Surface Pro 3 throttling

Unfortunately its not that clear cut yet, I've only had it for 3 days now and because I received it on a Friday, I haven't been able to see how it fares at my job yet or how the battery life is under a normal day. However I haven't really been bothered by the throttle so far and would heartily recommend the i5 version as long as you don't plan on playing video games on it as a main focus for buying it, as I can't stop thinking how amazing the hardware is while looking at it and using it. They fixed so many things between the SP2 and SP3 its amazing, the new type cover is a huge improvement with the extra magnet and a perfectly usable trackpad, the new kickstand couldn't be any better, the redesigned charger has stronger magnets and goes/stays in much easier than the SP2, the addition of instant go sleep makes it wake up and sleep instantly like an iPad instead of sluggishly like a laptop, the combination of the aspect ratio change and the weight/thickness change turns the Surface Pro line from being tolerable to use while holding for short periods only in landscape orientation to completely comfortable to hold for long periods in portrait or landscape, etc. etc. It's harder to justify the $250 premium for the i7 version, but Microsoft did say that it was only going to be a 20% to 30% improvement over the i5 to begin with, so I think we know what we're getting ourselves into when we pay a steep premium for a relatively small speed boost.

Thanks for the reply, do you generally recommend it or are still bothered with the throttle?

I posted this on a different thread for this same issue, but I'll put it here too for the people who see it.

I'm going to have to do more testing on my i7 unit. When I was experiencing the throttling was while trying to load Guild wars 2, it would go from 40fps to pegged around 24 after just a few minutes. However, today I did a real world stress test where I had mac os x mavericks open in a vmware virtual machine updating to yosemite, two torrents downloading, a few files downloading in Chrome, mp3s playing in the background, and web browsing, using between 50 to 80% cpu usage and using 7.8gb of ram (and probably most of my page file). While doing all this for about 20-30 minutes, the fan is spun up but the processor is still sitting in the low 60s high 50s degrees Celsius, and its still happily jumping between 800MHz and 3.3GHz without any noticeable slowdowns, which my surface pro 2 had trouble with when multitasking this much. It looks to me that only when the GPU is getting fully taxed as well that the device starts overheating and throttling, otherwise you do see the boost from the i7 over the i5. I am going to install a few more games and graphics intensive apps and test a bit more, but for how much smaller the SP3 feels compared to my SP2 with still a real improvement in real world speed, I am still impressed by it. Given that gaming on my SP2 was mostly a novelty, I don't feel that trading that feature for the vastly superior build of my i7 SP3 is an unfair trade.

I was waiting to the i7 and just found out about this issue. Now I am thinking of just getting an ipad or android instead.

Just to add my voice, I picked up an i7 SP3 and am having the same problems as everyone else. After around 50 seconds into any application that uses 80-90% of the cpu, the temperature will rise to around 85 degrees Celsius before being throttled to 1GHz. Im also having the same wifi problems out of sleep where the adapter disappears. It looks like that large premium for the 17 will only help you if you need power in bursts of under a minute...