Posted byTop Mod3 years ago
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Hello and welcome to the 3DMark subreddit!
I created this subreddit for people to submit their 3DMark scores, discuss scores, and share how they achieved those scores (overclocking, specs, etc).
For now the rules are fairly basic and are included in the sidebar:
- Posts must pertain to 3DMark benchmarking applications
- Any download links must be from official sources or mirrors
- Scores posted must be valid results in order to be included in the Top-Scores
- Posts must include the benchmark name (ie; Firestrike, Time Spy, Cloud Gate, etc) somewhere in the title
I will add these to the sidebar along with a few other rules, but these are just the basic ones for now while I work on the subreddit.
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Every time we review a tablet at CNET, we conduct benchmark testing, which gives us an idea of how well it will perform while playing the latest and greatest mobile games. We've used 3DMark to test tablets since 2013 (here's a full explanation of what 3DMark analyzes) but a year down the line, how do the zippiest tablets hold up over time?
One way to see how a slate keeps up is to compare gaming benchmarks from our original product reviews with up-to-date scores. CNET Labs took last year's fastest gaming Android tablets and re-ran them through the 3DMark testing gauntlet to see how the updated scores compare.
Points to remember: benchmark scores vary depending on the unique condition of each device. Gaming benchmarks are usually run on fresh slates, but the amount of apps downloaded, internal storage used, physical condition, as well as many other factors, can all play a role on how a tablet performs. The wear and tear of everyday life and casual use takes its toll on your slate, so keep in mind that though our review units scored a certain way, your device isn't guaranteed to do the same.
For each tablet, I reset and wiped clean all of the data to start off with a clean slate (pun intended). I then downloaded the software updates for each respective model. Since the tablets are a bit old, this process took some time. Finally, I downloaded 3DMark onto each and ran the Ice Storm Unlimited test five times in order to select the best score.
Note: The higher scores indicate better performance.
Every tablet, aside from one, saw improved 3DMark benchmark scores. The updated results for the Asus Transformer Pad TF701 and EVGA Tegra Note would even place them on our current list of fastest Android gaming tablets, though the Tegra Note's score was the only one that declined from its original. It seems as long as your manufacturer is consistent with software upgrades -- something Google-branded devices enjoy often -- tablets continue to live up to initial performance expectations.
For those concerned about buying a tablet that will quickly age or become irrelevant in a few months, this information may bring some comfort. Just note that most of these models cost a pretty penny when they were the top in their class -- and some still do. Bargain shoppers can hope for similar results from a budget tablet, but those don't receive the same amount of love from over-the-air updates as much as expensive, high-end models. An investment is necessary if you desire a tablet that will be able to keep up throughout the years.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) , Asus Transformer Pad TF701 , EVGA Tegra Note , and Google Nexus 10 and Nexus 7 were the fastest Android tablets released in 2013, and though they've since lost that bragging right, they still offer good qualities to warrant their purchase. The Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) continues to be one of the best stylus-toting slates, while the Nexus 10's trailblazing 2,560x1,600-pixel resolution screen remains one of the highest in its category. These slates have been been dethroned by faster, newer models, but it doesn't mean they're no longer worthy choices.
Portable gadgets -- just like cars and refrigerators -- need to be taken care of with regular maintenance. By our indication, a little TLC matched with consistent updates can go a long way to help keep your tablet up to speed. Benchmarks, though helpful in forecasting what kind of games your slate can handle, don't indicate smooth and speedy long-term performance as much as regular software updates from your manufacturer.
TL;DR: Don't be lazy, download those software updates for your tablet.
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Best tablets of 2019: Our editors hand-picked these products based on our tests and reviews.
$1599.99
- ProsElegant design. Strong performance. Great battery life.
- ConsBulky and heavy. Screen isn't super-bright. Expensive.
- Bottom LineLike all 15.6-inch 2-in-1s, HP's 2019 revision of the Spectre x360 15 is unwieldy in tablet mode, but its six-core CPU and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics far outstrip last year's model in productivity and presentation performance.
