The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite chip, outperforms the M3-powered MacBook Air in certain benchmarks.
A third-party firm’s benchmarks show that the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon X Elite chip outperforms the 15-inch MacBook Air with an M3 chip.
Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop 7 earlier this week, along with the Surface Pro 11. Initial benchmarks of the Surface Laptop 7, featuring the Snapdragon X Elite chip, indicate it outperforms Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air in some tests, as well as Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs and the Surface Pro 9 with an SQ3 chip. The results suggest that Qualcomm’s latest processor for Copilot+ PCs could compete closely with Apple Silicon chips in the near future.
Although reviews of the new Surface Laptop 7 are still pending, a Microsoft-commissioned third-party test reveals that the Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop offers reliable battery life, efficient thermal management, and strong CPU performance. However, it reportedly falls short of the third-generation Apple Silicon processor in graphics, gaming, and web performance.
In its report, Signal65 compared the Surface Laptop 7 to several other models: the Surface Laptop 9 with an Arm-based Microsoft SQ3 processor, the Surface Laptop 5 with a 12th Gen Intel Core i7 CPU, the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo with a current-gen Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU, and Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Air with an M3 chip. All the laptops were equipped with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, except for the MSI laptop, which had 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
In two popular benchmarking tests, Geekbench 6.3 and Cinebench 2024, the new Surface Laptop 7 outperformed all other laptops except the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air in single-core tests. However, in multi-core tests, the new Surface Laptop 7 achieved the highest score among all the laptops tested, demonstrating up to 30 percent faster performance than the M3 chip in multi-core tasks.
Meanwhile, the Snapdragon X Elite chip in the Surface Laptop 7 significantly outperformed the other laptops in the Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark test. The Qualcomm Arm-based chip provides NPU performance more than twice as powerful as the 15-inch M3-powered MacBook Air.
Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop 7 outperforms the Surface Laptop 5, Surface Pro 9, and M3 MacBook Air on Handbrake 1.7.3, but falls significantly behind the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo with the latest Core Ultra 7 155H CPU. In web performance tests (Google Chrome’s Speedometer v3 and JetStream v2.2), the Surface Laptop 7 ranks second, surpassed only by the M3 MacBook Air.
In the graphics department, the M3 chip in the 15-inch MacBook Air outperformed the Snapdragon X Elite in the Surface Laptop 7 in two out of three 3DMark graphics benchmark tests; the Apple Silicon chip was not tested on the third benchmark.
Signal65’s local H.264 video playback tests showed that the Surface Laptop 7 offered the highest battery life, with over 21 hours of playback on a single charge, which is 16 percent more than the M3-powered MacBook Air. In the Procyon Productivity battery test, the MacBook Air with an M3 chip and the Surface Laptop 7 had “equivalent” battery life.
Although these tests were commissioned by Microsoft, it’s important to mention that they were carried out by an independent third-party firm. Reviews of the new Surface Laptop 7 are still pending, and we anticipate gaining further insights into its day-to-day performance, battery life, and other aspects after the laptops become available for sale in the US next month.
