Last week I was lucky enough to get my hands on a new AMD Ryzen 7 15" Surface Laptop 3 in Platinum finish, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Initial reviews from various tech outlets were fairly mixed, however it seems that all of the review units Microsoft supplied most publications were the AMD Ryzen 5 with Vega 9 graphics variety. Because of this, there aren’t a whole lot of published benchmarks for the Ryzen 7 with Vega 11 graphics, so I thought I’d provide my findings here for those that may be interested to see how it stacks up with other devices it the same space.

After firing up my Surface Laptop 3 for the first time.

For brevity’s sake, I am going to stick with the benchmarks in this post. If you’d like to hear about all of the details for the first 15" Surface Laptop models, be sure to check out the great in depth review from AnandTech: The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15-Inch) Review: AMD Ryzen Surface Edition. In it, they had this to say:

The Surface team continues to make some of the nicest devices around, and the Surface Laptop 3 upholds that tradition. The attention to detail on items like having every single device tested to ensure the initial opening of the laptop can be done with one finger is the kind of fanaticism not normally seen in the laptop space. The entire design is sleek, smooth, and light, and the color options are a welcome way to add even more choice for consumers.

All in all, I agree with just about everything stated within the AnandTech review, but in short — benchmarks aside, I love my 15" Surface Laptop 3. So much so, that I’ve opted to kick my work provided Dell to the curb.

At the office with my Surface Laptop 3

Comparing the Hardware

The Surface Laptop 3 comes in several flavors to choose from, including both 13.5-inch and 15-inch sizes, and Intel Core i5–1035G7, Intel Core i7–1065G7, AMD Ryzen 5 3580U, and AMD Ryzen 7 3780U CPU options. The Microsoft Surface Edition AMD Ryzen CPUs are only available in the 15-inch consumer version of the Surface Laptop 3, while the business version of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 and all 13.5-inch versions are powered by Intel CPUs and graphics.

Comparing Surface Laptop 3 Models, via AnandTech.

The AMD Ryzen™ 7 3780U Microsoft Surface® Edition Processor found in the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 is a quad core, 8 thread CPU with a base clock speed of 2.3GHz and a max boost clock speed of 4GHz. The 3780U also features Radeon RX Vega 11 Graphics with a total of 11 GPU cores, and the GPU is where the AMD Ryzen Surface Laptop 3 devices separate themselves from their Intel counterparts.

MD Ryzen 7 3780U Microsoft Surface Edition Specs, via AMD.

My Surface Laptop 3

For my Surface Laptop 3, I opted for the Ryzen 7 model with 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and Radeon RX Vega 11 Graphics which has a base price of $2099. While the top-end configuration at $2799 has double the storage and memory of my Surface Laptop 3, its compute and GPU benchmarks should be similar to my Surface Laptop’s configuration.

Here, I will be comparing the Ryzen 5 3580U Surface Laptop 3 directly with the Ryzen 7 3780U Surface Laptop 3. If you’d like to see how it stacks up against similar devices in the market, I’d like to point you back once again to the AnandTech review, which posts it’s benchmark findings for the Ryzen 5 3580U among a plethora of devices.

Using the data I provide you here, you should be able to correlate where the Ryzen 7 3780U stacks up compared to AnandTech’s findings. I do not want to reprint their findings here in their entirety, as benchmarking that many devices likely took many, many hours — and they deserve the click for that hard work. Here is one of the many examples that they provide:

See the AnandTech Surface Laptop 3 Review for many more comparisons.

AMD Ryzen 7 3780U Microsoft Surface Edition

Mirroring what AnandTech did in their review, here’s a snapshot of the AIDA64 CPUID results for my device:

The AIDA64 CPUID results for my Surface Laptop 3

AMD Ryzen 7 3780UM Surface Laptop 3 System Performance

I was not able to recreate every single benchmark that AnandTech performed in their review, but I was able to recreate nine System Performance, and seven GPU Performance benchmarks, which should be a good comparison. In the table below, you can see how the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3’s Ryzen 5 3580 compares with the Ryzen 7 3780U and the Surface Laptop 2’s Core i7–8650U.

Ryzen 7 3780U System Performance Comparison

The Ryzen 7 3780U took seven of the nine system performance benchmarks, including: All four PCMark 10 tests, the Cinebench R15 Multi-Thread benchmark, Mozilla Kraken , and Google Octane .

took seven of the nine system performance benchmarks, including: All four tests, the benchmark, , and . The Surface Laptop 2’s Core i7–8650U held strong with the Single-Thread Cinebench R15 and WebXPRT 3 benchmarks.

AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 Surface Laptop 3 GPU Performance

The table below highlights how the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3’s Vega 11 GPU (3780U) stacks up against the competition, including it’s weaker sibling the Vega 9 (3580U), and the Surface Laptop 2’s integrated Core i7–8650U graphics.

Ryzen 7 3780U Vega 11 GPU Performance Comparison

The Ryzen 7 3780U’s Vega 11 GPU handily takes five of the seven benchmarks, including: 3DMark First Strike , 3DMark Sky Diver , 3DMark Cloud Gate , 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited — Graphics , and the GFXBench 5.0 Aztec Ruins Normal 1080p

handily takes five of the seven benchmarks, including: , , , , and the The Surface Laptop 2’s Core i7–8650U took down the remaining two benchmarks: 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, and 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited — Graphics

15" Surface Laptop 3 512GB SSD Storage Performance

As one might expect, the storage performance metrics as measured by CryastalDiskMark from the 512GB SSD found in my Ryzen 7 Surface Laptop 3 are nearly identical to the results from the 256GB SSD found in the AnandTech benchmarks. The Surface line of products aren’t known for their speedy SSDs, but for most workloads, they’ll do just fine.

AMD Ryzen 7 3780U Microsoft Surface Edition 512GB SSD Performance

Final Thoughts

Overall, the numbers show that the AMD Ryzen 7 3780U powered Surface Laptop 3 more than holds its own in the mobile CPU space, with the Vega 11 GPU being a big differentiator.

Obviously the Vega 11 isn’t like having a dedicated GPU, but it does greatly improve overall performance at a very low power draw while allowing you to get some light gaming in, if that is your thing.

The Outer Worlds on my Surface Laptop 3

In the past week I’ve played The Outer Worlds, Astroneer, Everspace, and Surviving Mars while on the road… and I look forward to playing further titles while enjoying countless more hours on the first AMD-powered Surface device.