[Tim Kriebel]

I am shopping for a tablet like Surface Pro for a daily driver in the field to go digital?

Is anyone using one for 2020 successfully ?

What specs and Mfg are you running with?

 

Pros and cons?

THANKS

TIM

[Mike Langensiepen]

Not a user but I did once do some comparison renders for a client that was using a Surface Pro and a very high spec AMD Tower. The Surface Pro blew the AMD out of the park and half way round the world on the render – it really was that much faster.

That said, I have a couple of Surface Pro users who use them for ‘normal’ IT use with an occasional opening of 2020. Not impressed – yes they are fast but we have an ongoing issue where the external mouse randomly moves and after much testing, it is down to the touch screen drivers and Microsoft are unwilling/unable to fix it. They are also quite easy to damage the screens on. Also several had to go back because they stopped powering on.

I’d be inclined to go for the HP Spectre X2 or the Thinkpad X1 if money is not a major object.

For specs, 8GB RAM minimum, i7 processor as fast as you can afford. Make sure it has good external connectivity with USB3 and DisplayPort as well as Bluetooth and AC Wifi (most will have this anyway). Avoid AMD like the plague.

[Tim Kriebel]

Thanks

So there is no mouse issue with the HP or the Thimkpad?

[Mike Langensiepen]

Not that I have heard of but we can’t change the Surface Pros as we can’t justify changing having spent that money. They are nice machines but definitely have a few little issues. Perhaps we have just been unlucky but he wandering cursor issue would be a biggie for 2020 users. The existing users complain constantly even though they have been told to ‘suck it up’

[Chris Blackman]

How much of the rendering is handled specifically by the GPU?

I’m wondering if a more portable solution would be a decent tablet/surface and an external GPU.

 

Thoughts?

[Mike Langensiepen]

Imho if you are using Windows 10, I would say that the rendering engine uses mainly the main processor but I suspect that will change as soon as the third party rendering engine is updated.

I’d go for the fastest i7 based unit you can afford and then make sure you have 8gb ram, largest practical display, SSD and then a discrete gpu as the last bit of the wishlist.  The manufacturer of the internal render engine in Design is making noises about a distributed render function where other systems can help with the rendering – there are some practical issues with this type of rendering so it may never happen.

The wandering cursor issue we had with our Surface Pros seems to have disappeared after the recent round of Win10 updates but now the auto-appear keyboard function appears to be broken. Microsoft REALLY need to sort out Win10 when it doesn’t even work correctly on their own hardware! TL;DR buy something that ISN’T a Surface Pro.