Surface Pro 3 i5/i7 for mobile music production?

[Audi0Naut]

Hey guys,
I'm going to start studying at university real soon and therefore i gotta buy a laptop/notebook/tablet/idk. I'd love to produce on the go, using FL Studio 11 with some external plugins.
The Surface Pro 3 seems to be the perfect tablet for university, but I'm not sure if it would be able to handle FL Studio smoothly.

There are two versions I'd consider to buy:
Intel Core i7-4650U (Dual Core; Clock Speed 1.7 GHz; MaxTurboFrequency 3.3 GHz)
8GB Ram

Intel Core i5-4300U (Dual Core; Clock Speed 1.9 GHz; MaxTurboFrequency 2.9 GHz)
8GB Ram

What do u guys think? Would it do the job?
Has anyone here experienced producing with a Surface Pro or an device of similar hardware?
Thanks for taking your time!

[KrisM]

I've been using the i5/8GB version for almost a month, now, and it handles my modest needs. I mostly work with Buzz, which is quite CPU-friendly to begin with, but I pushed an i5 MBA pretty hard with Reaktor and Ableton Live before. Depending on your typical use and/or readiness to freeze/bounce tracks, plugins used, etc, you'll be fine for a lot of stuff.

Microsoft is a lot more shady than Apple about battery life. The "up to 9 hours" shit is at 50% screen brightness (compared to 75% for the MBA tests, which regularly gets more than rated by independent testing), which isn't all that great, but overall battery life is pretty good and I don't really regret the purchase.

It gets hot quickly if you push the CPU even a little hard, though, definitely splash out $150 for the extended warranty (with two accidental damage replacements to boot, $50 deductible) in case it kills itself lol. It's never shut down on me, though, FWIW, even when spending almost an hour rendering fractal images while plugged in. It was still responsive, too, and I let Apophysis7X use all but one thread of the CPU and as much RAM as it could stomach.

the Type Cover is cheap shit and not at all worth $130 or $150. I'd be happy enough with it for $75 but would prefer $50. It has basic scissor switch laptop keys I've hated in PC laptops since forever, I miss typing on my MBA. The trackpad is good for Windows, but again the Apple hardware shits on it for feel and smoothness of use. Both are usable, though. I wish the keys were separated, it's way too easy to hit multiple keys are once unless you're dead on and I have short not-stubby fingers. It's covered in a felt-like microfibery thing that attracts pet hair and dust (plastic keys, glass-embedded trackpad). All the same, it's a handy and useful screen protector that does double duty as a keyboard.

The stand is very nice, and quite sturdy. I draw (terribly) on it a lot and it's great for propping it up like a little easel.

Do you know if FL Studio handles high DPI displays or not? You might have to fiddle with Windows 8.1 display settings, disable scaling (which will make it look tiny), or whatnot. If it's tiny you can always use the pen as a mouse, but that's a matter of preference/willingness to stare at tiny things lol.

Oh, and my QuNeo fits in the pocket inside the sleeve I got for it. Very powerful portable little setup there.

[cytone]

There have been some concerns raised about the CPU throttling its speed when under load and it heats up. The i7 version may be worst at this. I don't know how it compares to other laptops in this respect but you may want to research it.

[KrisM]

There have been some concerns raised about the CPU throttling its speed when under load and it heats up. The i7 version may be worst at this. I don't know how it compares to other laptops in this respect but you may want to research it.

f**k I forgot about that probably because I haven't had it happen to me, yet, during music'ing. I keep meaning to watch the clock speeds/temp while rendering something to see how it goes, but I don't think I've been throttled yet because I haven't noticed any time estimates suddenly increase because there's less CPU power available. I'll render a fractal in a bit to see what happens.

I seem to recall something about the throttling mostly affecting people playing games. What I'm remembering is that the GPU ramping up pushes the thermals over the limit, and possibly something about the CPU even losing power from the available wattage to the die (15W iirc) due to the GPU hogging it and choking the CPU off, lowering its maximum clock speed.

This is all sketchy remembrance at best, please don't take this as gospel lol.