I've written more than once in these pages that I'm not wild about 15.6-inch convertible laptops, finding them too heavy for comfortable use in tablet mode. But if you're shopping for a desktop replacement that can occasionally fold and stand for a presentation, you might as well get the most powerful desktop replacement you can. As of now, that's the HP Spectre x360 15 (starts at $1,599; $2,049.99 as tested), a stylish six-core, 4K-screened beast with superb battery life. It easily replaces the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 as my favorite plus-size hybrid—even if the lighter, 13.9-inch Lenovo Yoga C930 remains our Editors' Choice.
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- $1,499.00
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Big Changes Since Last Year
While several configurations of the Spectre x360 15 are available, HP chiefly promotes just two. The $1,599 model sold at Best Buy is much like our May 2018 review unit, with a quad-core Core i7 CPU, relatively modest Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive.
The $2,049.99 version seen here and sold on HP.com raises the ante considerably with a six-core, 2.2GHz Core i7-8750H processor and the Max-Q version of Nvidia's 4GB GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. It combines 16GB of RAM with a 1TB solid-state drive and the same 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) touch screen as its sibling.
Either way, the Spectre is one of the five or six best-looking laptops you can buy, a sleek slab with wedge-y, edgy sides and corners, available in Poseidon Blue with Pale Brass accents (contrasting trim and hinges, pictured here) or Dark Ash Silver with Copper Luxe accents. It measures 0.76 by 14.2 by 9.8 inches, about the same as the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 (0.74 by 14.2 by 9.5 inches), and is minutely heavier at 4.7 pounds. The XPS 15 2-in-1 is trimmer at 4.4 pounds, while the Yoga C930 is much easier to carry at 3.1 pounds.
The chassis is made of fingerprint-prone machined aluminum with almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or pound the keyboard. The diagonally cut left and right rear corners hold the power button and a Thunderbolt 3 port respectively. You'll also find the power connector, an HDMI port, and an audio jack on the left side; a microSD card slot, a USB 3.1 Type-A port, and a second Thunderbolt 3 port are on the right. A tiny sliding switch on the system's right edge disables the webcam if you're worried about snoopy spies.
Getting the Job Done
![Tablets Tablets](/uploads/1/2/3/7/123703793/540037253.png)
The webcam captures bright and sharp if slightly noisy images at 1080p rather than the lowest-common-denominator 720p resolution. You can use either its face-recognition ability or the fingerprint reader in the palm rest to sign into Windows Hello.
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The keyboard offers handsome, thin lettering; two levels of backlighting; a numeric keypad; and dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. Unfortunately, it also offers HP's trademark placement of the cursor arrow keys in a row, with half-size up and down arrows squeezed between full-size left and right, instead of the proper inverted T.
After a few minutes' practice, you'll enjoy a comfortable typing feel, with adequate travel and firm feedback as the keys hit home. The extra-wide touchpad glides and taps smoothly, though it clicks with a hollow feel.
The Spectre's sound is above average. Its Bang & Olufsen speakers aren't raucously loud but can fill a room with clear tones, distinguishable mixed tracks, and even a bit of bass without being tinny or distorted. Preinstalled HP Audio Control software offers music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer. It's one of a slew of house-brand utilities for everything from a Windows 10 tutorial to assigning functions to the stylus buttons, accompanied by more software ranging from McAfee and Dropbox trials to Windows' Candy Crush Friends Saga and Royal Revolt 2: Tower Defense.
The abovementioned stylus, the HP Active Pen, is a two-button, AAAA-batteried unit that showed good palm rejection and kept up with my scribbling and sketching on screen with only one or two missed strokes. Alas, there's no cubbyhole or garage in the laptop, so trying not to lose the pen will be up to you.
