Microsoft promotes the Surface Pro 3 as the perfect laptop replacement, and the company positions it as a rival to Apple’s MacBook, but when removing the keyboard, it instantly becomes a truly powerful tablet running the full version of Windows 8.1.
In a research conducted by Which?, Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 proved to be the fastest tablet on the market, topping the speed test and scoring better than Apple’s iPad Air 2 and Google’s Nexus 9.
The Apple iPad mini 3, which is often described by the Cupertino-based firm as a really fast device, is only on the tenth place, below less famous names such as Tesco Hudl2 and Asus MEMO Pad 7.
Going back to the Surface Pro 3, Which? says that it’s 20 percent faster than any of its rivals, whereas the iPad mini 3 is three times slower than Microsoft’s tablet.
The tests were performed with Geekbench and you can find all results in the table at the end of the article.
Very powerful hardware
It’s no surprise that the Surface Pro 3 is the most powerful tablet on the market because the hardware that Microsoft is using for the device is pushing it closer to the laptop industry rather than to the tablet one.
The top-of-the-range Surface Pro 3 model comes with an i7 process, 8 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage space, which basically turns it into a little notebook that can be used on the go with no compromise. Of course, it’s not cheap, and the most expensive model costs almost $2,000 (€1,500), but what you pay is what you get, and in this case, you get one of the most powerful devices on the market.
Below are the scores obtained by the Surface Pro 3 with an Intel i5 processor in Which?’s survey:
Tablet name | Geekbench score |
---|---|
Microsoft Surface Pro 3 128GB i5 | 5069 |
Apple iPad Air 2 | 4046 |
Google Nexus 9 | 3537 |
Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 2014 | 3060 |
Apple iPad Air 32GB wi-fi | 2687 |
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 10.1 | 2650 |
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 | 2594 |
Asus MEMO Pad 7 ME572C | 2351 |
Tesco Hudl 2 | 2084 |
Apple iPad mini 3 | 1790 |