Microsoft is promising up to 50 percent more performance with its latest generation of passively-cooled and actively-cooled Surface Pro tablets. Our own tests, however, show something far more disappointing.

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The Surface tablets are arguably some of the best Windows tablets currently available and they frequently top our own Top 10 lists. Unsurprisingly, we were quite excited to finally be able to test the Surface Pro and run it through our usual suite of benchmarks. What was surprising, however, were some of the performance results we discovered.

Surface Pro 2017 Core i5-7300U

Our first Surface Pro model was the Core i5-7300U SKU and, as shown by our looped CineBench R15 Multi-Thread test scores below, CPU performance can fall significantly from 334 points during the start of the run to as low as 226 points towards the end. This represents a drop of almost 33 percent from what we expect out of a proper ULV Core i5-7300U. In fact, such behavior is more common on a 4.5 W Intel Core Y or Core M series CPU rather than a 15 W Core U series.

It's important to note that most notebooks sporting Intel U-class CPUs utilize active cooling solutions. Microsoft's decision to completely omit a system fan on the Core i5-7300U SKU will mean that Turbo Boost performance can be severely limited. The higher clock rates are only beneficial for the first minute or so before reaching an imposed temperature ceiling. Our tests show that once the CPU reaches around 57 C, clock rates will throttle to 2.3 GHz or slower in order to maintain safe operating temperatures.