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Surface Laptop 7 13" Snapdragon X Plus

Updated on 19.06.2024

Just my first impressions, don't expect any fancy benchmarks but the overall experience of someone not paid off by Qualcomm or Microsoft :)

Note: This is a living document that I'll update as I find new things.


Build Quality

The laptop has an extremely nice CNC aluminum chassis, the rigidity is absolutely perfect on both the screen and the bottom case. Seriously, this is the nicest non-Apple laptop I've ever seen.

Gorilla Glass 5 covered screen has no rubber gasket to protect it from the metal case when the laptop is closed. I expect scratches after a few months of use.

Input Devices

Surface Laptop 6 has a backlit keyboard that feels quite good, there is a notable omission of play/pause and song skip keys.

The touchpad is the absolute best I've seen on a Windows machine, pointer precision is good and you can click on the entire surface thanks to the haptic feedback motor. Feedback strength and click sensitivity can be adjusted in Windows settings.

Touchpad disables itself when typing on a keyboard making gaming impossible.

Screen

The laptop comes with a glossy 3:2 ratio 2304x1536 120Hz VRR display with rounded corners. The viewing experience is great with amazing colors and good contrast ratio.

Ghosting performance is quite poor so not a great screen for fast-paced games (fortunately the chip can't run them anyway 😊)

Screen brightness and color balance are adjusted automatically thanks to the brightness sensor near the camera.

HDR protocol is supported but completely pointless considering the low peak brightness.

VRR Issues

Variable refresh rate is enabled by default for battery savings but it unfortunately introduces issues:

SoC - Snapdragon X Plus X1E64100

This is Qualcomm's fourth attempt at a proper laptop chip, and the first one to use their custom Oryon cores.

Overall system performance is decent, native ARM apps open quickly and are very responsive.

The GPU is a major disappointment, contrary to marketing materials the real-world performance is far inferior to anything else on the market.

CPU

X Plus contains 10 Oryon cores in three separate clusters in a 4+3+3 layout.

Oryon looks like a copy of the firestorm core from the original Apple M1, it has identical cache configuration and is 8-wide (new cores like Cortex-X925 and Apple M4 are 10 wide)

3.4 GHz max clock on this SKU means it's not competitive with Intel 155H and AMD 8845HS chips in single threaded performance

Emulation performance

Expect about 60-80% performance of a native application

Core to Core Latencies

Note that actual values might not be very accurate because I used my custom program but you can quite clearly see the cluster layout and relatively high latencies between them.

GPU

Integrated Adreno GPU is based on an older Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 phone chip.

The overall performance is very poor for a modern laptop chip, even older games run poorly and suffer from glitches.

Feature support is inferior to Intel and AMD GPUs with no support for DX12 Ultimate and mesh shaders.

Glitches

The drivers are pretty terrible, I have seen many issues: stuttering, random garbage on the screen, complete OS crashes

Gaming Performance
Counter Strike 2

Heavy stuttering, 30-40 FPS on Dust 2 with low settings + FSR Quality

Battlefield 1

Almost unplayable stuttery 20 FPS on single player

Battlefield 4

Crashes the laptop lol

Memory

The base spec Surface Laptop 7 comes with 16GB of soldered LPDDR5X-8448 memory:

Battery Life

The laptop pulls around 10 watts on medium load which combined with an unimpressive 54Wh battery results in 4-6 hour battery life.

Higher load tasks can easily pull 30+ Watts discharging the battery in 1 hour and 30 minutes.

In a light load scenario 8 hours should be possible, anything more is marketing fantasy :)

Other Things

Included Accessories

The only thing included with a laptop is a custom Surface Connect charger. It attaches magnetically to the right side of the device and fits in both directions.

Biometrics

Microsoft has included a Windows Hello IR camera, it works perfectly fine and unlocks the laptop very quickly.

UEFI Settings

UEFI setup only allows to change secure boot settings, no other options available.

Device Support

Confirmed working:

Conclusion

Microsoft did an excellent job on the laptop itself, the real issue here is the subpar battery life, weak GPU and insane amount of glitches thanks to the X Plus chip.

If you have a bit more time, I recommend waiting for the inevitable Intel Lunar Lake option in late 2024/early 2025. It will most likely wipe the floor with X series chips at much lower power draw and perfect software compatibility.

If you really want this laptop right now, I recommend picking up the cheapest base version and upgrading the SSD to something like 1TB.

Overall rating: 6/10, wait for Lunar Lake lol