14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 was officially unveiled on May 20 and is currently the most powerful tablet ever rolled out by the software giant, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not affected by the common issues that also impacted previous models.
As we already reported last week, some of the buyers who purchased a Surface Pro 3 tablet were complaining that their tablets were suffering from overheating whenever they were launching more demanding apps or games.
Of course, this made the tablets pretty uncomfortable, especially when holding them with both hands, so some have even decided to return the devices to Microsoft stores and ask for a new unit.
Some of our readers have confirmed the overheating issues, but a few also detailed a number of other issues, including excessive fan noise when the device needs to cool down. Of course, this might not be such a big issue, but we’re receiving reports that the Surface Pro 3 fans are making more noise than the ones available on older models, even though they were supposed to actually be more quiet.
Here’s a message we received from a reader whose Surface Pro 3 is suffering from this issue:
“Asides from overheating, my Surface Pro 3 gives off a burning smell when the loud fan noise starts. Again when I switch it off to cool it down, it waits for a second and gives off the fan sound for another 3 seconds before it finally stops. Should I worry about this? I had used the surface pro 1st edition in the past and didn’t experience this. It merely got hot but no fan sound or burning smell.”
We’ve searched for more complaints about the Surface Pro 3 fans and have come across the following comment, which is also pointing to an unexpected behavior of the fans when kicking in to cool the CPU.
“I have both the Surface Pro 2 and Surface Pro 3. The fans will come on if I'm installing an app, or running applications that are more demanding than browsing the web. I ran the same apps on both devices. The Surface Pro 3 would get quite warm, and the fans would kick on. At the same time, the Surface Pro 2 fans never came on, and the device is rather cool. Not sure if it has something to do with the Surface Pro 3 being thinner, and not being able to circulate more air in comparison to the thicker Surface Pro 2,” one Surface Pro 3 buyer posted on the company’s Community forums.
At this point, it’s not clear if this is a common Surface Pro 3 problem or only a few tablets are actually affected by it, but we’ve reached out to Microsoft for more information and will update the article when we receive an answer.