Review Surface Pro 11 hands-on review: OLED beauty, Snapdragon power

[admin]

The Microsoft Surface Pro 11 adds Qualcomm Snapdragon X power under the hood and an optional OLED screen that looks lovely in person. Here's our hands-on report.

Surface Pro 11 hands-on review: OLED beauty, Snapdragon power : Read more

 

[ElegantFowl]

Is it fanless? That's the key benefit I expect from an Arm chip - still using an SP7 which is the last fanless one made.

 

[nickthorley]

You have the LCD and oled showing the same battery life when I would have thought oled would be more power hungry. Is this potentially a misprint and if not, why do you think this is

 

[Milkdromida]

You have the LCD and oled showing the same battery life when I would have thought oled would be more power-hungry. Is this potentially a misprint and if not, why do you think this is

OLED is typically more power efficient than LCD as it doesn't need to backlight the whole screen all the time. Microsoft are still quoting the same time between both models though, and I'm pretty sure the OLED model even has a slightly bigger battery.

 

[Robert_Wade]

Here's my issue: Because it's basically Windows running on a simulated environment, I have zero trust that it can handle what I need it to do. I currently have both an SP6 and SP7, both the i7 variety. I use the SP7 to run my Digital Audio Workstation software along with a number of virtual instruments (I'm in a band). I cannot have a tablet that's going to choke when I put multiple layers of .vst's in play and am in the middle of a performance. As I typically discover, I'm an outlier when it comes to Microsoft's products---and Microsoft doesn't give a squat about people like me as customers (or they would have kept Windows 8 and Windows Phone and Zune and Cortana). But the bottom line is, my SP7 is showing its age, and at some point I expect the SSD to just stop functioning. The SP11 looks interesting enough, but I simply have seen ZERO analysis on how it handles non-traditional, non-mundane workload like audio processing.

 

[alissa914g]

Most likely it is NOT fanless. I had all three models and they all seem to have a fan on them. Usually you wouldn't need them but if you put it in an enclosed space or left it with the keyboard on and flat, you'll hear the fans go on at some point. Stand it upright and maybe the fan comes on. It's better than throttling although like all other versions of Windows, you can change the fan mode to passive instead of active.. it will throttle to cool down.... but you can barely hear the fan anyway.

 

[alissa914g]

Here's my issue: Because it's basically Windows running on a simulated environment, I have zero trust that it can handle what I need it to do. I currently have both an SP6 and SP7, both the i7 variety. I use the SP7 to run my Digital Audio Workstation software along with a number of virtual instruments (I'm in a band). I cannot have a tablet that's going to choke when I put multiple layers of .vst's in play and am in the middle of a performance. As I typically discover, I'm an outlier when it comes to Microsoft's products---and Microsoft doesn't give a squat about people like me as customers (or they would have kept Windows 8 and Windows Phone and Zune and Cortana). But the bottom line is, my SP7 is showing its age, and at some point I expect the SSD to just stop functioning. The SP11 looks interesting enough, but I simply have seen ZERO analysis on how it handles non-traditional, non-mundane workload like audio processing.

It's going to be better than SQ1, SQ2, or SQ3. Audio processing isn't very intense and even doing something like mass encoding FLACs to WMA Pro 10 like I did once, it goes very fast even on an SQ3. Video encoding worked as well as it did on an M1 on the SQ3.... so hopefully you'll get an ARM64 native compiled app... but for all the APIs and DLLs that are Windows based, they'll be using ARM64 native code on those so all apps won't run through the Prism layer.