Geek 7 Bench
Results are expressed as Geekbench scores. Higher scores/longer bars are faster. Surface Laptop Ultra Windows power slider set to “Best performance”
Geekbench 7 is a general-purpose, general performance benchmark, and in single-core CPU tests, the 20-core Nvidia RTX Spark N1X CPU chip in the Surface Laptop ranks below the two-year-old A18 Pro chip in the MacBook Neo. In multi-core CPU tests, the Nvidia chip outperformed Apple’s M5, but it is 21 percent slower than the 15-core M5 Pro. As you can see from the chart, the M5 Max has a considerable lead over the RTX Spark.
Cinebanco 2024
Results are expressed as Cinebench scores. Higher scores/longer bars are faster. Surface Laptop Ultra Windows power slider set to “Best performance”
Cinebench 2024 is more media-focused and renders an image using Maxon’s Redshift engine. In terms of single-core CPU performance, the Nvidia chip is even slower than Apple’s A18 Pro, which is surprising for a chip made for a mobile phone to be faster. In multi-core CPU benchmarks, the Nvidia chip still lags behind the M5 Pro.
As for battery life, PCWorld couldn’t perform the same test we did (playing a 4K video saved on the laptop’s SSD until the battery runs out). However, its tests, which involved streaming a YouTube video in 4K, lasted about 8 hours, a far cry from the 20 hours we got in our tests.
One last thing to note about the 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra is its price. The model tested by PCWorld costs $3,699 and has a 20-core Nvidia RTX Spark N1X CPU, a 6,144-core GPU (Nvidia counts cores differently than Apple), 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. For comparison, Apple sells the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an 18-core M5 Pro CPU, a 20-core GPU, 48GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD for $3,599. So for $100 less, you can get a MacBook Pro M5 Pro that’s much faster in general use than Microsoft’s laptop. The 14-inch model with the same specs costs $3,299, $300 cheaper than the Surface Laptop Ultra.
