if you already own a surface pro is the surface pro six good enough to upgrade
Microsoft recently introduced the surface pro 6 and we're actually
finishing up our hour review but we can answer a question today that you
probably are wondering about if you already own a surface pro is the surface
pro 6 worth it now there are three generations of surface pros for your
recent generations and they're all pretty much functionally identical what
we have here is the surface pro 2017 and what we have here is the surface pro 6
again if they weren't if they were the same color you probably wouldn't be able
to tell the difference there's two changes though with the surface pro 6
the first obviously is the color this is the first time since say the surface pro
2 that the surface pro 6 if the surface pro comes in black the other change is
what's inside of it this has a seventh-generation chip
inside of it and this has an eighth-generation core chip inside of it
though essentially everything else again remains the same same dimensions same
weight down to about the same down to about the ounce now just a quick
microcosm of our review which would encourage you to read on pc WorldCom
this comes in this is a twelve point three inch tablet 27:36 by 1834 again
unchanged the price is 1199 for the tablet as what we this is what we have
this is a core i5 with eight gigabytes of RAM but you'll also have to buy the
type cover it doesn't come bundled again and it ranges from $129.99 to 15999 this
is actually the cheaper type cover this ironically costs you $100 more for the
black configuration if you want the cheapest surface pro six by the Platinum
color which is this color now inside of this is a 1.6 gigahertz Core i5
8250 you inside of this is a seventh generation Core i5 this is actually a
core i7 machine which we'll talk a little bit about later now we're not
going to talk about the surface pro 4 that's an older machine but that has a
6th generation Core chip inside of it basically that is a discontinued product
at this point so we're in that sense we're talking to
the people who already own it but you can't actually buy it let's talk a
little bit about the differences in terms of performance because that is
where the differences lie again functionally the same but what we did in
terms of a review is we always review the products using a suite of standard
benchmarks and there's probably three or four that we want to talk about here
today now the question you want to ask yourself is if I own a surface pro for
doing 100 owners upgrade to a service pro 6 and likewise if I own a surface
pro 17 do I want to upgrade to here's what we need to consider so PC mark home
is sort of a middle-of-the-road benchmark it measures a little like
gaming little web browsing a little bit of video and so forth and what we found
is that for the surface pro 20:17 there's only an 8% increase in
performance if you go up to the 20s if you go up for the surface pro 6 but if
you own a surface pro 4 it's a twenty seven percent boost that's significant
likewise if you go and use the Cinebench benchmark Cinebench is actually a
benchmark that we use for rendering a two-dimensional scenes using the 3d
capabilities of the chip it's probably not something that you're going to use
every day but it's a great test for all the CPUs and all the threads this has a
quad core chip inside of it this has a dual core chip inside of it so you're
gonna see a substantial benefit from going to the service pro 6 in that
regard in fact you're gonna see a 47% boost with this going to the service pro
6 and an 88% boost going from the surface pro 4 so again it's a pretty
much a niche application but if you are involved in doing a lot of rendering
work you probably want to make that upgrade the third benchmark that we
talked about is the 3d mark sky diver benchmark and this measures the 3d
graphics capabilities of the chips now again it's worth mentioning with this we
were given a core i7 product to review this is a core i5 the core i7 came with
an iris plus GPU that's substantially more powerful than the HD 620 that comes
in this now it's worth mentioning that the core i5 model of this also comes
with a d620 but we have to sort of review what
we're given if you're going for talking about graphics which again this is sort
of a key for games obviously you're talking about graphics 40 percent boost
from service Pro 2017 to the surface pro 6 and if you own a surface pro 4 well
it's almost a no-brainer it is an 81 percent boost and this is something
you're gonna want to take advantage of the final thing to think about is
battery life it's a key it's a key metric for a laptop you're obviously
gonna want to consider this when you're buying something like this and here you
don't have as much wiggle room again you've got the same chassis so you're
squishing the same battery in there and the only thing you can really do is make
a few adjustments as far as cooling is concerned and as far as the power
consumption of the individual chips so the battery life difference from this to
this is relatively minor it's about 12% again though with a surface pro 4 you're
getting a substantial upgrade that's 57% probably actually a little bit more
because your battery is gonna degrade over time you see that happening with
your smartphone the same thing happens in a tablet so that is a much more
substantial difference there's one other note to talk about when we're talking
about the differences between the two and that is the fact that this has a
substantial fan noise attached to it it always had this if you get the core i5
model is actually a famous machine might not be a big difference but remember
Microsoft's point this time around is focus and a fan noise is very
distracting it was on that this silent as a grave the core i7 though has that
fan I think what we're concluding on this oh that's actually before we do
talk about that let's talk about a few alternatives so if you own a surface pro
and you don't necessarily want to upgrade to the surface pro 6 what should
you decide upon in addition so we have three that I'd
recommend first of all those lenovo's the mix 521 with 720 and the ThinkPad x1
tablet which is the third year that on the third generation the mix is a great
machine the battery life is bad it's sort of at the bottom of the barrel the
ThinkPad x1 is a terrific machine but it's a little bit more expensive along
with that I also like the HP Spectre devices and the HP Spectre x2 is a bit
more consumer-friendly it's got Bang & Olufsen speakers it's
just a well man you action machine HP and Lenovo are pretty
much tops of the heap at this point along with the service machines the
bottom line is is that the surface pro 2017 and the surface pro 6 are both
solid machines if I was a surface pro 4 on her
I would definitely upgrade to the surface pro 6 if I was a surface pro
2017 owner is spending another thousand dollars for an 8% to 10% increase in
various benchmarks worth it I would probably say not but again it's your
choice the bottom line the surface pro 6 is a solid machine that you should
consider however there are alternatives out there for our full review check out
PC world comm