Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review
Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA
We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2014 the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran six of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite with Surface Pro 3 (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disk, Cache & Memory and Cache Bandwidth).
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All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speeds (max boost of 2.9GHz) with 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM and Windows 8.1 64-bit.
;) Processor Arithmetic |
;) Memory Bandwidth |
;) Processor Multi-Media |
;) Cache Bandwidth |
;) Cache and Memory |
;) Physical Disks |
The various SiSoft SANDRA tests we ran didn't yield any major surprises. The Core i5-4300U inside the Surface Pro 3 performs as expected, and puts up numbers right in-line with similar processors in the arithmetic, multi-media, and cache-related benchmarks. In terms of memory bandwidth, the Surface Pro 3 offered up about 18.5GB/s, which is also on-par with similar CPU / memory configurations. The Physical Disk benchmark, however, hints at one of the things that makes the Surface Pro feel so speedy during everyday use. The Samsung SSD integrated into our Surface Pro 3 transferred data at over 560MB/s, which is comparable to some of the fastest solid state drives currently available.
