is more of the same old junk from Intel. Nothing special. Vega still wins.0ldman79 - Sunday, December 15, 2019 - link
It's just like their previous IGP.Intel brags about "up to 64 EU IGP" then 99% of their SKU have 24 EU or less. One model has 64 EU and that's only their high end i7 K model. Who the hell is going to buy a $600+ CPU and run the IGP? Even if it is Intel's best IGP it's still below a 750 Ti.
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
"Why they don't show UHD 630 performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider?"As you've correctly noted, the short answer is that it's very slow. Too slow to even justify the time benchmarking, unless you like framerates in the teens.
Ultimately the Ryzen APUs are fast enough that we treat them like low-end dGPUs, and that includes running AAA gaming benchmarks on them. The Gen 9.x GT2 GPUs, on the other hand, are decidedly a tier lower for intensive gaming workloads.
Teckk - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Good win for AMD not battery life is a bit underwhelming. With the new 1W display for new laptops (based on IceLake?), this needs some serious improvement. AMD needs Ryzen mobile on 7nm soon.A decent laptop but, 128 GB as baseline, really? Good to see they're not offering 4 GB RAM at least. Add another USB port and this is a good enough machine for light home usage.
eastcoast_pete - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Thanks for the review! Unfortunately, it confirmed several of my fears - the AMD version of the new Surface is definitely usable, but behind even the previous (Intel) generation of this premium laptop line. The Wifi choices made by MS are indeed questionable at best, while the low battery life points to the basic problem of using a chip not designed for mobile use in an ultraportable. Really wish AMD would roll out a true Zen2+ or better mobile APU with better power management. For now, it continues to play second fiddle to Chipzilla's offerings.GreenReaper - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Microsoft is likely to be one of their first customers for this, too... in their consoles. Realistically we'll only start seeing new PCs with equivalent APUs around that time - most likely with 802.11ax Wi-Fi as well in the case of the inevitable Surface Laptop 4.evernessince - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
You make it sound like last gen Intel mobile products are such a step back when in fact they are identical to current products on the market and Intel's "next-gen" products as well. The performance gains have piddling at best. 8 and 9th gen products for all intents are purposes are the same architecture and nm process. You also left out the fact that an R5 mid range processor is beating some of Intel's i7 high end processors in CPU performance. Battery life could be better but have you done the calculation of performance per mAH of the battery? Or are you just assuming with considering the size of the battery and the performance being afforded? How do Intel laptops with similar performance characteristics and battery size fare? Like any laptop, battery life is dependent on more then just the chip on the device.Your comment is misleading, intentional or otherwise.
0ldman79 - Sunday, December 15, 2019 - link
Nah, AMD's battery life still isn't up to par against Intel's 25th Skylake revision, not even the original release.AMD is kicking ass on the desktop but the mobile front is still a bit much. Intel has spent billions making laptops more efficient. They've done well. They got the laptop market under their thumb, even today, while they've effectively lost the performance desktop battle.
The_Assimilator - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Not sure why AMD had such a hard-on to get a CPU that is evidently not mobile-focused, into an extremely mobile form factor. No support for LPDDR4, no built-in WiFi, and an iGPU that isn't powerful enough to make any tangible difference to an Intel offering, just makes for a "why".Irata - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Oh, Ryzen's iGPU does offer a tangible real life difference if the reviewer choses to include the right benchmarks and also show's the Intel iGPU results for them.Tech Report's and Computer Base's Ryzen 2500u review do and they show that the tangible difference is 50 to over 100% better fps, greatly better frame times, i.e. the difference between a game being playable, or not.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
If you have to include “the right benchmarks” to make your APU look good, your product sucks, and you are engaging in the very behavior you accuse anandtech of. Hypocritical.evernessince - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
Well that depends. The sample size is this review is rather small. Very small in fact. Adding more certainly wouldn't hurt. It's less about adding the right benchmarks then it is getting a more reliable dataset. If another review is showing data that more appropriately demonstrates the GPU's capability, that indicates that perhaps the test suite used here is not ideal.Irata - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
With "the right" I mean proper benchmarks.One of the advantages of having a better iGPU is that it allows you to do things that you cannot do with a weaker iGPU. Casual gaming, particularly e-sports titles come to mind. Same for any GPU accelerated software.
If you do not include any of those in a review (e.g. just compare them on the basis of surfing the web and watching a few videos), then you are hiding these advantages.
