Buyer beware: Surface Pro 3 throttling: i7/i5 = i3 in speed with sustained load.

[greyskytheory]

I just bought the Surface Pro 3 I7 256gb model. I do a lot of music production and was surprised by the SP3 performance. I loaded most of my software (Presonus Studio One 2.0, Kontakt, Absynth and a ton of sample libraries from the likes of Spitfire Audio and Sample Logic). While in the dock it performed flawlessly and I was extremely happy with it. The very next day I was on an airplane traveling and figured I would whip out the SP3 and see if it would perform well without the docking station. I was surprised to see that I was able to load the song I was working on and play it back with no problems. I then added extra tracks and FX and the SP3 handled it all in stride without any hiccups...for pro music work the SP3 is just fine.

 

[Mattt McGregor]

I was annoyed to see that most tablet makers/sellers with thin designs and relatively powerful I5/I7 processor do careful throttling of the CPU. I am surprised to see that it appears unwarranted when you are running within many specification limits. The Dell Venue does it. My Lenovo Miix 2 11 i5 does it, and it does it really badly; 1.6/2.0 down to 600Mhz. These designs are not ready for this type of hardware. They can neither dissipate the heat or transfer the type of prolonged power required to drive this level of CPU and graphics for stress level work. I wish they would stop writing up wish list adverts and not mentioning that the top CPU is available for 5 seconds in the Lenovo or less than 5 minutes in the SP3. Frustrating.

Thanks for the video and information. It bad to hear the SP3 is also prone to this, but misery loves company.

 

[Yanishka2011]

Guys the Venue 11 Pro throttling on the i5 series has been solved.

No throttling now take place until the CPU hits 84C... previously it was at 68C (which may be also the same for the SP3)
Under stress tests and gaming CPU doesn't really hit anything above 74C. Venue can now run games that were impossible before the fix.

Not sure SP3 can do the below... perhaps someone can come up with something similar
h://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/mobile-devices/f/3824/t/19576995