Review: Microsoft Surface Pro 7 2-in-1 Business PC

Test results

With a Cinebench R15 CPU score of 471cb, this 10th generation i5 processor delivers a very nice score and surpasses the previous i5 generation. The performance even comes close to the previous generation i7-3930K processors with, again, 4 cores and 8 threads. The PCMark 8 Home Conventional benchmark shows us a score of 3119 points, positioning this modestly equipped Surface Pro 7 between the average notebook and a gaming PC.

On the mainboard, Microsoft has opted for an Intel Iris Plus Graphics chip. Now things get interesting. When running the OpenGL benchmark under Cinebench R15, this i5 with 4 cores, 8 threads and the Intel Iris chip with 59.86 fps performs exactly as well as an Intel Core i7-3930K with 6 cores, 12 threads and a GeForce GTX 460/PCie/SSE2 graphics module. The PCMark 8 Creative Conventional benchmark shows us a score of 3614 points. Despite our 3DMark benchmark gives us the score ‘0’ back with the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark and the benchmark software can’t be updated for a new test run, we are still very content with the numbers we see. If we compare the scores of all the benchmarks, we see that the performance of this system exceeds the average notebook by a wide margin.

The battery life of the PCMark 8 Home Battery benchmark is 3 hours and 5 minutes, corresponding with a score of 2322. This leaves approximately 10 to 12 percent of battery capacity left. This means that this potent 2-in-1 PC does a fraction shorter on a battery charge than an average laptop, but despite this, this Microsoft Surface Pro 7 can be run for a long time with multiple programs in the background, and the user can even reach for heavier graphics. In any case, this makes us very happy.

We can be brief about the quality of the screen. It is excellent. Via our Spyder 5 Elite calibration tool, we measure an sRGB colour space of 100% and an AdobeRGB colour space of 75%. This allows this Surface Pro to be used very well for artistic purposes. Even for photo and video editing, in most cases this panel provides enough colour range to get a good impression of what the final result will look like.

Caveats

Although we’re delighted with this delicious Surface Pro 7, we’ve found a few little things that, as good reviewers, we’d like to discuss shortly. Very shortly, because we definitely don’t want to burn this Pro 7 on them. First of all, Microsoft has added USB-C, but unfortunately, this one does not have Thunderbolt technology. Now, this is absolutely no deal breaker for us, but given that this technology has been used by the industry for a couple of years now, it is remarkable that Microsoft chooses to not (yet) implement this in its Surface models.