Audi0naut, I'd be willing to download the FL Studio demo and try some of your songs to see how well they run.

Another thing, the i5 and i7 CPUs don't benchmark too far apart, imo the i7 is a waste of money unless you just absolutely need it.

[KrisM]

Okay, here's the skinny on my (not super scientific) test. I rendered a fractal for 15+ minutes.

I swear it was at 2.9GHz (turbo mode) when I first started looking, but it spent most of its time at 2.6GHz and that might have been from last night while plugged in. A lot of portable PCs seem to have turbo mode disabled when on battery (which I was).

The temp of each core climbed to 80C over a period of about eight minutes or so. The fan was audible, and the CPU clock stuck at 2.594GHz, call it 2.6GHz that entire time. After a few minutes the fan kicked up more, and the CPU clock dropped to 2.394, call it 2.4GHz, so it was indeed throttled, but not by a lot and to me, acceptable. The temp dropped back to 73-74C, with the CPU sometimes reaching to 2.5, and even 2.6GHz. Once it settled around 73C, the clock went back to 2.6GHz and temps got to around 80C again, and the rendering finished. The average clock was still 2.5GHz.

The CPU immediately dropped to 800MHz, and within 15 seconds or less the temp was down to 50C. I shut it off (it's persnickety about Sleeping and likes to sometimes wake up, especially if on wifi >.> it boots very quickly from the SSD).

I'm still reasonably sure it never reached 2.9GHz because it wasn't plugged in. I've had temps around 95C while plugged in/charging... Though technically 2.6GHz is turbo'ing for this CPU SKU, so it's already being throttled from the get go to 2.6GHz vs the 2.9GHz this i5 is capable of. I can run another fractal rendering when I get home and am on power to see how it compares.

Personally I am okay with these results.

holy f**king shit I almost lost all that due to forum maintenance -_- lol...

**update** didn't even bother with finishing, the CPU started at 2.6GHz while plugged in. that part sorta blows, but this thing is very thin, and the engineers had to do something I guess. I swear I'd seen it at 2.9 before, though. Apophysis7X is only allowed 3 of four cores, though, so maybe the CPU is convinced it doesn't need 2.9GHz? Hell if I know.

[KrisM]

So plugged in and using all four cores this time it got weird. CPU got up to 88C while at 2.6GHz and then it started choking back until it settled at 1.8GHz (with a low of 1.7GHz) and yet at 64C. The hell...? Guess it freaks out when all the cores are maxed. It was happy to run at 78C on three cores @ 2.2-2.4GHz but all four and it won't go above 1.7-1.8GHz -_- two of those cores are hyper threading...

[Audi0Naut]

Thanks for telling me about your experience with the surface pro 3 man.
I actually tested some fl studio projects on a few other laptops with weaker CPUs and it still work smoothly, so I guess it'll work out.

[KrisM]

No problem. I need to stop trying to render on this thing and get some 8-core AMD or Intel quad for that nonsense anyway >.>

[Kaine]

Thanks for telling me about your experience with the surface pro 3 man.
I actually tested some fl studio projects on a few other laptops with weaker CPUs and it still work smoothly, so I guess it'll work out.

What exactly was the chip in the laptop through?

The tablets & ultrabooks use "U" series chips which are far less powerful than the standard laptop chips, which in turn are far less powerful than the desktop chips.

The's a whole world of difference between a i7 "U" & i7 "MQ" & i7 "K" series variants.

For a rough and ready comparison take a look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and compare the chip you want with a chip you know to see how it holds up.

[Gonga]

Alaina Yee's review at Maximum PC mentioned that v3 has bigger, noisier fans than v2, but has a much larger screen so performance suffers slightly.

These new ultra-books and tablets have another major downside - they are not easy to repair, if at all, and not recyclable. Everything goes into the landfill, just like "Smart"phones.

I read that the biggest selling PC on campus in the U.S. this year is the laptop by a wide margin. I got my daughter, who uses autocad to do architectural renders, a high-powered custom HP laptop with a top-line NVidia GPU, gigabit Ethernet (the Dells were WiFi-only) and touchscreen, and then put in a Samsung SSD. No regrets at all.