MS segmented their surface laptops into "business" (Intel) where the better battery life is an advantage when you are using it for email, powerpoint, Word, Excel but most likely not causal gaming or content creation.
For this you have have the AMD based consumer platform with its faster iGPU - have a look at the PC mark scores to see how it scores there. You can also check other reviews for Laptops with other Ryzen APU to see that they do offer a tangible advantage over Intel's iGPU when it comes to being able to still play a game or not.
That advantage is paid for with lower battery life in idle / low load situations (not necessarily true for higher load), so it really comes down to what is more important to you. I know that for my work laptop, I would value the extra battery life, for a personal one the ability to do a bit of casual gaming would be worth having a shorter battery life (which is still decent, we are not talking Bulldozer here).
So not hypocritical imho. Just pointing out that a review should include tests for what it was built for / is aimed at.
m53 - Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - link
All the benchmarks I have seen so far, the ice lake iGPU is equal or better than AMD APUs for same TDP. On the otehr hand the CPU is tangibly faster with much better battery life and connectivity (wifi6 built-in).Fulljack - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
Intel doesn't have built-in wifi either. current offering actually still use smaller RF module, due to Intel CNVi. I don't get why Microsoft doesn't release AMD with latest ax chipset, because Intel AX200 does works on AMD system too.GreenReaper - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
Surely it's because it costs more, and this is meant to be the more affordable option?Icehawk - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
I get that we always want the best but I honestly don't know why it's harped on about how this device "only" does ~315 which is about as fast as a SSD can handle anyway - 1G connects for a single machine just don't matter in real life. More important to me is how reliable the connection is, which according to this review is solid.Eliadbu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
I'll give that the GPU is compelling but all other aspects of the APU are mediocre, especially the battery life which worse than average. I would like to see how the ice lake version compares to this APU.I think this machine proved why Intel still dominates the low power/thin and light laptops market.
Irata - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Did you look at the system performance benchmarks? Ryzen 5 does pretty well there (second place overall in PC Mark 10) and the list does not include any Core i5, only core i7.The only laptop that has a higher score is the top of the line Surface Book 2 with an i7 plus nVidia dGPU.
The Ryzen model tested here is the base model, btw.
Yes, battery life could certainly be better (although they do not test how well it does under load), but Surface Book Ryzen us not the worst - there are Intel based models that do less well.
phoenix_rizzen - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Yeah, if you consider this is the middle-of-the-road APU (R5) from AMD being benched against the top-of-the-line CPUs (i7) from Intel, it does really well. For most of the CPU benchmarks, it's right in the middle of the i7 pack. For most of the GPU benchmarks, it's better than the iGPU, as good as the MX150 dGPU, although not nearly as good (as expected) as the 1060 dGPU.Would be interesting to see how this APU compares to i5 versions of these laptops.
Would also be interesting to see how the R7 APUs compare to the i5 and i7 versions of these laptops.
Eliadbu - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
this is 8th gen, meaning we are comparing to the past products, you talked about r7 but from what I've seen we are talking 100-200mhz difference (so 5% difference at most ). also the TDP will get up as clock speed goes up which equal to more heat,worse battery life etc. many test that it did perform good is due the GPU as I said it is compelling but is it enough I would say no, and for testing battery life under load I would say while it might have some use cases most people will use the laptop on battery for basic tests like browsing the web, watch videos, edit documents or other light use programs. if the r5/r7 had lower price I would give it more favor but as it stands out it does not give us any discount, it may have been due Microsoft pricing tactics but it does not change the fact. also we need to see how it compares to ICL version of this machine. I would guess it would still have the better GPU but the gap would shrink significantly, and CPU would not be it strong side either.Potato Power - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
Microsoft puts a 46Wh battery inside. That explains why the battery life is only so so. Even my cheapy Zenbook has a bigger battery.sorten - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Decent showing against previous generation Intel options, meaning it wasn't as far behind as I expected. Unfortunately for AMD, Ice Lake offers better than 2x the iGPU performance of 8th gen chips, and there will also be a minor bump on CPU performance, battery performance, and memory speed.Kishoreshack - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
People overreacting should understand this is the base model, for a base model it competes very we with top end models of last yearI would be really excited to see higher end models of surface laptop 3
AMD VS INTEL COMPARISON
Felt that surface should have integrated ZEN 2 ARCHITECTURE INTO THESE LAPTOPS
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Except this "base" model has worse IRL GPU performance, worse batery life, and worse wifi. It is a step backwards. AMD GPUs are supposed to be better then intel, but the graphs here show that is not hte case unless power isnt a consideration.Kind of hard for MS to use ZEN 2 ARCHITECTURE APUs when they refuse to make them. AMD is just crippling themselves here.
