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New surface pro 64gb user, comparison to asus t100

jaydeeuk1

New Member
Bought one of these from Microsoft using the student deal which was a cracking offer (thanks to a friend at work). £359 but quidco gave £53 cashback and Microsoft refunded £30 as they forgot to include the windows store voucher (no great loss, nothing worth buying on there anyway!) so this tablet has cost me about £275!

Originally I had an Asus T100 which was good, the quad core atom had plenty of poke, the 2gb ram never felt limiting and battery was excellent - 10 hours easily, The tablet section weighs about half that of the pro, and about the same with the keyboard attached. My first impressions were excellent. however it was buggy (bad WiFi drivers, volume control faults, required constant restarts) and didn't feel like it would withstand 18months hard use. I think if UK prices were more inline with US I might have forgiven some of its faults, but when the surface deal appeared I knew I had to change - my company is now a proud owner of a slightly dodgy t100. For those considering an Asus T100, its a nice little machine, but was released about 3 months too early. It probably isn't a fair comparison to a surface pro, but the Asus was £50 more although with the type 2 keyboard the surface pro has cost me about £50 more, but it is one of the nicest keyboards I've ever used.

Had done lots of reading prior to purchase as I almost bought one at Christmas for £499, battery life is about 6 hours of average use which is what I expected. The only negative thing is it gets really hot under load. The T100 was barely warm when benchmarking, but the pro feels hot. The 80 degree ceiling is perhaps a little too high. I've downloaded a program called throttlestop after seeing on a forum someone mentioned you can alter voltages so will have a play later.

I ran 3dmark 06 demo to compare with the Asus T100 scores. It scored an average of 2130, and the pro 5069. Both had gamebooster installed.

Out of interest I installed the newer generic driver and score dropped to just under 5000, not large enough to be significant but perhaps indicative that the official driver is better optimised.

Overall, a very happy pro user.
 

CrippsCorner

Well-Known Member
What a bargain man! Well done...

I love QuidCo, Microsoft gave me cash-back twice for some reason
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worked out about £63 back.
 

lparsons21

Active Member
I've got both. A Surface Pro w/128Gb and the ASUS T100 w/64Gb.

I gave the Asus to my son as he won't do anything heavy duty with it. And that is where the differences lie. The T100 is superb! Cheap at $349/379 depending on which model you get, it still works very fast. But that is doing little things, or one big thing! Just running it with light Office apps and a few others, a few pages open in the browser, email and so forth doesn't seem to tax it much at all. But doing things that require more resources just mean more swapping, which in the end, means slowing down.

I'd say which is better is determined by what you want to do with it more than anything else.

For my son, the Surface Pro would be serious overkill at a premium price. For me, the Asus is a little light for my needs/wants.

Frankly the way I look at the Asus is, is that it is what the Surface RT/2 should have been.
 
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