As with other 4K displays, fine details look sensational on the Spectre's screen. Viewing angles are wide, and colors are rich and well saturated. On the minus side, while contrast is good, I found myself wishing the screen were brighter—it doesn't fall off as swiftly as some if you turn brightness down to save battery life (the movie image was still quite visible during our battery test at 50 percent brightness), but it's not very sunny even if you turn it up all the way. Calling it dim might be an exaggeration, but calling it a disappointment wouldn't be.
Big Screens Hit the Test Bench
For our performance comparisons, we matched the Spectre against four other 15.6-inch laptops. Two are 2-in-1s with quad-core processors: the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 is a convertible, and the Microsoft Surface Book 2 is a detachable. Two are conventional clamshells, but with six-core CPUs to give the HP a fair fight: the MSI P65 Creator and Dell XPS 15. As you can see in the specifications table below, they offer a variety of Nvidia discrete graphics chips.
The HP had no trouble proving itself one of the most powerful convertibles you can buy—it probably won't satisfy hardcore gamers, but it is a potent productivity machine. It also impressed by lasting nearly 17 hours in our battery rundown test, far longer than you'll be able to carry it.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the storage subsystem. The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
We consider a score of 4,000 in PCMark 10's office productivity suite to be excellent. All the laptops except the Inspiron cleared that hurdle, but the Spectre finished a small step ahead of the XPS 15 to take first place. All five SSDs aced PCMark 8's Storage test, with the HP second to the MSI in a photo finish. (Variance is usually minimal on this test among systems that have the same grade of high-end SSD.)
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Chalk up another win for the HP, by the barest of margins over the XPS 15. Video editors and 3D designers, or indeed anyone who uses highly multithreaded software, will find the six-core systems, as expected, in another league than their quad-core competitors.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The hexa-core portables crossed the line three abreast. The Inspiron held its head up high while the Surface Book 2 languished in last place.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Judging by the more challenging Fire Strike subtest, the contenders finished in Nvidia parts-list order, with the MSI Creator and its GeForce GTX 1070 topping the Microsoft detachable and its GTX 1060. The Spectre landed in the middle of the pack, while the Inspiron's GeForce MX150 graphics were outclassed.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
Second verse, same as the first. The HP and the Dell XPS 15 finished in a dead heat, their scores indicating that you can play modern games at 1080p resolution (forget about 4K) but will have to turn the image quality down a notch or two.
Video Playback Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
The Surface Book 2 has two batteries, one behind its screen and one in its keyboard base, which give it an obvious advantage in this marathon. The HP crushed the other single-battery systems in an extremely impressive result for any desktop replacement, let alone one with an energy-hungry 4K display.
A Diamond-Faceted Dynamo
At the risk of repeating other reviews, 15.6-inch hybrids are niche systems, destined to be used primarily in laptop mode and only rarely propped up in stand or tent mode for a presentation or rested in a lap as a jumbo tablet. That said, the 2019 Spectre x360 15 fills that niche quite well.
Its trim, two-tone design makes it a visual standout, while its beefy CPU and GPU guarantee it won't keep you waiting on your favorite applications. Its keyboard is comfortable (except for those accursed HP cursor arrows), and its screen, while not the brightest, is colorful and attractive. We narrowly prefer the Lenovo Yoga C930 for reasons ranging from its lighter weight to its stylus slot, but if you're determined to go big, the Spectre can accommodate you in all of its orientations.
HP Spectre x360 15 (2019)
Bottom Line: Like all 15.6-inch 2-in-1s, HP's 2019 revision of the Spectre x360 15 is unwieldy in tablet mode, but its six-core CPU and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics far outstrip last year's model in productivity and presentation performance.
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Updated on by
There has been a slow number of Android emulators popping up lately, each with their own features. A question occasionally rises: which are the best Android emulators for PC? The answer to that may come down to personal preference. This page however will attempt to find the best Android emulators by benchmark performance tests rather than by features.
Two benchmark tools were used: AnTuTu Benchmark, a popular choice. And 3DMark, another widely used benchmark tool for testing the performance of graphics of a device.
