Does Your Surface 3 Get Hot?

[chobo2]

Hi

I have 128gb surface 3 running windows 10 build 10130 and I notice at time it gets really hot. I am not sure if it is the battery getting hot or what. I am not doing anything to crazy most of the time just in Facebook or Google Chrome.

 

[ClintRo]

Mine does occasionally as well.. only a little bit usually up by the camera.

As Sam said, it is not unexpected.

 

[Stiv X]

Concur, a little heat sometimes. Nothing that would concern me, though.

 

[Lokified]

Since the Win10 Insider Build does not have the correct drivers... it may be using more of the CPU than it needs to. Remember the CPU (Cherry Trail) is designed to run at the base speed and ramp up when needed by a program. If the CPU's drivers (i.e. chipset drivers) are not installed then it may run at the max speed all the time. That is not good since it will put wear and tear on the chip and drain your battery faster. I love Win10... but I won't put it on my S3 just yet.

 

[P_Devil]

^ They updated the build to incorporate the latest drivers from Intel for the Atom x7 SoC, I'm not sure which build MS did that with though.


Heat up by the back camera is normal, that's where the SoC is that operates your Surface 3 (the CPU, graphics, RAM controller chips, etc.). It's normal for that to heat up quite a bit if you are conducting heavy tasks like video encoding. It shouldn't get warm if you are just playing back videos, unless you use Chrome for online videos as that relies on software decoding instead of hardware decoding like the modern version of IE.

I have never had my Surface 3 (same model as yours) get hot but it does get pretty warm when I'm encoding videos with the display on. Having the display turn off helps with that. The batteries for the Surface 3 are all in the kickstand region so any warmth there signifies that something is going on with those and they really shouldn't get warm, not even when charging.

 

[Haden Blau]

Only when browsing on certain sites on Chrome and playing CPU intensive games do I notice it getting uncomfortably hot. But that's to be expected.