it's been a while since we've had some properly garbage gaming on this channel
but I think what's in this box may change that
now in this box is the cheapest Microsoft Surface tablet available new and I'm
pretty excited to try some varyingly inappropriate levels of gaming on it
oh that that required a lot less Force than I was expecting and
hey okay oh they sent over the pen and by they I mean Micro Center that sent
over the cheapest Microsoft Surface that they have thank you very much Micro Center
oh yeah yeah what a beauty here is the cheapest new Microsoft Surface you could
buy from a Micro Center you can see here that it cost 400 new and it is a Microsoft Surface
go 3. now what I find really interesting about gaming on this device is that it
has Windows 11 on it so we may have quite a big variety of games available to us to
play on it but we'll figure all of that out a little bit later uh let's open the box and
have a closer look at it but first I want to open the pen because that's fascinating
oh there's like a little tuggy thing does it does it all undo with one pull
no wow the pen feels quite nice it is plastic but it's it's sturdy enough
plastic and here we have what almost looks like a little felt tip and then
on the back we have like an eraser bit yeah that looks like a reasonable writing utensil
all right oh that's a nice touch we've got little Graphics that show you where all the i o is and
what it all does on the bit of I don't know is this like rice paper below that we've got some
bookies in here and then this is I'm assuming like the power cable and stuff let's have a look
at that oh it's actually got a very similar smell in the Box to Apple products you know
that neutral clean smell I thought you had to pay at least a thousand dollars for that smell
oh that's a cute little charger over here it's got like a fold the out bit
with a very proprietary looking power plug which is a bit naughty
wow this is quite a nice little tablet on the back we've got the Microsoft logo and
it's like a really nicely finished metal and oh this got this little
stand that pops open so you can kind of rest it on the table and that is actually metal as well
and then on the bottom we've got the proprietary connector for like attaching a keyboard to it
which doesn't come with this one because you know it's the cheapest model interestingly the
cameras are on the long edge of the device which along with the bottom keyboard Mount thing shows
that its primary orientation is landscape mode which hints at this being more a laptop tablet
Abomination hybrid thing than just like a straight up tablet which should make it pretty good for
gaming I guess I don't know we'll see in terms of IO around the sides there's there's not a
whole lot we do have a power button up here with a volume rocker but that's kind of all
we have on the top of the device I guess this is what that is and then this is where most of our
i o is we have our proprietary power connector which I don't know why that couldn't have just
been another USBC Port but you know capitalism I guess and then here is our USB C port word
hopefully we can get a video signal out of this type c because I have some ideas for that later
in the video and then finally we have our AUX port which is a nice touch we can still
plug headphones into the device but we don't care about any of this do we the specs is what
gives us the indication of the kind of gaming Carnage we can expect cpu-wise we're working
with an Intel Pentium gold 6500y ah yes Pentium that would have gotten us real excited 25 years
ago we also have a staggering four gigs of LP DDR3 RAM and 64 gigs of emmc storage this thing
is looking like a real Beast now I'm gonna be honest I didn't do any research going into this
video I just saw that it has Windows on it so we can probably do some gaming on it but I don't know
that for a fact so we're gonna have to we're gonna have to find that out together foreign
okay so I think this has like s mode Windows 11 on it so it's like a slightly lower power
version of it but hopefully that doesn't impact our ability to install like Steam and stuff uh
actually I forgot we got the pen with it as well so we can oh that is really weird the pen is
starts registering before you touch the screen but anyway in terms of VD we don't have anything
extra on here it's just Windows 11 but it makes sense it's a Microsoft device it's not the fastest
device if you do a thing that it didn't really expect you to do it it kind of freaks it out a
little bit and it takes a moment for it to figure out what's going on at this point I discovered
that in order to install any apps other than Microsoft apps you need to switch out of S Mode
which is as easy as just activating a thing which is good but first let's see what kind of games
we can play in S Mode but first I desperately wanted a better way to interface with the surface
honestly the first thing I want to do is plug peripherals into it so let's let's give that a try
foreign
very slowly I mean the fact that it can't even load the thumbnails for
the games I feel like isn't a good sign I mean honestly this is some playable Roblox action
it's not running exceptionally well and I have no idea what the settings are
or frame rate is but this is kind of playable oh oh what's happened
oh no and with that it was time to disable S Mode and try and play some real games getting