The following Android emulators were tested:
- Bluestacks 2
- KOPLAYER
- Remix OS Player
- AndyOS
- Droid4X
Version numbers of the emulators as well as the version numbers of the benchmark tools used are listed in the test results.
PC system information used for performing the benchmark tests:
- Windows 8
- Intel Core i7 4500U CPU @ 1.80GHz (2 cores)
- 8GB RAM
- Intel Integrated HD Graphics
- Virtualization Technology enabled
Configurations used for the tested Android emulators:
- 2 CPU cores
- 2GB RAM
- 1280 x 720 Resolution at 192 DPI
- OpenGL (compatible mode)
AnTuTu Benchmark is a widely used benchmark tool for testing devices. It covers CPU, RAM, GPU, UX, and other hardware of the device.
Below are the test results for each emulator. Click the images to enlarge them.
Generally, Bluestacks 2 and Bluestacks 3 performed well under 3D graphics, while Remix OS Player handled CPU multitasking the best, probably because it’s designed to be more of an operating system designed for multitasking.
All app players tested archived a mid-level 3D grade, but a high-end grade in CPU usage.
Below is a visual graph of the total scores.
AnTuTu Benchmark test results:
- Remix OS Player
- Bluestacks 3
- Bluestacks 2
- MEmu
- Nox App Player
- KOPLAYER
- Droid4X
- AndyOS
This is a benchmark tool for testing physics (CPU) and graphics (GPU) on devices. Since most app players for PC are marketed for playing Android games, 3DMark seemed like a good fit. The Android emulators tested passed through two types of tests provided by 3DMark: Ice Storm Extreme and Ice Storm Unlimited.
Note that Sling Shot mode was unavailable due to OpenGL ES 3.0+ being unsupported.
Here’s how they stacked up in the numbers with Ice Storm Unlimited. You can see the CPU and GPU scores as well as Android operating system versions the emulators are using. Click on the images to enlarge them.
Bluestacks 3 and Nox App Player finished very close, with Bluestacks 3 having the slight advantage in the graphics score while Nox won the physics score. Below is the visual graph of total scores.
3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited test results:
- Bluestacks 3
- Nox App Player
- Bluestacks 2
- MEmu
- Droid4X
- Remix OS Player
- KOPLAYER
- AndyOS
Next up is 3DMark’s Ice Storm Extreme test. This mode shows a visual and graphically intensive cinematic screens for testing.
Interestingly, MEmu and Nox led the way with the better performance in the physics test. MEmu, Nox, Bluestacks 2, Bluestacks 3, and Droid4X all performed well in all the categories. It is notable to see that Droid4X, a lesser known Android emulator for PC, performs on par with Bluestacks.
3DMark Ice Storm Extreme test results:
- Nox App Player
- MEmu
- Bluestacks 3
- Bluestacks 2
- Droid4X
- KOPLAYER
- AndyOS
- Remix OS Player
While the benchmark tests are not always 100% accurate, it does give a better view on finding the best Android emulators for PC based on their performance. Generally, most Android apps with intensive graphics will run well on any of the emulators providing you’re using a modern PC. A dedicated graphics card should enhance performance as well. I’ll be testing more Android emulators for PC in the future.
Tablets
Microsoft's small, entry-level tablet gains LTE connectivity, making the Surface Go even more ready to go. Your eyes and fingers may balk at the 10-inch screen and its matching-size keyboard, but you'll be impressed with its quality and versatility.
There are plenty of country songs about being a restless, rambling roamer. None of them talks about staying near Wi-Fi hotspots. If your travels take you where 802.11ac can't follow, Microsoft has a solution in the LTE version of the Surface Go ($679), the smallest of its Surface tablet line. As we said in our August 2018 review of the original Surface Go, the 10-inch slate's performance is lukewarm at best and its optional keyboard is cramped for long typing sessions, but it's light, well-built, and—with the addition of cellular data—a convenient way to stay in touch with email and everyday office tasks.
