Microsoft Surface Laptop Review: Plush, Premium Design In A Competitive Category

Name: Microsoft Surface Laptop
Brand: Microsoft

by Tuan Huynh — Thursday, December 28, 2017, 12:31 PM EDT

Microsoft Surface Laptop: PCMark And 3DMark Performance

Page 5: Microsoft Surface Laptop: PCMark And 3DMark Performance

Futuremark benchmarks have been the go-to system tests since the late ‘90s. We ran the Microsoft Surface Laptop through PCMark 8 v2 and PCMark 10, which are testing suites designed to gauge the system performance in everyday use scenarios with GPU acceleration-enabled, while 3DMark tests its gaming chops.

PCMark 8 & 3DMark Benchmarks

Productivity, System-Level and 3D Benchmarking

We run PCMark 8 through the accelerated Home, Work and Storage workloads. The detailed testing suite covers the entire gamut of what notebooks are typically used for.

PCMark 8 reveals the Surface Laptop’s Toshiba TLC SSD doesn't hold its performance back in daily use scenarios much. The Surface Laptop finishes about in the middle of the pack here.

The Surface Laptop didn't fare quite so well in the newer PCMark 10 suite. Here, the machine trails the pack overall and can't quite keep pace with the quad-core machines in the more heavily threaded Content Creation and Productivity tests.

3DMark doesn’t reveal anything we didn’t expect. While Intel HD Graphics has improved substantially in the last decade, its still no match for a dedicated low-end GPU, like the GeForce 940MX or MX150, when it comes to raw 3D performance. The Surface Laptop won’t deliver an amazing experience in the latest AAA-titles, but it has plenty of power to run indies like Stardew Valley and Party Hard without breaking a sweat.