My current review on the SP11 Snapdragon

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Hi All,

I would like to my experience with the Surface Pro 11 (SP11), specifically the X Elite model featuring 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. My assessment focuses on two critical aspects: performance and battery life.

Battery Life: Transitioning from the Surface Pro 5 (SP5) to the Surface Pro 9 (SP9), I consistently faced challenges with battery longevity. Initially, the SP9 would provide approximately 5 to 6 hours of usage after installing essential applications and employing it as my primary device. Over time, this duration diminished to a mere 4 hours. Furthermore, the device’s standby mode proved inefficient, draining significant battery life within hours.

In contrast, the SP11’s Snapdragon processor has delivered an exceptional battery performance that merits recognition. On a typical day, a full charge at 8 AM would sustain through intensive usage, including Visual Studio, VS Code, Microsoft 365, emulators, email correspondence, web browsing, network diagnostics, and x86 data recovery tasks. By 1 PM, the battery level would be at 80%, and by 6 PM, after intermittent use, it would only deplete to 67%. Evening activities such as streaming and gaming over WiFi 7 only reduced the battery to 44% by 11 PM. Remarkably, after leaving the device idle overnight, it retained 43% charge, allowing for continued use until mid-morning the following day. This was on no way match the intel SP9.

Performance: The SP11’s performance is on par with, if not superior to, the Intel i7-powered SP9. Notably, the SP11 demonstrates seamless responsiveness in touch gestures, screen rotation, and wake-from-sleep operations. In comparison, the SP9 exhibited sluggishness in these areas, with delays in login screen appearance, multi-touch gestures, and screen orientation changes.

With the SP11, nearly 97% of my applications, particularly those native to Arm64, operate smoothly. Even x86 applications, running via emulation, match the performance of their Intel counterparts. The only notable challenges have been with specific printer drivers, compatibility with certain applications like Apple TV, and virtual machine configurations. However, recent updates have addressed issues with Windows Sandbox and provided beta versions of Windows 11 for Hyper-V.

In conclusion, the SP11 has significantly outperformed my previous devices, offering remarkable improvements in both battery life and overall user experience. Once again, this is based on my personal experience, and as they mention on YouTube, I am not endorsed by Microsoft or any sponsors. :slight_smile:

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SP11 Plus LCD model: I’m getting 10% or less per hour with VS Code and WSL usage. Office 365 uses less than that. OneNote tends to use a little more when I’m writing with the pen.

With processor limit tweaks, I can get 16 to 18 hours estimated battery life while browsing and watching YouTube at 1080p. Responsiveness isn’t affected and I set the refresh rate to dynamic 120 Hz.

Teams is an absolute nightmare of an app that chews through the battery. It’s supposed to be native code but it runs like it owns all the CPU cores.

I would expect the OLED model to get slightly more battery life if you use dark mode. The SP11 is a real battery beast given the slim form factor. If you want ridiculous battery life, the ThinkPad T14s Snapdragon model gets almost 30 hours for web browsing and the Surface Laptop 7 15" is close at 25 hours.

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I’ve got the Elite X rather than the Plus but I’ve been really impressed battery wise, especially when its being used for less intensive stuff (pretty much what your using) - but get nowhere near 18 hours. I did get about 13 hours when just using it for video one day though.

That said I’d still say its “all day” battery life for all but the most extreme of days; I certainly don’t have any battery anxiety like with older Surface Pro’s that would struggle to last more than 4-5 hours.

It also charges very quickly with a little boost from a Powerbank, easily extending its use for as long as I would want on any given day.

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How on Earth could you get such a good battery life? What have you switched off? My brand new SP11 drains at 10% per hour. So it lasts 6 hours from 80% to 20%, and others have the same experience, too.

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Please don’t use AI to write your post. The overly sophisticated academic style of writing gets annoying to read through. Other than that, thanks for the information, it’s interesting what you said that x86 applications are performing the same as if it were run on Intel. I did not expect that. I unfortunately heard it cannot run AutoCAD or games so waiting till something is done to fix that.

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I absolutely love my surface pro 11 plus. Ever since I bought it my m3 pro macbook pro and 11 inch ipad pro are gethering dust. My use cases are browsing, office, emails, music, light photo editing and a bit of vs code. This solved the biggest problem I have had with windows tablets that is standby battery drain

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gaming over WiFi 7

Hey - please provide more details on this! Are you using Sunshine/Moonlight and streaming from a host on your local network? How’s the performance? What WiFi 7 router are you using, and how do you like it?

