Surface Pro 3 throttling

Additional input - after playing around with several games last night, looks like the problem is with the CPU not totally handing over the graphics task to the graphic circuit.  Just about every game you try to run that puts a demand on the graphics, the fan will kick in and the CPU will get hot after about 5 minutes.  That is with the i3 and maybe faster with the i5 and i7.

This is going to be a problem that only Intel can solve.  For the i5 and i7 models, probably be glad that they are throttled or else you would only get about 5 minutes of use out of the tablet before it overheats and shuts down.

I figured that was the problem and am seeing that even on my i3.

Until a fix comes across, these are NOT going to be gaming machines in the normal sense.  They will run the simple games like from the Store but anything that requires heavy compute cycles, forget it.

Now you can see why the gaming community doesn't like Intel graphics.  Intel does a great job with chips but can't seem to get the software/drivers to work right.

The new keyboard cover is great, that little bit of an angle when you're typing makes all the difference, and the new trackpad is clickable and actually usable, I think its bigger than the one on my 13in Vaio!

As for whose problem it is, I don't want to put the blame solely on Intel, although they are definitely not innocent here. Its just that this is the third computer that I've tried to play games on with intel graphics and is the first one I've had problems with. My Vaio Z with its i7 3612QM and my SP2 with its i5 4200U never seemed to have problems as long as you turned the graphics settings down accordingly, around 1600x900 on my vaio and 1280x720 on my SP2. Besides some games like FTL that just refuse to work on intel graphics, most things are fine. However, you have to remember that this is INTEGRATED graphics, which means when using the GPU, you're using cores on the processor that otherwise wouldn't be touched along with the main cores, meaning the processor will get hotter than a normal processor stress test. That extra heat combined with the SP3's aggressive throttling causes trouble. I am personally suspicious of what Microsoft has done to integrate instant-go, such as removing the power saver and performance power states and preventing the user from changing CPU frequency settings. This is a big software leap for Microsoft too, instead of just looking at the Surface Pro line as full laptops in Surface casings, now they're trying to integrate bits of the RT feature set into full windows 8, such as when you hold down the power button and get the "slide to shut down" prompt.

I fully appreciate all of these features (especially how instantly the surface turns off when you close the type cover, I always had problems with my SP2 inconsistently sleeping with that trigger). All I can hope is that this aggressive throttling is an unintended side effect of these changes and not an understood concession by the engineers.

I was not aware you could disable instant-go. I've heard that if you enable hyper-V instant go gets disabled, but does that bring back the power settings too? Or are you talking about a different software switch that toggles instant go along with the other power options?