Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15-inch, Intel): Keyboard and touchpad It also smoothly processed my swipes and scrolling gestures as I moved through pages in Chrome. The Surface Laptop 3's 15-inch touchscreen display accurately and speedily accepted my taps as I navigated Windows 10. As I watched this panel from all angles, I noticed that its colors lost only a bit of their intensity when viewed from 45 degrees to the left or right.

The screens on the XPS 15 (434.2 nits) and the 16-inch MacBook Pro (429 nits) are considerably brighter. Our light gun clocks the Intel Surface Laptop 3 at producing up to 366 nits of brightness, which is just a tad less than the 380-nit Surface Laptop 3 (AMD). That's just a hair above the AMD Surface Laptop's 101% rating, but below the 132.2% mark from the XPS 15 and the 113.9% from the MacBook Pro. To check out how sharp the screen is, I sampled a 4K video of the wildlife in Costa Rica, and the wisps of clouds and scales of a lizard were so crisp, I started to think about booking airfare (until I realized that meant going on a plane).Īccording to our colorimeter, the Surface Laptop's screen produces 104.5% of the sRGB spectrum. The maxed out version costs $2,199 and is our test unit, but with a 512GB SSD. The 15-inch Intel Surface Laptop 3 starts at $1,299 ($999 on sale), in a Core i5, 8GB of RAM and 128GB SSD config. Specifically, our model costs $1,799 (currently on sale at $1,599), and packs a 10th Gen Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. We tested the Intel version of the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, which Microsoft brands as the 'Surface Laptop 3 For Business,' while the regular Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 is an AMD-based laptop.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15-inch, Intel): Pricing and availability Add in a comfortable keyboard and solid speakers and you have one of the best laptops you can buy. While both laptops have good to very good CPU performance, the Intel-based Surface Laptop 3 beats its AMD-based brother on battery life and a few other Tom's Guide tests, including our video editing and storage speed benchmarks. As this Surface Laptop 3 review will explain, this round goes to Intel.

Microsoft surface 3 review