Fulljack - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
eh, it shows the igpu as the most powerful one, even beating mx150 which is a dgpu on some scenario. too bad the graph still hasn't show Intel gen11 graphics. so I don't get what do you mean by worse irl gpu performance.of course, as expected, it won't beat gtx 1060 due to sheer amount of difference both in tdp and die size.
isthisavailable - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
*just a comment sh*tting on MS for still having 128gb ssd as the base storage*isthisavailable - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
And charging $300 for 128gb more! Seriously are they using optane or what for justifying such insane pricing because I can buy a 2tb ssd for $300.andykins - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Couldn’t agree more with this. Even Apple doesn’t charge that much for an SSD upgrade. The base model is good value but shame about the prices of the upgrades.isthisavailable - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Apparently SSD is upgradable. Time to swap it with a 2tb monster.tipoo - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
It's swappable, but it's a rare form factor within m.2 and currently there aren't many (any?) replacement drives in this form factor.sing_electric - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
THIS x 10^3. Keeping a 128GB base was one thing 2 years ago when NAND prices were still through the roof, but today? And their prices to upgrade are even more insane.At LEAST there's a few replacement boards available (like this Toshiba - 512GB for a reasonable $160: https://www.newegg.com/p/1B4-0016-03F41?item=9SIAH...
Hifihedgehog - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Excellent review as always, Brett! Is the Surface Pro 7 also in the pipeline for a review here? I'm quite curious to see your analysis of the GPU performance.Brett Howse - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Sorry I didn't get sampled that yet. Next up will be the Ice Lake XPS 13 though so stay tuned.nandnandnand - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
https://wccftech.com/amd-4th-3rd-gen-ryzen-ryzen-t...Throw it into the garbage.
Let's see 6, 8, 10, or even 12 cores.
outsideloop - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Ice Lake is two pieces of silicon. Intel 10nm yields are low. Ice Lake is expensive to make, and that gets passed onto laptop price. Yes, the Ryzen is $1200. The Ice Lake models will be closer to $2000. How much do you want to spend?andykins - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
The Ice Lake Version is cheaper with a starting price of $999 compared with $1199 for the Ryzen version (admittedly this is a somewhat apples to oranges comparison as it is 13.5” vs 15”). This is in the table on the first page of the article.inighthawki - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
There are 15" versions with an ice lake sold in the business store. They are $100 more for the same memory/HDD specs.Rickyxds - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Why you don't show the performance of UHD 630 in Rise of the Tomb Raider??Are you protecting Intel?... Why show the performance of the Ryzen and Vega in DOTA 2???
I answer to you, You are protecting Intel and UHD chips.
but I don't know why!
Brett Howse - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Ryan mentioned this on your other comment that was the same but they Intel iGPU is simply too slow to test on AAA games like this.Irata - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
It may be worth mentioning this in the article or showing it in the graph as N/A.The really odd thing about the review is that the compared systems are not consistent across tests (i.e. 5 are included in some but not others).
Potato Power - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
They get pay-off by Intel. Simple.quadrivial - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
> "The addition of an extra Vega core in the semi-custom Ryzen APU does help in some scenarios, but is still somewhat held back by the Zen CPU cores in real-world games."The GPU is probably held back by 2400MHz RAM, but it is DEFINITELY not held back by the CPU performance.
edzieba - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
It's an integrated APU, both the CPU and GPU need to share the same thermal environment (and power environment). Any inefficiencies in the CPU have a knock-on effect on the GPU performance budget, and the choice in where the CPU/GPU split is placed also affects real-world performance.JasonMZW20 - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Ryzen will auto manage power between CPU/iGPU, so I don’t think that’s much of an issue. Memory bandwidth, though, has always been a limitation on AMD iGPUs. You can find benchmarks on desktop APUs with higher memory speeds and the gains associated with that.Problem is, if MS used DDR4-2933 that Zen+ officially supports, power consumption would increase on both SoC and memory, reducing overall battery life further.
skavi - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Do you guys have ice Lake Surface Laptops in your review pipeline? I would love to finally have an Apples to Apples comparison.Ryan Smith - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Ice Lake is next on the list. But it'll be a Dell.A Surface vs. Surface comparison is an interesting idea though. So you'll have to stay tuned for that.
m53 - Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - link
We are eagerly waiting for the 15 inch surface (AMD custom ryzen) vs 15 inch surface Business (Intel ice lake) vs 13 inch surface (Intel ice lake) comparison.pjcamp - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Correction: I have an original Surface laptop. It has two USB ports, not one.pjcamp - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
My mistake. I saw Surface Laptop and read Surface Book. Not the same thing.Irata - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
It would have been interesting to post benchmarks for e-sports titles. My kid can play Fortnite very well on my Matebook D with a Ryzen 2500u @1080p resolution and medium details.I am sure there are many similar titles like Overwatch and others.
