In the high-end thin and light notebook market, Microsoft's Surface Laptop series has always established a benchmark position in Windows thin and light office notebooks with its excellent workmanship, design, and unique aesthetics.
The design is comparable to that of the Apple MacBook Air, but in terms of key aspects of product experience – battery life, heat control and performance, the Surface Laptop series often cannot compete with the MacBook Air. The industry generally attributes this gap to the limitations of traditional X86 architecture processors.
Today, this situation is undergoing fundamental changes with Qualcomm's strong intervention.
Qualcomm, with its deep accumulation in the mobile field, launched the Snapdragon X Elite processor based on the ARM architecture. This not only marks Qualcomm's official entry into the PC field with the help of Windows 11 AI + PC, but also brings new opportunities for the Surface Laptop series.
Both Snapdragon X Elite and Apple's M series use ARM architecture. This change undoubtedly lays the foundation for improving the experience of Surface Laptop 7.
So, how does the new Surface Laptop 7 equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite processor perform in actual experience? Next, this article will reveal the answers to you one by one through a detailed evaluation.
Design aesthetics, still extraordinary
First of all, in terms of appearance design, Surface Laptop 7 continues the high standard of the series. The body lines are smooth and the corners are rounded, which makes it look thin and light without losing its sturdiness.
The aluminum alloy body gives the whole machine a high-end texture, and the surface has been carefully polished to present a delicate and elegant metallic luster.
In addition, Surface Laptop 7 offers a variety of fashionable colors, including elegant black, bright platinum, sapphire blue and sandy gold, to meet the personalized needs of different users.
Surface Laptop 7 offers two screen sizes: 13.8-inch and 15-inch, meeting the visual and portability needs of different users.The 13.8-inch model is currently available, and the 15-inch model will be launched later.
The prototype for this review is the 13.8-inch version, with a body thickness of approximately 18mm and a weight of approximately 1.34kg, which is relatively easy to carry.
Surface Laptop 7 pays great attention to details. A small bump is set on its power button, which not only ensures the position of the DEL button at the rightmost edge, but also allows users to quickly identify the power button and avoid accidental touch.
At the same time, its body design and workmanship are quite sophisticated, and the color matching of the keyboard and the body is very coordinated, which is both harmonious and unified and cleverly highlights the keyboard keys, bringing users a more pleasant typing experience.
Excellent performance, upgraded experience
The performance of the new Snapdragon X Elite processor is undoubtedly the focus of everyone's attention. According to the data previously released by Qualcomm, the Snapdragon X Elite has shown better performance in many tests compared with Intel and AMD processors of the same positioning. So, what is its actual performance? Next, we will take you to find out through detailed test data.
CPU single and dual core performance:The Surface Laptop 7 we reviewed is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E80100 processor, built on the TSMC 4nm process, with 12 Oryon CPU cores, a maximum multi-threaded frequency of 3.4GHz, and active frequency boost technology. Some cores can be increased to 4.0GHz under high load scenarios.
In terms of performance, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E80100 processor performed well in the Cintbench 2024 test, with a multi-thread score of 908pts and a single-thread score of 124pts. Compared with X86 processor laptops of the same type and positioning, its performance is indeed slightly better. This shows that the performance of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E80100 processor is very good, and compared with previous Windows laptops with ARM CPU cores, its progress can be said to be very huge.
Office test:Although ARM core processors still face challenges in the software ecosystem under the Windows ecosystem, in terms of daily office work, Microsoft's own Office suite's support for ARM architecture has been perfectly compatible with Apple's M series processors.
So, how does Office support the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E80100 processor? We used the “Office Productivity Test” in the Procyon suite to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the Surface Laptop 7, which covers four commonly used office software: Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
In the end, Surface Laptop 7 achieved an overall score of 6424, which is an upper-middle score and fully demonstrates its excellent office performance.
This result shows that the Office suite is well adapted to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E80100 processor, providing users with an excellent office experience. Whether it is processing complex Excel tables, editing long Word documents, making beautiful PowerPoint presentations, or managing Outlook mailboxes, Surface Laptop 7 can handle it easily without any pressure.
