Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 7 was unveiled by the company earlier this week, alongside the Surface Pro 11, and the first benchmarks of the company’s Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite chip appear to have beaten Apple’s MacBook Air with the M3 in some benchmark tests, along with Intel’s Meteor Lake processors and the Surface Pro 9 with SQ3 chip. Benchmark results also suggest that Qualcomm’s latest Copilot+ PC processor could be on par with Apple Silicon chips in the coming weeks.
While reviews of the new Surface Laptop 7 are still pending, a Microsoft-commissioned third-party test of the Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop reveals that it’s capable of delivering reliable battery life, good thermal management, and strong CPU performance. However, it reportedly lags behind third-generation Apple Silicon processors in graphics, gaming and web performance.
Surface Laptop 7 CPU performance on Geekbench 6.3
Author of the photo: Signal65
In its report, Signal65 compared the Surface Laptop 7 with the Surface Laptop 9 with Microsoft’s Arm-based SQ3 processor, the Surface Laptop 5 with a 12th-generation Intel Core-7 CPU, the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo with Intel’s current-generation Core Ultra 7 CPU, and Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Air with the M3 chip. All laptops were equipped with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, except for the MSI laptop which had 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
On two popular benchmarking tests — Geekbench 6.3 and Cinebench 2024 — the new Surface Laptop 7 easily beat all other laptops except the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air in the single-core tests. In multi-core tests. however, the new Surface Laptop scored the highest among all laptops tested — tests also showed it to be up to 30 percent faster than the M3 chip in multi-core performance.
The Surface Laptop 7 offers better battery life than other models tested by the company
Author of the photo: Signal65
Meanwhile, the Surface Laptop 7’s Snapdragon X Elite chip was far ahead of other laptops in the Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark test. Qualcomm’s Arm-based chip on the laptop allows it to offer more than NPU performance that is more than twice as powerful as the 15-inch M3-powered MacBook Air.
Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop 7 can also outperform the Surface Laptop 5, Surface Pro 9 and M3 MacBook Air on Handbrake 1.7.3, but is far behind the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo with the later Core Ultra 7 155H CPU. Meanwhile, in web performance (Google Chrome’s Speedometer v3 and JetStream v2.2), the Surface Laptop 7 is second only to the MacBook Air with the M3 chip.
The Surface Laptop 7 beat the competition on the Procyon AI computer vision benchmark
Author of the photo: Signal65
In the graphics department, the M3 chip on the 15-inch MacBook Air beat the Snapdragon X Elite on the Surface Laptop 7 on two of 3DMark’s three graphics benchmark tests — the Apple Silicon chip was not tested on the third benchmark.
Signal65’s local H.264 video playback tests showed that the Surface Laptop 7 offered the longest battery life, with more than 21 hours of playback on a single charge, more than the MacBook Air with M3 which provided 16 percent less battery life. In the Procyon Productivity battery test, the MacBook Air with the M3 chip and the Surface Laptop 7 were found to offer “equivalent” battery life.
Although these tests were commissioned by Microsoft, it is worth noting that the benchmarks were conducted by an independent third-party company. Reviews of the new Surface Laptop 7 are still pending, and we can expect to learn more about day-to-day performance, battery life, and other parameters once the laptops go on sale in the US next month.
