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Intel and AMD fight on the Surface battlefield.

Microsoft dropped a surprise this year when it announced its Surface lineup: the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 was the first in Microsoft’s arsenal to use AMD’s Ryzen processors.

The 13-inch Surface Laptop 3 stuck with Intel’s Ice Lake processors. Interestingly enough, so did the business model of the 15-incher.

We reviewed the 15-incher with an AMD Ryzen 5 3580U Microsoft Surface Edition CPU, Radeon Vega 9 integrated graphics, 16GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD storage.

Now, we have our hands on the business version of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3, and it’s time to set them face to face to see if AMD is the winner, or if you should find a business version of the 15-inch version of the Surface Laptop.

Let’s get this out of the way up top: Yes, it’s a Ryzen 5 vs an Intel Core i7. This was the smallest difference between the two, and getting Intel with an i7 was just $100 more than the AMD model we reviewed. To upgrade to a Ryzen 7, you’d have to pay a minimum of $2,099, so we’re comparing here on price.

The Intel Surface Laptop 3 also won out on the file transfer test. It copied 4.97GB of files in 10 seconds, a rate of 508.9 MBps. The AMD machine reached a slower 282.7MB.s

There might be an explanation for the file transfer scores beyond the processors. It seems that Microsoft is dual-sourcing its SSDs from Toshiba and SK Hynix. The Intel version came with a Toshiba, while the AMD we tested earlier had an SK Hynix drive.

On our Handbrake test, laptops transcode a 4K video to 1080p. That took the Ryzen Surface 20 minutes and 33 seconds, but the Core i7-powered Surface did it more quickly, completing the task in 17:18.

To stress test productivity laptops, we run Cinebench R20 on a loop 20 times in a row. On the AMD machine, the CPU ran at an average clock speed of 2.5 GHz and an average temperature of 61.5 degrees Celsius (142.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The highest score in R20 was on the first run (1480.4). This dropped slightly around run 3 and then to its lowest range at run 9, ending at its lowest score on the final run (1157.2). It leveled out in the 1100’s around run 9.

On the Intel machine, the CPU ran at an average clock speed of 2.4GHz and an average temperature of 73.3 degrees Celsius (163.9 degrees Fahrenheit). It started higher on Cinebench R20 (1687.7) but didn’t really level out until run 7, when most scores were in the mid 1400’s.

Because neither of these are full-on gaming laptops, we tested graphics with the Dirt 3 benchmark on medium presets at 1080p.

The Intel model ran the benchmark at 60 frames per second, edging out the AMD version, which ran at 56 fps. It’s a slight victory for Intel’s Gen 11 graphics, as the company has often fell far behind AMD’s integrated graphics.

We got similar results on 3DMark Fire Strike, in which the Intel machine earned a score of 2,846 while the AMD laptop hit 2,075.
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