GPU performance test:Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E80100 integrates Adreno X1 GPU, with FP32 single-precision floating-point performance of up to 4.6TFlops (4.6 trillion calculations per second) and pixel fill rate of 72Gp/s (72 billion times per second). This GPU supports mainstream graphics APIs such as DX12, DX11, and Vulkan, which can bring users higher rendering efficiency and better gaming performance.
In terms of performance, we evaluated the Snapdragon X Elite through the 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme test. The test results showed that its score was close to that of Apple M2, which is a relatively good result in a thin and portable notebook.
NPU application experience:Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E80100 integrates Hexagon NPU, providing up to 45TOPS of AI computing power, making it the most powerful NPU in the AI PC currently on sale. This powerful AI processing unit can bring higher processing efficiency in real-time image processing, natural language processing, video analysis, etc., bringing users a better user experience.
On a traditional PC without an NPU, when conducting a video conference, the conference software needs to process a large amount of real-time image data, which puts a lot of pressure on the computer's CPU and GPU. Especially when superimposed with real-time background blur, character tracking, portrait beauty and other effects, the computer's load becomes very heavy.
However, with the support of NPU, Windows 11 AI + PC showed a completely different performance. After opening multiple real-time conference effects in Windows 11, it can be seen from the task manager that the occupancy rate of NPU has increased significantly and started to actively process data, while the occupancy rate of CPU and GPU is not high. This shows that NPU plays an important role in real-time image processing and effectively reduces the burden on CPU and GPU.
In addition to real-time image processing, NPU, as a very important processing unit of Windows 11 AI + PC, also supports many functions in Windows 11. For example, the real-time subtitle function can translate the audio in any application or video platform into English subtitles in real time, and it already supports more than 40 languages. The realization of this function is inseparable from the powerful computing power support of NPU.
Strong battery life, no more battery anxiety
Battery life is very important for mobile office and business travel users. We adjusted the screen brightness to 200 nits, set the power management to high-performance mode, turned off Bluetooth, enabled WI-FI, and used the “Office Productivity Battery Life” test in Procyon to test the battery life of the Surface Laptop 7.
In the test, the Surface Laptop 7 ran four workloads, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, in a loop. In the end, the Surface Laptop 7 achieved a score of 12 hours and 50 minutes.
In comparison, most 14-inch Windows thin and light portable office notebooks run the test for about 8 to 10 hours under the same conditions. This result fully demonstrates the excellent performance of the Surface Laptop 7 powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E80100 in terms of battery life, allowing users to say goodbye to battery anxiety and focus more on work and creation.
The interface settings are simple and practical
The Surface Laptop 7 has a simple Surface Connect interface on the right side of the body, which is designed for a magnetic charger, while the commonly used interfaces are cleverly set on the left side of the body.
On the left side of the body, Surface Laptop 7 provides a 3.5mm headphone jack for easily connecting your headphones or microphone. In addition, there is a USB-A 3.1 interface that supports the insertion of traditional USB devices such as USB flash drives, keyboards and mice to meet your basic needs for daily work.
It is also equipped with two USB-C ports, which not only support charging and data transmission, but also support Display 1.4a protocol. We can connect Surface Thunderbolt 4 docking station, 4K display, high-speed SSD mobile hard disk and other peripherals through these two USB-C ports. Whether it is fast transfer of large amounts of files or building a multi-screen work environment, Surface Laptop 7 can handle it easily.
About software compatibility
As a product using ARM architecture CPU, the software compatibility and driver issues of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite under Windows have become the focus of users.
However, for some special industries or specific applications, compatibility is still a little unknown. This is mainly because some software may not yet support the new architecture, or require specific drivers and updates to ensure compatibility. As the software ecosystem continues to mature and improve, we have reason to believe that the compatibility issues of these special industries and specific applications will be gradually resolved in the future.
Summarize
The Surface Laptop 7, equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite processor, has demonstrated outstanding strength in terms of design aesthetics, performance, and battery life.
It not only continues the Surface Laptop series' consistent high-level workmanship and design concept, but also achieves significant improvements in performance and office experience, bringing users a more excellent user experience.
For users who pursue high-end, lightweight, and focus on battery life and performance experience, Surface Laptop 7 is undoubtedly a product worthy of high attention.