This would have been much more interesting than testing games where using the iGPU practically comes to to a slide fest even at low resolutions, i.e. they are unplayable regardless if you get 17 or 25 fps avg.
This would also have allowed you to include Intel iGPU results in more games.
Icehawk - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
Yeah, I don't get the sample games a lot of sites use. I want a spread - from simpler stuff all the way to the latest. Great, can't play Doom 9 but can I play Plants vs Zombies?ToTTenTranz - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
What I don't get is why they didn't take advantage of what should be a tiny PCB, since Picasso is a full-fledged SoC, to at least put a massive >70W.h battery in there.It's a 15" 3:2 large laptop, RAM is soldered, SSD uses the tiny 2230 M.2 form factor and they're using a SoC with no need to eGPU, southbridge, USB controllers, etc.
Yet Microsoft managed to put in there a small battery even for 15" standards.
Also, what exactly are the optimizations made on the hardware level, other than just ordering APUs with one extra CU enabled?
Actual hardware tweaks should have included support for higher clocked DDR4, like all those 1.2V DDR4 3000-3200 modules being sold right now. As it stands, the extra CU in there makes little difference since it's bandwidth starved. 128bit DDR4 2400 is giving it almost the same bandwdth as the Snapdragon 855 smartphones.
All of this could be excused if this was a low-budget device, but the cost is way too high to fail on these things, IMO.
isthisavailable - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Couldn't agree more.edzieba - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
While they save some space by bringing the GPU on-package, they lose it again with an off-package chipset. Intel's Y and U series bring that on-package, which saves a lot of overall PCB space (and have an on-die GPU anyway, albeit a smaller one until Ice Lake).ToTTenTranz - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
Picasso is a SoC with all I/O embedded in it. There's no need for southbridge or chipset as you're calling it.That's why there are PCBs with Raven Ridge / Picasso with the size of a credit card.
https://www.computerbase.de/2018-02/amd-apu-ryzen-...
melgross - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
The biggest significance here is that Microsoft has moved partly away from the Wintel alliance. Otherwise, it doesn’t mean much for AMD’s direct sales, as estimates of Surfacebook yearly sales is about 300 thousand to at most, 500 thousand.Will it stimulate other Windows OEMs to follow? Well, those that are already using AMD chips will continue doing so, and the rest will most likely continue doing what they’ve been doing.
id4andrei - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
AMD was always hobbled by OEMs coupling the former's CPU with single channel RAM, shoddy build, HDD instead of SDD,etc. I agree that the Ryzen Surface is underwhelming but it's by far the best AMD notebook and hopefully spur some higher end AMD notebooks.The Hardcard - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
I have a couple of questions.First, do other AMD laptops have access and benefit from the firmware and other optimizations that Microsoft has done?
Second, are there any extra obstacles or restrictions to loading a Linux OS onto a surface laptop?
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
For the first question, you should see the following article on just that subject:https://www.anandtech.com/show/14947/already-worki...
"AMD did state that of all the work that has gone into the Surface Laptop 3 co-design, around 50-70% is going to directly benefit the state of other Ryzen Mobile hardware in the ecosystem."
thesloth - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
$300 jump from 8GB/128GB/R5 to 8GB/256GB/R5 seems a little extreme for 128GB extra SSDPeachNCream - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
It's the latest Apple tax brought to you by Microsoft.andrewaggb - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Completely agree. Sure goes from being reasonably priced to overpriced in a hurry.justin.anthony.hall - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
If you don't like Ryzen then just order it with 10th Gen i7 Ice Lake. Simples:https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/surface-laptop-3...
