Opening and modifying a large Photoshop file created little to no lag on the system. The Surface Laptop Studio took 11 minutes 29 seconds while the Surface Laptop 4 took eight minutes 49 seconds. Transcoding a 12-minute 4K video into a 1080p video with Handbrake was also slower with the Surface Laptop Studio than with its more affordable Surface sibling. Both of the laptops’ CPUs rendered the same scene faster, but the Surface Laptop 4’s processor was significantly faster, taking four minutes 58 seconds to render while the Surface Laptop Studio took seven minutes and two seconds to render. The Studio rendered the scene 30 seconds faster than the Surface Laptop 4, taking a total of eight minutes 25 seconds. When rendering a 3D image in Blender, the Studio’s discrete Nvidia RTX A2000 graphics card pulls ahead of the much cheaper Surface Laptop 4’s integrated graphics, but barely. In both benchmarks and in real-life applications, the Surface Laptop Studio does fine, but it doesn’t stand out.

While the Surface Laptop Studio’s Intel Core i7-11370H processor excels at conserving power, this comes at the cost of its performance.

Surface laptop studio weight