Surface Book 3 Overheating During Updates and Routine Downloads?

It seems weird to me, but i dont thibk theres a fan in the tablet. My Surface Book 1 definitely had some form of fan in the tablet half, but I'm not so sure about the Book 3. 

Even weirder is that it looks like it has unstuck itself. After having been stuck on PROCHOT for over a day, and the CPU being stuck at 400 MHz, the CPU is now back to normal. 

I've been benchmarking it and stress testing it for most of the afternoon and there is no sign that it has slipped back into its old ways. 

I'll probably let it run some more stress tests overnight and see if the CPU continues performing well.

Okay, so quick update. I haven't been able to replicate the issue again after loading the original factory image. I've had a few other quirks like the GPU not recognizing that it has the ability to run OpenCL (which I fixed by uninstalling and reinstalling the NVIDIA drivers). I've been stress testing the bejeezus out of the SB3 and it will not thermal lock again.

I have no idea what caused the original lock and both the Microsoft tech and myself have no clue why it is now working after resetting to the factory image.

I found something interesting while stress testing it, though: if you disconnect the tablet from the base, PROCHOT will come on for a few seconds and the CPU will throttle to 400 MHz. I'm not sure if this is what caused the original issue (maybe a sensor incorrectly reading that the tablet was disconnecting or something?) but it is interesting to note nonetheless.

The device gets toasty. I was averaging around 70 C doing various benchmarks. As a real-world example, I ran Minecraft Bedrock on max settings for around 2.5 hours and averaged 3091 MHz across all cores with an average temp of 58 C. Doing a Blender run, it put out 3550 HMz across all cores and averaged just over 69 C. I'm reasonably impressed that it can put out as much power as it does for nearly 2.5 hours straight. I guess at the end of it all there's not much to say.

There isn't an issue currently, which is rather bizarre, and the issues there were are now gone.

Naturally, almost as if the thing can hear me praise its miraculous recovery, it decided to over heat yet again. I'll link to a folder on Google Drive here that has a few HWiNFO logs as well as the Windows event log for this thing. Worryingly, the CPU average just over its base clock rate of 1.3 GHz while running OSRS, Minecraft, and eventually GTA V. The FPS on Old School Runescape of all things would dip down to the single digits. Seriously, this is embarrassing. Not saying my SB1 was perfect, but even it could handle OSRS at 50fps with occasional dips to 40fps if I was doing a bit of multitasking (like having dozens of tabs open in Chrome, several PDFs, Word, and Excel all running at the same time).

I sent a request to the tech I was working with to swap this thing out. Hopefully it's just a one-off sort of thing, but if not, then I guess I'll switch out from the Surface lineup for a bit. There is no reason why a $2500 laptop should have any issues running a game as basic as Runescape or handling this level of multitasking.

I have been using my Surface Book 3 for teaching over the zoom. It hits the 100 degree-Celsius levels so easily.

It is frustrating how this laptop thermal throttles so frequently for everyday tasks. Coming from Surface Pro 4, and considering how much the specs of this device is much higher as compared to my surface pro 4, The SB3 performs so poorly. I think it is because of the Intel i7 1065g7 processor, as this processor is designed to thermal throttle at 100 degrees Celsius. It works at high temperatures and it has been a must for me to use an external fan pointed to the back of the screen for cooling.

SB3 has been frozen during the zoom meetings 2 times, that I had to hard reset it to make it work again. I paid almost $3000, and I am very unhappy with the thermals and performance. :(

My Surface Pro 4 even wouldn't freeze in a meeting, but it would get really hot as well, that was my reason to upgrade to SB3.

I really love the form factor and design, but this processor choice is so poor and I am really disappointed. I would rather have a thicker version, if that is what it takes, that has good thermal. Also, I would prefer a more powerful CPU with 8 cores. If you need to make the screen thicker for 2 fans, just do it. :) I want the performance and less versatile is ok as long as I have the great pen input display. Also upgrade that to 4k :).

Surface Book 3 13" is badly designed, MS did exactly the same mistake than the surface book 2  13".

The CPU/iGPU in the screen is passively cooled "fanless"

The result is if you doing long of CPU intensive application the computer overheat and throttle down.

I don't understand why they did that, the Surface Pro 7 and the Surface Book 3 15" with the same CPU got an active cooling...