maroon1 - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Battery life is much more important than GPU performance in those devices. It is not like people buy surface to play AAA games.PeachNCream - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Agreed, but there are people that will only buy one computer and if the Surface Laptop is that one system AND they play PC games, it will end up happening. I do doubt anyone will pick up a Surface Laptop mainly for gaming though. There are other systems that are less expensive and better suited to the task that can also handle any Surface Laptop workloads.id4andrei - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Read on the verge how this CPU struggles playing 4k video on youtube(on Edge). Is that a known issue of AMD CPUs?revivedblazejr - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
Edge has issues with playing 4k videos on integrated graphic cards from a long time. if you have a better discrete graphics card, it would use it and scale the resolution. i have been facing this issues from 2018, upgraded to a 1080ti and it works well. i think it is on browser's end and idk if they have fixed it yet.IntelUser2000 - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
"Unfortunately AMD doesn't offer an equivalent here, so Microsoft is using a Qualcomm wireless adapter in the AMD-based 15-inch Surface Laptop 3."They could have just used the Intel wireless instead. They offer non-CNVi versions. If you see AMD motherboards with integrated WiFi they all feature Intel wireless.
inighthawki - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
I would really love if this review was able to compare with the 15" Ice Lake variants they sell in the business store. Or at very least compare it to the 13.5" version so we can see the basic differences in performance between Ice Lake and Zen+. I have a sneaking suspicion that ice lake wins out in almost every metric including battery life on the 15" model, but I'd love to see that actual comparison.Brett Howse - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Sorry we only got the 15" to review. We have other ice lake laptops coming though.inighthawki - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
Thanks Brett. No worries! Appreciate the review for what it is!Dug - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
This is too bad. I really like the form factor. Very light for a 15". Great screen, great aspect ratio, keyboard, and touchpad.But with poor battery and wifi, it just doesn't make sense.
I'm one that really likes the alcantara on the deck, and would miss that. It always feels nice, and does not get dirty like the utubers want you to believe.
0iron - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
On a bright side, there's high chance next year Surface will come out with Renoir. There is always next year 😄hanselltc - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
So why exactly does amd wait 9 months to release the mobile verisons of their now 9 months old cpu's? This is a very bad showing of zen aside ice lake.Silma - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
I'm somewhat disappointed by the AMD performances.Yes it delivers much better graphics than Intel's IGP, but it's still a joke compared to a graphic card.
MS is to be lauded for offering AMD as a choice though.
GreenReaper - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
Ultimately, it's not a gaming laptop - and the resolution is higher than most, which compounds the issue if you want to run native. But some of game results are also a little misleading.Realistically you'd probably *not* run Civ on Ultra on this hardware unless you don't care about FPS. Memory bandwidth will be hurting. I'd take native res and lower settings to reduce texture size/particles - which might also speed the game itself up, not just its rendering.
konbala - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
2400Mhz DRAM for AMD variant is so unfair.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
This is a limitation imposed by AMD. Go look at AMDs spec page, they only support 2400.m16 - Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - link
So outside of the meh WiFi and reduced battery life, this is a solid mid range CPU laptop with some nice GPU chops.Definitively a candidate for purchase if one spends more time in the desk rather than mobile and life on Windows.
deepblue08 - Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - link
Kudos to MS for starting to use AMD chips. I think the overall performance is good and if you include the GPU performance in your consideration, I would say the performance of the platform is on par with Intel's. The only letdown I see is battery life. I feel that Intel still holds the mobile crown for this particular reason.tildas - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
This is a great option for work and games. I work for https://technovolume.com/, where I was given this laptop. Every day is so much easier for me, it's great!tildas - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
This is a great option for work and games. I work for https://technovolume.com/ , where I was given this laptop. Every day is so much easier for me, it's great!dickeywang - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
The whole ultrabook idea is no longer valid with the benifit vs costs.Was a user of surface book 1 and surface book 2, but recently switched back to a Thinkpad P1 Gen2. I get more flexibility for the P1 with optional 64GB ram, 2x2TB SSD and lower costs. Mobility is almost the same, the surface book 2 is 1.632kg with 0.381kg of power supply. With the P1, the weight is 1.718kg but I can use the 65W lenovo thunderbird power supply which weights less than 0.15kg. Not to mention the P1 has 4core/6core/8core options for the processor and a better Nvidia graphics card.
You can make similar argument with the Surface Laptop 3 15inch.
Bespam - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
It is so hard to understand this text. Why u just cant write easier? "Convertible functionality" - are you serious? What it even means? Please just use regular words. It is so hard to read this.jackmy12 - Monday, November 18, 2019 - link
Great work & great post. I am really inspired by it0ldman79 - Sunday, December 15, 2019 - link
The Teseract test, is this streaming, BluRay, digital h264, what?Just curious. I've been using Infinity War to tune my battery life, h264 transcode of my BluRay.