Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review

PCMark 8 v2 is the latest version in Futuremark’s series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of systems, from tablets to desktops. PCMark 8 offers five separate benchmark tests--plus battery life testing—to help consumers find the devices that offers the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for their particular use case. This latest version of the suite improve the Home, Creative and Work benchmarks with new tests using popular open source applications for image processing, video editing and spreadsheets. A wide variety of workloads have also been added to the Work benchmark to better reflect the way PCs are used in enterprise environments.

PCMark 8 v2 System Level Benchmarks

These tests can be run with or without OpenCL acceleration. We chose to run with OpenCL acceleration enabled to leverage all of the platforms’ CPU and GPU compute resources…

We do not have many reference numbers using the latest edition of PCMark 8, but we ran all three of the accelerated tests on the Surface Pro 3 anyway. Without context its hard to know, but these numbers are actually quite good.

Futuremark PCMark 7 General Application and Multimedia Performance

Futuremark's PCMark 7 is a whole-system benchmarking suite. It has application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment and uses custom metrics to gauge relative performance. Below is what Futuremark says is incorporated into the base PCMark suite and the Entertainment, Creativity, and Productivity suites--the four modules we have benchmark scores for you here.

The Surface Pro 3 performed very well according to PCMark 7. In our tests, the Surface Pro 3 had no trouble outpacing the Dell XPS 12, and the lower-end tablet platforms were no competition at all. Although we don't have the full PCMark 7 data set on hand for the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014 edition, that machine put up an overall PCMark 7 score of 4850; the Surface Pro 3 was about 5.8% faster.