Top of the Line
You may have seen Microsoft's TV commercials for the Surface Go, which tout its $399 base price with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of eMMC storage, and Wi-Fi. My $679 test model ups the ante with 8GB of memory, 128GB of faster solid-state drive storage, and of course LTE as well as Wi-Fi. All versions rely on Intel's Pentium Gold 4415Y, a dual-core, four-thread, seventh-generation processor running at 1.6GHz.
Lenovo Tab 4
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The keyboard is extra—$129.99 for the Signature Type Cover in cobalt, platinum, or burgundy Alcantara fabric (a kind of mock suede). The Surface Pen stylus, not included with my review unit, is $99.99. That means that the full bundle will set you back over $900 plus a cellular data plan, which is expensive by any measure—you'll find yourself comparison-shopping 2-in-1 detachables and convertibles (few of which, admittedly, have LTE) as well as mini tablets.
Consumer versions of the Surface Go, like my test unit, come with Windows 10 Home in S mode, which is nearly indistinguishable from the full-fledged operating system but only lets you install apps from the Windows Store. To make a permanent switch to regular Windows 10 Home, as I had to do to install our benchmark tests, you must visit the Store and enter your Microsoft account information, then perform a few clicks. This spoiled my preference for setting up Windows with an offline account.
The LTE version weighs a few feathers more than the regular Surface Go at 1.17 pounds. Measuring 0.33 by 9.7 by 6.9 inches, the silver magnesium tablet is a fraction larger and heavier than the 9.7-inch-screened LTE Apple iPad (1.05 pounds, 0.29 by 9.4 by 6.6 inches). Among Windows tablets, it's substantially smaller than the Lenovo Miix 630 and Microsoft's own Surface Pro 6, which have 12.3-inch screens and weigh 1.7 pounds apiece.
Asus Zenpad 3s 10
![3dmark Tablets Highest Scores 2019 Zentab 3dmark Tablets Highest Scores 2019 Zentab](/uploads/1/2/3/7/123703793/453133112.png)
The power button and a volume rocker are on the top edge as you hold the tablet in landscape mode with the screen facing you. On the right edge are an audio jack, a USB Type-C port, and a proprietary connector for the AC adapter or Microsoft's $199.99 docking station.
The magnetic connector for the Type Cover is on the bottom and the flush-fitting SIM tray is on the left. (The provided tray removal tool slid in and out of the pinhole without doing anything, but a bent paper clip popped the tray open on the first try.) A microSD card slot is hidden under the kickstand.
A Diminutive Laptop Alternative
The 5-megapixel front-facing camera offers Windows Hello face authentication as well as Skype conversations; it produced well-lit and detailed images in my tests. The 8-megapixel rear-facing camera won't send smartphone makers back to the drawing board, but it captures serviceable snaps (though image quality plummets as you use the digital zoom).
Like the Surface Pro's, the Surface Go's kickstand opens smoothly and lets you prop the tablet at a good variety of angles, though like other detachables it works much better on a desk than in a lap. The same is true for the Signature Type Cover keyboard, which attaches easily—the magnetic connector is one of the surest and simplest I've encountered—and then folds its rear edge to tilt to a comfortable typing angle.
The keyboard has several handy features. For one thing, it's backlit. Also, it has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys (along with Escape and Delete keys on the tiny top row). And it has a smooth-tapping touchpad, so you're not always lifting a hand from the home row to use the touch screen. (That said, I was peeved that you can't double-tap and slide to drag as on a real laptop touchpad, but must hold down the corner with one hand and drag with the other.)
It also has a shallow but snappy typing feel, with a pleasant rain-on-the-roof sound. The biggest adjustment you'll have to make is that it's cramped, with the A through apostrophe keys spanning 7.19 inches instead of the desktop regulation 8 inches—nothing you can't master with practice, but nothing you'll want to write a novel on, either.
What Microsoft calls a PixelSense screen provides 1,800 by 1,200 pixels of resolution, which works out to 217 pixels per inch. It's a beauty, with vivid colors and contrast. Brightness is ample and viewing angles are wide. Fine details are crystal clear, though its small icons take careful tapping. Streaming videos look great—and sound surprisingly good, too, with audio that's better than expected (albeit free of bass and somewhat ragged at top volume).
