Surface Pro 3 Throttling Solution?

Yeah, I'm not even thinking about returning it until after I thoroughly test August's patch Tuesday, and even then its doubtful because this feels like early adopter problems. I've gotten the WiFi issue less and less under normal use and the thing performs like a dream for everything I've done that's not a video game (although battery life seems to be the same or a little less than my surface pro 2, not surprised because of the i7 and not really an issue because I plug it in a lot at work). The Yosemite update finished successfully and it looks alright, but my VMware graphics drive for mavericks doesn't work with it, so it unfortunately runs poorly as a vm. Also don't forget that the i7 SP3 has an Intel graphics 5000, supposedly making it better for games than the i5's 4400 if this throttling thing ever gets worked out. Hopefully it can be, because my SP2 seemed to sit at 85C while gaming and never had a problem, don't see any reason why my SP3 can't either.

The processor in these tablets are flatter and wider than the desktop/laptop version used in the Pro 1/Pro 2 for which 'should' have improved cooling.  Looks like something else screwed up.

These are 3rd generation machines.  There is no excuse for any problems to exist on them.

I jumped the gun and went ahead and ordered the i3 model.  I chose it for testing/comparison since not many people will be buying that model.  Even though it is "low end", it is built with the exact same parts except for the CPU.  I am getting to think that the i5/i7 CPUs maybe too much for the chassis.  That is a guess.

Lets keep this thread going and will give feedback on the i3 and we will also see what the August Update will do for the i5 and i7 models as well.  Others will probably chime in and post what they find as well.

My final conclusion is that unless the game can run at 800MHz, the SP3 can't run it. I logged temperature, CPU and GPU Frequency and usage percentage with some pretty ugly results during a game of StarCraft II (a very very well optimized game). It took about a minute and a half to steadily drop from the smooth 50FPS the game started at (which the hardware, especially my i7 should be able to maintain easily) to 30FPS. Immediately after it started dipping under 30fps to the high 20s, then another 2 and a half minutes after that to dip below 20FPS. About 5 minutes into playing the game, my FPS stabilized around 13, completely unplayable. It took the processor about 30 seconds to drop from 1.7GHz (the rated clock speed of the i7 processor, it should be able to run at that indefinitely) for the CPU to hit around 77 degrees Celsius and the processor being cut to 800 MHz for the first time, and then another 30 seconds until the processor stabilized at 800MHz almost solidly throughout the rest of the game, never returning to those high clocks even after the temperature stabilized at 60 degrees.

Although it may be understandable that airflow is not as good in the SP3 as with the SP2, I agree that the 60 degrees temperature throttle is much to conservative, especially with my old SP2 happily sitting in the low 80s indefinitely and the TJMax of the processor being all the way at 100 degrees C. I have no idea how microsoft is advertising that League of Legends is a featured game on the SP3, given that it does not run in a playable fashion even with the resolution cut down to 1440 x 1050. My only idea for how this happened is that the testing/hardware team has no communication with the advertising team, as anyone who tries to run a game on the SP3 notices this immediately.

I'm bashing the SP3 here not because I hate it, but because I love it and this is a black eye I would love to see fixed, although the most I dare hope for is a slight improvement (70 degrees Microsoft? Please?). For everything else I've use my i7 SP3 for it has run like a dream, but games just don't run at all which really hurts when its a $1600+ machine.

Here is the log file from my test on OneDrive: http://1drv.ms/1uduKv6

Well, for speed, 800MHz definitely will not be enough for most games on the market now.

I would say to wait for the August Update to see what happens there.

For testing, those are prototypes that are built but most likely, they may have only run some games for a few minutes to see if they would do it and what performance.  That may be where they could have encountered a problem and the manufacturing cycle had already begun.

I should be getting the i3 model around mid week and am going to install Age of Empires: Asian Dynasty onto it.  If there is anything that can rip a machine apart for performance (a low end machine at that), that is the game to do it with.

We shall see.  If the August Update doesn't fix anything for the i5/i7 performance, I think Microsoft needs to remove the "gaming" capabilities of the tablets from advertisements.  This could actually backfire big time.

The August update may be tomorrow but it would still be great to hear something from MS on this. Without a statement I fear they may lose quite a few customers.