MAJOR Delay on i7 Surface Pro 4s!!

[WildKarrde]

The Alienware 13 starts at $950, has dedicated graphics with 2GB RAM and all day battery with an upgraded battery.

 

[Jack Smith18]

The Alienware 13 starts at $950, has dedicated graphics with 2GB RAM and all day battery with an upgraded battery.

Yeah but it's still a AW and not comparable when one is a big bulky laptop and one a pretty lite weight tablet.
The AW runs hot and loud and not sure why you even brought it up since there are much better laptops .

 

[WildKarrde]

It was an example, plain and simple. If you have a better example then feel free to share it.

While I haven't played with the Alienware 13, I owned each generation of the M11x, and each one was a light, portable and competent gaming netbook with excellent battery life outside of gaming.

 

[John M Beauchemin]

Sorry, that word was supposed to be integrated.

What I meant to say was that spending $300 to get better integrated graphics still left me with integrated graphics, not discrete. So I decided it wasn't worth it.

I won't pretend to know all the specs, and from my basic research on the SP4's it seems almost like they've neutered the i7 in order to bring it in line with the i5 by giving it a slower clock speed and only 2 cores instead of the usual 4, but I do know that the cache on the chip itself is 'likely' still twice that of the i5. How that shakes out in the real world, I don't know. I pre-ordered the i7 unit and am still impatiently waiting, but every day that goes by I am having second thoughts about whether the performance gains warrant the massive cost increase. In a desktop solution, an i7 will destroy an i5... but like I said, the SP4 i7 seems totally neutered by comparison. Not only are the chips clocked miserably slow to being with, but the i7 clocks even slower than the i5. I'm concerned that in order to maintain a consistent battery life between the units, they basically trimmed away any real difference between the two.

 

[WildKarrde]

Yeah... that's pretty much what I took away from it as well. If I could have gotten IRIS graphics on the i5 model I wouldn't have even considered the i7. Looking forward to your review when you do get the i7 model though (if you keep waiting for it), I'm still kinda second guessing my choice, to be honest. My SP2 wasn't really all that bad, lol. But the extra RAM is definitely helping, and all other computing is much smoother/snappier with the SP4 than the SP2.

 

[John M Beauchemin]

Looking forward to your review when you do get the i7 model though (if you keep waiting for it)

We'll see if I can hold out. I do plan on using this thing to draw and do work in photoshop, and potentially process RAW photos in Lightroom while on-site... so that's the reason why I went i7 initially. I was convinced that the i7 will be markedly better than the i5 at that kind of stuff, but the more hardware specs I see the less convinced I am. I also don't know anything about the difference between Intel540 Iris graphics vs the 520 in the i5. I'm a desktop guy, don't know jack about integrated graphics. I'm assuming the difference between the two is number of simultaneous operations it can perform? Maybe cache size? Or does it use the CPU cache? Maybe it's time to read up on that so I can really make a decision.

 

[WildKarrde]

The difference in gaming is about 36%, which I'd say isn't insignificant. I'm getting my numbers from here:
Iris Graphics 540 Mobile compare HD Graphics 520 Mobile GPU