I have to admit, I’m a proud owner of the MS Surface 3 Pro running an i7 under its hood. It’s my first Windows Tablet, so I do not have references to any of the previous devices. So I’m just giving my personal opinion.

The first impression of the tablet was, that it’s a pretty solid device which does not feel cheap at all. It feels a bit heavy at first, but the weight is pretty balanced, so it isn’t an issue at all. The first boot feels like an eternity due to the setup run of Windows 8.1, but this is a known issue.

After the first boot being done, the following ones happened in about 10 seconds which is an impressive timing. The i7 itself delivers decent performance to do so – But beware: as soon as the CPU needs to do some heavy number crunching, the whole device starts to lag due to thermal throttling.

Hours of software installation are passing by and I was tempted to say, the Surface 3 is a pretty decent companion for a sysadmin as (sadly) most of the tools needed are running on windows.