dgstorm
Editor in Chief
So, here's a slick benchmark comparison between an Apple MacBook Pro 13 and the new Microsoft Surface Book. In their promotional materials, Microsoft claims the Surface Book is "twice as fast" as the MacBook Pro 13. Of course, that all depends on how you benchmark it. The editors at PCWorld decided to test this claim and the results are impressive.
First, for clarity, PCWorld compared the following devices:
Retina MacBook Pro 13 -
- Intel Broadwell Core i5-5752U - dual-core 28-watt chip with a base clock speed of 2.7GHz
- Iris 6100 graphics
- 8GB of RAM
- PCIe SSD
- The latest El Capitan build of MacOS
- Intel Skylake Core i5-6300U - dual-core 15-watt chip with a base clock speed of 2.4GHz
- GeForce graphics
- 8GB of RAM
- PCIe SSD
- Windows 10
We can't forget that GPU performance is also very important for some applications, especially gaming, rendering and graphics apps. You will notice that the Iris 6100 graphics is what we see in the MacBook, whereas the GPU in the Surface Book happens to be a GeForce. Now we are drilling down to the nitty gritty.
When the PC World editors ran the two laptops through several graphics benchmarks, (including LuxMark 3 OpenCL, Unigine's Heaven Benchmark, the newest version of the game Tomb Raider, and Premiere Pro CC), the competition was a whole different ballgame. In fact, the performance difference wasn't even fair. To summarize with the benchmark that had the largest difference, the Surface Book scored 74fps in the Tomb Raider benchmark, while the MacBook Pro score a measly 23.6. That's over 3 times faster in GPU performance than Apple's device, which means Microsoft was being a bit conservative on their marketing hyperbole.
The rest of the GPU benchmarks were at least twice as fast, except for the Luxmark 3, which was about 60% faster. The main thing we can take away from this is that if you are wanting the Surface Book for mobile gaming or for digital art rendering, then it is the clear winner by a long shot. Even at a $1500 base price, its performance advantage was significant enough to warrant that premium price.
