Microsoft Surface Pro 4 in the test

The Surface Pro 4 is the fourth step for Microsoft in the notebook and tablet market. Compared to its predecessor, the touch display diagonal grew only marginally by 0.3 inches to 12.3 inches, but the resolution makes an enormous leap to a huge 2,736 by 1,824 pixels (267 ppi). Font looks very sharp. Pictures and videos is the very bright IPS display in great colors. Its 8 millimeters of thin and extremely high-quality magnesium housing offers only very little space for interfaces. Only a USB 3.0 interface, a headphone jack, a mini-display port and a microSD card reader under the angled back part are visible. If you want more, you have to buy the Surface Dock (USB 3.0) for around 250 euros.


Dominant in performance tests


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Microsoft Surface Pro 4: Benchmark


There are two DisplayPort outputs and USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit LAN and audio. Added to this is a RealSense camera with 5 megapixels at the front and an 8 megapixel camera at the back. The Surface Pro 4 provides wireless connections via WLAN-ac and Bluetooth. Writing, marking and painting is much more fun than the predecessor with the now available surface pen. The pen currently features 1,024 pressure sensitivity levels (previously only 256) and holds surprisingly well on the magnetic sides of the Surface Pro 4. The optionally available, new type cover (around 150 euros) with extra large touchpad also holds by magnetic force on the tablet. The keyboard works better and feels much higher quality than the previous version. If it is planned, some longer texts can be written well. However, if you lift it up into the angled position, the type cover bends over and wags when writing. There is no good notebook keyboard.


Conclusion


Thanks to the Core i5-6300, 8 GB RAM and the very fast NVMe SSD, the Surface Pro 4 dominates the performance tests clearly. With 5,689 points in the 3DMark Cloud Gate, it is a good 40 percent, with the PCMark 7 with 5.007 points around 30 percent faster than the slowest detachable in the test (Toshiba Portégé Z20t-B-11P). In the Cinebench R11.5 CPU test, it holds the competition with 3.42 points and the HD Tune benchmark with an SSD data transfer rate of 849.2 MB / s even clearer. Bottom line, this is more than enough power for all typical office tasks as well as sufficient for some image editing and simpler games. The price for the relatively high power is the rather short run time. The 38-Wh battery of the 770-gram Surface 4 Pro holds only 3:05 hours in the PCMark 8-Battery test.


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In the performance and image quality, the extremely high-quality Microsoft Surface Pro 4 surpasses the test field. This makes the small battery rather early, and lack of interfaces.