How is the Atom Processor?

[SteelSteve]

I've been thinking about upgrading from my Surface 2 to a Surface 3 mainly as a result of limited app store, and the possibility of using it to replace my bulky work laptop when I travel (primarily to run office docs and a few small non CPU intensive apps including the companies VPN software). I have tried to find comparisons between the 2 and 3 with little success, and most Surface 3 reviews seem to indicate that the Atom is underpowered for the device. So with that said I figured to get the real story I'd ask the people who actually own one. How do you all feel the Atom processor does on the Surface 3?

 

[oditius]

If you are going to make high demands than go with the pro version. But what you are saying you are going to do, then the 3 should work fine. I would get the one with 4GB ram. Storage isn't that much of a problem because it will take the larger SD cards with no problem.

Posted via the Windows Central App for Android

 

[jcorbin121]

Steve - I have the base Surface 3 model. I run Office 2016 using mostly Excel to manage my family budget, do some other light spreadsheet work, write Word doc's use Quicken 2011 with 8 years of data in it (a little slow but not unusable) and have not really found anything that doesn't run at acceptable levels. I switched froma 17" Dell i7 Inspirion with 8GB of RAM, yes that box plays games better but the day to day apps run the same as far as I see. I love the Surface 3 after having it for 6 or 7 months, the only downside I can complain about is not being able to install apps to the removable storage card. I have the Surface 2 magnetic keyboard, the S3 Pen and a logitech USB mouse. The pen is pretty cool, works amazingly well, I have dome some 'whiteboard commenting' onto Office documents with it easily. I too have used my company VPN with no issue, I have the 10mb Charter and get pretty close to 90 mb down, 4mb up on a speedtext.net run. So far the Atom has held up, now if you look at task manager that little guy will run 80-90 % usage a lot of times but it keeps up pretty well.

John

 

[SteelSteve]

Yeah, no high demand processing. In fact my Surface 2 does most of what I need, I'm just hoping the Surface 3 since I can install software would be able to allow me to access internal company info which requires a VPN connection. If it performs at least as fast as my Surface 2 I think it will do what I need / want.

 

[scrumperman]

I run a full blown install of Photoshop on it with no problems. Mind you I usually have nothing else running at the time but it can still handle the workload.

 

[Faizil Wasbari]

My mistake was putting high expectation on the Atom processor for the first time. The reason was that I am using Lenovo i7 before. In the beginning, I did struggle a lot to get used to the S3 due to the processor and emmc ssd limitation. After the firmware update, everything works fine. After knowing the S3 limitation, now I think it is easier and more friendly to use it.

 

[Steve Adams]

We love our surface 3's. I am getting ready to install corel photo video suite x8 on mine. I know I have to probably make sure nothing else is running. But hey, I don't need upteen things running while using something else. The surface 3 is the best piece of computing gear we have owned. Both my wife and I love them.