steam up and running was surprisingly seamless all I had to do was get some switch out of s mode and
then I could install Firefox MSI afterburner and steam I could even run games off of an
external drive but idiot proof setup process aside can it actually run any of the games
no way GTA 5 at 1080p ish normal settings is actually running I mean
running is a strong word but still a few moments later uh
okay that did not last very long maybe if we lower the resolution it'll run a
bit longer before it crashes well we've made it further down the first street so
that's a good start uh here we're running at the equivalent of 720P
oh no it's crashed again oh I actually think we got a full-blown system crash here and not
just the game okay so it lasted like 10 seconds longer but it took the whole system down this time
hey we got further we're actually into downtown now and it's still running now that the game is
actually running you can see that the CPU is bottlenecking the igpu which is one of
my favorite things in the world when that happens because it's just so ridiculous but um yeah look
at that we've actually got GTA 5 running now again with this kind of test when you start out with a
high resolution where the system can't run it at all and you get to a point where you have you
know like 16 or 17 frames per second it actually feels really playable then like it's like wow okay
16 frames per second feels decent at least it's running you know we're playing uh no it's crash
this is probably really stupid but let's try Battlefield 5. it can render the loading icon
which is a good start that's promising wow we get to run the menus which on a lot of these
low powered systems is not even an option so I mean what this is already better than expected
it may have been several lifetimes but we've actually loaded into the
deployment screen hopefully we can spawn before the game crashes
oh we're in this is by far the worst I've seen Battlefield 5 actually run like in game yes the
menus and stuff work but I've never seen it load in and give us a frame every two minutes
oh we got two frames there and we got kicked I think is what happened there uh yeah you
lost connection I'm assuming the game server realized that someone was in there gaming on
an easy bake oven and it just kicked us uh so let me try single player quickly
single player briefly launched but once the game realized what Hardware it was actually
running on it crashed pretty quickly I then quite bravely tried cyberpunk which
obviously didn't even launch so I decided to try something quite a bit easier to run
this is honestly one of the oldest cliches on the channel little potato system struggles to
run any games but then runs the crap out of Half-Life 2. this is at just over 1080P and
we are getting over 60 frames per second which actually is not as good as I was expecting it
to run to be honest Half-Life 2 usually runs better than this but we'll find a way to make
it run even worse in a second but first let's just try the more demanding bit in the game
just over 60 and Half-Life 2 is done this is not amazing uh but let's make it run worse
and then just like that we have a 48 inch 4K potentially 120 hertz tablet let's let's
make sure it is no it's running at 30 Hertz and unfortunately 4K 30 Hertz is the highest
resolution the little igpu in the Microsoft Surface can output which in all fairness is
probably not going to be a problem for the kind of gaming performance we're gonna get from this thing
at 4K now with GTA 5 I'm not entirely hopeful it's gonna work uh considering that at 1080p
it could game for like 10 seconds and then would crash but maybe maybe it was just underutilized
maybe the tablet was just so offended by us giving it such a loser load that it didn't
even want to try and at 4K it'll be so happy with the challenge that it'll run perfectly lie
yeah it just crashed
wow okay down here in our little cave it does run well enough for it to destroy our refresh
rate foible that we have so even though we're getting a respectable frame rate of over 60 it
feels like garbage and there's lots of tearing again we are just above the refresh rate problem
that we have with the display and honestly that to me is actually kind of impressive it is low
settings but it is 4K on the cheapest Microsoft Surface you can buy and it's been essentially
Plug and Play right so that's that's pretty cool that looks real 1999 right there uh let's actually
crank the settings and see what that does has it crashed oh no it's just taken very long wow it's
made a huge difference to the quality though and it's actually not impacted our frame rate that
badly it is running very similarly we lost like six or seven frames per second and that six or
seven frames per second we can't utilize because of the refresh rate anyway so um yeah look at that
we can actually run Half-Life 2 at high settings 4K and if you have a low enough standard this is
playable which brings me to the end of the first bit of gaming Carnage on the channel in a while
and it kind of made me curious about gaming on a high-end Microsoft Surface let me know in the
comment section down below if you want to see that and thank you for watching if you enjoyed
the video consider subscribing to the channel to see more videos like this one and maybe consider
watching another video suggest it'll pop up in a second and until three seconds from now bye-bye
foreign