I’m planning on taking the leap and do a lot of in-home game streaming. Any insights you can share would be super helpful.

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Awesome stuff well the main thing is it covers 97% Productivity well entertainment is never a deal breaker. Companies need to work on getting ARM drivers working as more Business adopts ARM technologies printer :printer: drivers should have been tested a long time during in the early days of Surface Pro X.

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What challenges did you face with virtual desktop configurations? Are you referring to citrix? As I use that for work.

Please share!

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What I’m wondering is if arm will mean we can run Android apps after WSA was shelved

I have at least one app which I absolutely need to keep on my tablet, but the dev hasn’t made a Windows version yet. It’s tempting to get an 11 in the future, but not if it makes using the thing practically useless in some situations, unless I buy a stunt tablet for jazz playing

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Teams… sigh… If I didnt have Teams meetings I could easily make it through a day. With the amount I have I get 3-4 hours on a full charge. Its gotten a lot better, but not good enough.

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for countries wtihout consistent power or internet (most low rent countries where much of software is sourced) that provides a HUGE productivity boon. Qualcomm stock should be crazy high but people aren’t realizing and confused AI isn’t even necessary. Pls i see many sold our. Surface is hard to get in all colors and , modles… its a 20 years shift . The copilots andAI, well it need you to basically hire a consultant at this point. One that knows Open source ,because the safety on the AI is making it regress. Lenovo seems to sell out and are firesaling their 86 models, and the optimizations specifically for hexagon,the DSP, go to the milliwatts. that means 30 hotwords ,true hands free operations. i use AI daily at least for typo fix in context…Or i would if it didn’t take so long over the wire. surface also is a true mac killer in build and that you don’t need both ipad and macbook air and tower cases since covid are really phased out, Also consider you can run linux ARM, Julia, Android without emulation.

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o my surface studio laptop with nvidia and i7 i got 1 hour battery watching a fill 90 min football match in a cafe was not possible with all antivirus vpn and crap. im wanting the new one… the optimizations ar just starting. also depends if you think the background stuff is worth it and if you have many chrome tabs open, i wouldn’t run a debloat but definitely ccleaner and some power use evaluation. the heat is unbearable if to take it to a hot country and dont have air conditioning. I love the device and less SAAS trend. also a small LG projector is now 4K <1000$/ thats’ a 120 inc screen.

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To be honest the only thing I have done was I did a fresh install of 24H2 plus stayed on recommended performance and removed animation. I had this device for now 2 weeks but might have the same impact as Intel after several weeks or month battery might chance. But currently I am impressed and better than Intel I had.

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If the OP is writing this on his SP11, then wouldn’t it be on par with the advertising to make use of AI? Besides, that shit ain’t going away any time soon, so we’re all gonna have to get used to it.

As for gaming, I am getting OK performance on the SP11 OLED with 32 GB RAM. WoW is running between 40 and 75 FPS avg on the settings set at 6. Same with ESO, but it has a little more fluxuation in the FPS. Would I raid or run M+'s on it, no. But for casual daily stuff, it is fine.

I cannot speak to AutoCad, but that, even on Intel machines, is a resource hog. So far, Photoshop, Lightroom and even Premier (which now has ARM support) run at a completely workable speed.

What people miss is they try and expect something that was never designed and built to so highly resource intensive processes to do so just cause they want it to. I dont see any copy on the Surface Pro website where it was intended high end graphics and gaming. Understand the limits of what you are buying and there will be less disappointment.

Any “you” here is general, and not meant to reference any single person.

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This post makes me sad! The OP’s writing style is similar to my own, and I hope people don’t think I’m using ChatGPT to write everything.

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The reality is that the GPU element on these devices just isn’t there yet, hence it not being a machine for high end gaming or 3D CAD stuff; its really now what its designed for anyway - these are basically Ultrabook class devices rather than powerful workstations.

We have users in the company I support struggling with AutoCAD even with high end i7 and 4070 GPU’s!

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I’ve had the best experience with Windows Pro Remote Desktop…the one that comes with Windows Pro. I haven’t tested with Surfaces because stupid home but looks super amazing on iPad OLED. Kind of network intense, set up temporary WiFi for it, need to make real one. Was streaming from Precision with some workstation 16GB Nvidia card.

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Maybe the web version of Teams could be better. I haven’t tried using that instead of the useless app.

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Sure it is surely impressive as compared to Intel-based PCs. Do you use the copilot feature for anything? So far I couldn’t find any good use of it…