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Similar to Surface RT, Surface Pro uses a 2x2 802.11n WiFi controller from Marvell. While it’s possible to run productivity workloads on many tablets these days, there’s truly very little that separates what you can do on Surface Pro with what what you can do on a conventional PC. Ultimately Surface Pro’s storage subsystem is a big part of what separates it from the current crop of ARM based tablets. Compare this to the ~20MB/s you get on most ARM based tablets and it’s obvious that this Surface deserves its Pro moniker. Using a simple USB 3.0 to SATA adapter I could easily read and write at around 200MB/s. USB 3.0 is equally as impressive on Surface Pro.
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Microsoft claims something like 29GB of free space remains on the 64GB model - enough for some apps and data, but keep in mind like all solid state storage you don’t want to completely fill up your drive either (this is also true for ARM based tablets like the iPad). Given the already high price of these systems and the relatively small price differential between a 64GB Surface Pro and a 128GB model, I’d recommend going for the latter. I don’t really view this as false advertising by Microsoft (both Macs and PCs have been sold like this for decades), but you do need to know what you’re getting into here. Of that 110GB, 89.5GB was free space that remained. My 128GB review sample was partitioned down to 110GB with roughly 8GB used for the recovery partition. There’s been a lot of debate over the amount of free space available on Windows RT/8 tablets fresh out of the box. The fastest sequential transfer rates I’ve managed on the 4th generation iPad are typically on the 20 - 30MB/s range, whereas the C400 in the Surface Pro is good for over 400MB/s in reads and just under 200MB/s in writes. Although some ARM based SoCs feature SATA interfaces, pretty much all of them are paired with eMMC based NAND storage solutions that are horribly slow. To put this in perspective, the C400 is in the same class of storage device that’s used in Apple’s MacBook Air.
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Update: It looks like the C400 SSD is an mSATA drive, likely similar to the one we reviewed here a while back. Microsoft is sourcing from multiple SSD vendors and claims to be shipping with optimized firmware, but I don’t know what other vendors are in the mix. In my 128GB review sample, Surface Pro features a Micron C400 SSD.
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Courtesy of Intel’s HM77 chipset, you also get a full blown 6Gbps SSD and a single USB 3.0 port - both significant upgrades over Surface RT. Surface Pro ships with a micro SDXC slot along the edge of the device.
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I even saw 2.75GHz for a very short period of time (remember, Intel’s Turbo Boost can exceed max TDP until the silicon gets up to temperature). It never gets uncomfortably hot however.ĭespite being a tablet, the Core i5-3317U had no issues hitting its max turbo frequency of 2.6GHz. There’s no getting around the fact that Surface Pro gets warm, noticeably more so than the 4th generation iPad. On the edges I measured a max surface temperature of 36.5C. That’s towards the top of the unit, around where the Core i5 CPU is located. I measured a max surface temperature of 41.8C while running 3DMark 11. The two fans do a good job keeping the CPU cool (I saw typical CPU core temperatures between 50C - 60C), but Surface Pro does get warm. The fan direction switch is triggered in tandem with display rotation, so as soon as you see your display rotate you’ll hear the fans change direction. Rotate the device into portrait mode and the fans will switch directions, drawing in cool air from the long edge and exhausting it out of the short edges. In landscape mode with the Type Cover attached, Surface Pro draws in cool air from the sides and exhausts it out of the top of the device. Fan noise is audible but not annoying - it’s very similar to the sound you’d hear out of any ultraportable with a couple of tiny fans spinning up.
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Do any sort of serious multitasking or start using Surface Pro as a real PC instead of a tablet and you’ll quickly hear them spin up. For most light use cases, those two fans will remain spun down and you can’t hear them. While Surface RT was passively cooled, Surface Pro features two integrated fans to cool the 17W Core i5-3317U.