The Surface Pro 9's built-in 5G connectivity gives it one major leg up over the Intel model, but I didn't find it very compelling during my testing.

(The bigger surprise? It was on par with the ASUS ZenBook Fold 17, a foldable computer held back by a low-wattage Intel chip.)ĭevindra Hardawar/Engadget What good is built-in cellular? (At least the SQ3 faired better with multi-core speeds.) 3DMark's Wildlife Extreme test, which is one of the best ways to compare cross-platform gaming, also returned a low score, as I expected. Even the weak Surface Go 2, with its low-power 11th-gen Intel chip, managed to outperform the Pro 9 5G in single-core performance.

Sure, Geekbench 5 was running as a slower emulated app, but its score is also indicative of how other emulated programs will run. Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 (Intel i5-1135G7, Iris Xe graphics)ĪSUS Zenbook 17 Fold OLED (Intel i7-1280P, Iris Xe graphics)Īll of the benchmarks I ran on the Surface Pro 9 also show that it's slower than any premium laptop we've reviewed over the past few years. Microsoft Surface Pro 8 (Intel Core i7-1185G7, Intel Iris Xe graphics) Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G (SQ3, Adreno 8cx Gen 3) In many ways, it felt like a step down from the Surface Pro 6 I reviewed four years ago, save for the silkier 120Hz refresh rate on the Pro 9's larger screen. Does that sound like progress to you? While it performed generally fine with native apps like Spotify and Evernote, multitasking between them and emulated apps still felt noticeably sluggish. So if I wanted to work the way I'm used to on the Surface Pro 9 with 5G, I'd just have to live with an experience that's worse than a three-year-old Surface Laptop. I typically run multiple browsers at once, since it's the easiest way to separate work and personal accounts. Microsoft Edge, on the other hand, is snappier all around because it's a native ARM app. As an emulated x86 app, it's slower to launch and fairly laggy while browsing the web and juggling tabs. While a few of the company's engineers assured me in a recent interview that the performance would be comparable between the SQ3 and Intel models, I knew that was inaccurate the minute I launched Chrome.

Devindra Hardawar/Engadget A better Windows on Arm experience, but not by muchĪfter using the Pro 9 with 5G for several days, I'm even more baffled by Microsoft's reckless attempt at shoving its x86 and ARM product lines together.

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