Microsoft Surface Pro 9

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Two of our best sources here! Can’t imagine what he had to pay for a 2tb 2230!

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:thinking: :thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwFdLT85FY8

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Hmm tough one…
.++ lower tablet weight
.+ lower price
.+ bigger touchpad
.+/- magnet for pen on tablet instead of pen holder in type cover (I actually prefer a magnet)
.- no kickstand
.- - no SSD hatch

(no microSD either :sob:)

The question is… can we use the WD SN740 without issues arising? (Apparently, additional messing around has to be done to fit the 740 to a Pro 8.)

1tb 2230’s are running $135-$155 on eBay these days…

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There’s a new cbutters video, for those interested in using an eGPU with their Pro 9.

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I’ve been using my Pro 9 5G since Wednesday, I would say that with my use case it runs as well as my Pro 8, but doing Teams calls and M365 productivity, I could only get 4-5 hours of battery. My Pro 9 5G was able to do the same all day, I would say 7-8 hours of screen time, 10-12 hours of battery total.

The 5G connection I was getting in downtown Seattle was faster than my corporate WiFi network so that is a plus.

I haven’t seen any line jitter in OneNote as I’ve been using it for note taking using the Slim Pen 2.

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eBay for SSDs, especially TLC or QLC ones… I’d give that a miss.

@Marty and others. who have asked me about our testing of the Pro 9 5G, we are still in the process of reworking our tests for performance, but we do have some preliminary results on battery life.

The TLDR version is that in the same suite of tests/tasks which importantly (for us) are reflective of those used in conjunction with our own custom device, the overall battery life is around 25% better than the Intel-based Pro 9.

So, some important caveats to the above.

  1. Perhaps most importantly for those considering switching from a Pro 8, the intel Pro 9 actually takes a step backward compared to the Pro 8 about 10-15%. In other words, despite the presence of the “efficiency cores” the 12th gen overall consumes more power in real world ( for us and our customers) than 11th gen.

One important note to the above: I and our developers are of the opinion that part of the issue is that some apps need to be reworked/updated to work properly with the asynchronous cores of 12th gen Core I as well as properly utilizing the reworked scheduler that is now part of later releases of Windows 11.

And a second additional note for those that might consider sticking with Windows 10; TLDR it’s even worse, showing about a 25% drop over Windows 11 results in the same set of tests.

  1. Specifically to the Pro 9 5g, how much is native versus using X86 emulation has a significant impact. The short answer is that running all native apps the battery improvement is close to 40%, but OTOH a worst case of running only X86 apps in emulation, the battery life is about 20% less than the Pro 9 intel.

However the overall performance in the same scenario of the Pro 9 5g versus the Pro 9 5G is about 25% faster than the Pro X. In other words they went for speed versus battery life on emulation. That being said, the battery life in the “worst case” scenario above is still about 15% better than the Pro X, certainly due to the bigger battery in the Pro 9 5g.

  1. One bright spot is the 5G in the Pro 9 5g. The TLDR is that it’s the best 5g overall in a tablet or laptop, especially if your carrier is Verizon or T-mobile. It tops the iPad Pro 12.9 2020 (we haven’t completed testing of the 2022 model yet) in every category except marginal signal acquisition where it ties the iPad Pro 12.9.

Additionally, this device solidly delivers on one promise of 5G that so far anyway, was only observable on the iPhone, which is that in aggregate 5G is more power efficient than LTE. It was especially noticeable in a sort of worst-case test comparing the Pro X LTE versus the Pro 9 5g running totally on cellular only where the Pro 9 5G outlasted the Pro X by almost 50%.

  1. One last observation, as I mentioned in a prior post, MS/Qualcomm seems to have reworked the video codec decoding almost completely with the Pro 9 5G with much lower CPU utilization, in some cases (HEVC) less than 1/3. It’s still not quite the level of Intel’s Core I 11th gen, but it’s within a few percent, close enough not to be noticeable 98% of the time.

So as an advisory for what you may see on the web of other battery tests of the 5G, they will see a significant bump in batter life, if a significant part of their test relies on something like streaming video on a loop until the battery dies. I don’t think that represents real world usage for 99% of users.

BTW: I’ll post some performance results after we have reworked our tests, and I’m comfortable than I can trust the results.

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Do you think this is a Win11 over Win10 issue, or a Pro 9 issue? I’m asking because elsewhere @LarryM was considering upgrading the Go 2 to Win11, and he had battery life concerns.

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Both, you have to have the reworked scheduler to properly utilize the asynchronous cores in 12th gen

EDIT: What appears to be happening with Windows 10 and 12th gen Core I, is that both the OS and Apps pound the performance cores and underutilize the efficiency cores

2nd Edit: based on our tests, the battery life on most systems doesn’t change significantly either way between Windows 10 and 11; 12th gen Core I being the noted exception.

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Makes sense. I guess his question is: does updating a Go 2 to Win11 drop the battery life, or should it stay about the same? I personally have no idea, I haven’t seen much about battery impacts from the 10 to 11 upgrade. But that discussion is better left for that thread.

Like I said, in our testing on 95% of systems, it doesn’t seem to make a difference either way…

PS: because this is the internet, you will see claims that Windows 11 “destroyed” a devices battery life.

Keep in mind that battery life is always poor with either a brand new system, or an upgrade, until Windows settles in and finishes things like indexing etc.

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One other thing and I’m not sure where to post this as it is both Surface Pro 8/9 specific as well as Windows 11 22h2 specific, but as part of the changes to better support HDR (which is significantly improved IMHO), the default brightness is about 15% higher for the same setting on the slider control. And it will thus, if you don’t do anything, slightly negatively impact battery life.

Does the Surface Pro 9 have adaptive refresh, or is that still “Waiting for Godot” like the SP8?

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It has the same display as the Pro 8, so yes

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Sorry - I meant whether it was functioning or is it still an on/off switch between 60 and 120…

It’s not on by default one either device, but its’ been available for awhile now on the 8 and the Pro 9 came with it.

Be aware there are still a significant number of apps that don’t play nice with VRR (artifacting mostly), though MS office and video apps are fine

OTOH itunes video playback is terrible. though streaming via a browser is fine.

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FWIW on the SLS it’s still on-off, but there’s now a mode “Dynamic (60Hz or 120Hz)”. So we don’t have continuously variable refresh, but at least we have automatically switchable as an option.

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