Political Crossfire Forums

I'm not so sure I'd be dismissive of a processor on clock rate along. Different architectures allow for different numbers of operations to be completed during each clock cycle. Its why modern 2 Ghz CPU's will flatten old school 4 Ghz CPU's.

The Haswell architecture in the new Pro has big advantages in energy efficiency, but is less stellar in situations where the CPU has to run at full load. Might even use more power under those conditions...but that's basically gaming, video editing, rendering, that sort of thing. Daily office tasks and internet stuff are going to net you a serious battery life improvement while also probably a decent performance improvement. Plus you get the HD5000 GPU..which is way better than the 4000.

Haswell is awesome for anything that runs on a battery. Apple is getting a solid 12 hours of battery life from their new MBA and also better benchmark scores. Intel is kicking ass!

But...desktop is way better regardless.

I'm not really dismissive, just cautious. I'm sure the haswell processor in the surface would work fine for what I need it to do. The problem is I absolutely can not afford it not to work well during busy season so I'm not willing to take the chance right now. I also don't know what running that thing 70-80 hrs per week (and leaving it on 24/7 for backups etc.) for months on end would do... it may get a bit hot, just don't know.

The last year's model that I use for portable stuff works very, very well for email, word, excel etc, especially when I plug it into a docking station. If I get time during the next month or so I might hook it up to my network with it's own user account and see how it does with some of the other software I use all the time and see how it holds out.

I was very close to buying one last generation. But the battery life turned me away. If we get some good benchmarks from the new one, I'll very probably bite.

Hows the job going, fstar?