It all sits behind the screen, like an iPad or a Surface Pro. It’s not that Microsoft is intentionally holding back performance. The Surface Book 3 has to contain most of its components - CPU, memory, and more - in its tablet portion. The 15-inch Surface Book 3 has an ace up its sleeve. Add four cores with a laptop like the Dell XPS 15, and you’ll see a 53% better score in Cinebench R20’s multi-core test than the Surface Book 3. The difference in core count makes a massive difference in performance.

The Dell XPS 15, ThinkPad X1 Extreme, and 16-inch MacBook Pro all feature up to eight cores. Not only is that less power than the CPUs in most 15-inch laptops, it also only has four processing cores to work with. There’s one primary reason for this: It uses the same 15-watt chip that appears in small laptops like the Dell XPS 13, Surface Laptop 3, and HP Spectre x360 13. My review unit came with a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.ĬPU performance on its own isn’t impressive for a device this large. In this case, it’s the 10th-gen Intel Core Ice Lake processors and the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti. The Surface Book 3 bumps up both its processor and GPU to the latest Intel and Nvidia silicon, respectively. Performance is the only major change in the new Surface Book, so let’s start there. But don’t be fooled - the Surface Book 3 still doesn’t have the heart of a true workstation laptop. The latest version, the Surface Book 3, doubles down on this performance promise with better graphics via the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti and updated Intel processors. It’s the one Surface product Microsoft often touts as having “powerhouse performance” - particularly in the large 15-inch model. That’s been a problem for the Surface Book.

Surface book pro 3