At least with the AT&T SIM card provided for testing, LTE connectivity worked so seamlessly I almost forgot to mention it. I measured online speeds with Ookla's Speedtest.net (whose parent company, Ziff Davis, also owns PCMag). Downloads ranged from 7Mbps in my Boston apartment to 62Mbps outdoors, with uploads peaking at 9Mbps. (Compare that with 199Mbps down and 12Mbps up for my home office's Wi-Fi.) That wasn't fast enough for streaming video, but more than adequate for Web browsing and email.
Testing: Taking on Beefier 2-in-1s
As for other performance results, only one other dedicated Windows 10 tablet has completed our new benchmark suite: the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Tablet. So I compared the LTE Surface Go not only to that slate but to a 12.3-inch detachable, the Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1, and two convertibles, the Core i3-powered Acer Spin 3 and the HP Spectre Folio, whose 5-watt Y-series processor was the closest thing PC Labs has tested of late to the 6-watt Pentium Gold. The Windows-based contenders' specs appear in the comparison table below.
I also included the test results we got in 2018 from the non-LTE version of the Surface Go, which was outfitted with much the same core components (Pentium Gold, 8GB, 128GB).
Realistically, it's unfair to put the Surface Go through benchmarks like this; as you'll see, its Pentium CPU outpaces Atoms and Celerons but isn't meant to keep up with Intel's Core series. It's more important to state that subjectively, the tablet felt more than perky enough for everyday productivity apps and multiple browser tabs, though hardcore gamers will obviously be wise to steer clear of any of these convertible tablets.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, Web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage suite that we use to assess the speed of the storage subsystem. The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
Four thousand points is an excellent score in the PCMark 10 productivity benchmark. The Core i5-based Dell and Lenovo came closest, while the Surface Go finished last but not really miles behind the Acer, which combines a Core i3 with a hard drive rather than SSD, dooming it to last place in the storage subtest.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
The Pentium Gold was thoroughly outclassed here, but to be fair, no one's going to try editing video on a 10-inch tablet. The Surface Go is perfectly capable of puttering around in Excel.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
With only 4GB of RAM, the Spin 3 couldn't launch Photoshop CC at all. The Surface Go gamely chugged along and completed the exercise, but that's about all you can say for it.
Graphics Tests
Best Android Tablet
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
All these scores are well below what we consider competent for playing demanding games, though the Surface Go scored a moral victory by edging the Spectre Folio. As with any tablet, casual and browser-based games will be your pastimes of choice.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets.
These scores are reported in frames per second (fps), the frequency at which the graphics hardware renders frames in a sequence, which translates to how smooth the scene looks in motion. For lower-end systems, maintaining at least 30fps is the realistic target, while more powerful computers should ideally attain at least 60fps at the test resolution.
These systems only made it about a tenth of the way to the smooth-gameplay threshold at the 1080p preset (except for the Acer, which crashed). In other news, I don't run as fast as Usain Bolt.
Video Playback Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the device, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the device into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 1080p file of the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
The HP showed the most stamina, but the Surface Go should easily get you through a workday with power to spare. It fulfills its mission as a grab-and-go productivity partner and communicator.
Outclassing iOS and Android
Its price keeps it from being an impulse buy and its size keeps it from being an all-day typing station, but otherwise it's hard to come up with serious objections to the Surface Go LTE. The tablet's build quality puts plastic slates to shame. Its access to the Windows ecosystem gives you an avalanche of apps, even if it can't run them at blazing speed. And its connectivity is smooth and convenient. It's an appealing alternative to the fifth-generation Surface Pro with LTE.
Bottom Line: Microsoft's small, entry-level tablet gains LTE connectivity, making the Surface Go even more ready to go. Your eyes and fingers may balk at the 10-inch screen and its matching-size keyboard, but you'll be impressed with its quality and versatility.