Snapdragon X Elite is Finally a TRUE M3 MacBook Killer?!

how much better is the new XLE powered surface laptop 7 compared to Apple's M3 MacBook Air well today we're going to compare everything from the design the ports the displays speakers cameras battery life because we know that's a huge focus and yes of course the performance this machine comes in at $1,400 and honestly it is a great value but you can buy an M3 MacBook Air for as low as 899 bucks so yes this is the base model because I want to see how well this Bas M3 can keep up with the xite there might be some big surprises now we are also going to compare an upgraded 15in air to the X Elite with some more in-depth benchmarks if you guys want to see that make sure you guys are subscribed now right away looking at the surface laptop 7 it looks like a Macbook and let me tell you we have really enjoyed the one day that we've had with it so far and it reminds me of this beautiful um MacBook Air the older generation because of the color also the wedge shape which the service laptop has I mean these machines are gorgeous now as you guys can see both of these are charged to 100% battery I'm going to go ahead and unplug both of them and in the power settings I'm setting the surface to best performance because we want the best performance on the Mac you don't have that you just have a low power mode if you want ultra power savings and now let's close these down and compare the size and the weight the footprint is very similar the surface is slightly taller in this orientation and as far as the thickness the surface is a bit thicker you could see that the air is actually thinner than the actual base of the surface towards the back of that wedge but then by the time you look at the front they are very even and as far as the weight the surface is heavier at 3 lb compared to 2.7 now as far as ports both of them have two USB type-c ports on the left side the MacBook supports Thunderbolt 4 whereas the surface does USB 4 which does most of the things that Thunderbolt can it's Ultra fast but you also get a regular USB type a port which is really nice and both of them have Max safe like charging you have that on the Mac and you have the surface connector on the surface now you can also get some data output out of that connector there's multiple accessories so overall the surface is more powerful in terms of its ports and I'm not sure if this supports two or three external displays the X Elite actually supports three so it definitely beats out the MacBook the Mac uses Touch ID to log you in whereas the surface uses Windows hello bam it turned on logged me in I do see a little bit of a delay there just to get that screen open I wonder if they're going to improve that with software updates cuz right now even though it's more convenient it's not quicker and as far as the keyboards and the trackpads both are excellent the Mac has excellent Keys the surface also has a really nice key feel and your arrow keys are full size which is nice and we know that Max have had the best trackpads for a long time you have a nice even feel that is simulated but on the surface you get the same thing it feels great it is so responsive this trackpad is amazing and I cannot say that the Mac is better than the surface for the first time ever now before I get into displays which I'm already seeing a difference let's first compare the speakers we know the Mac speakers are good um they have a quad Channel system but surface has also gotten better so let's take a listen somewhere unfamiliar bring me back to where we started [Music] [Music] all right guys that was so close you guys let me know your thoughts down in the comments but they are incredibly close I think the surface might be just slightly louder but both have really good speakers and that's a great Plus for a Windows laptop now here is the webcam on the M3 MacBook Air it is a 1080p webcam and of course we have microphones that are hidden on the system but they sound pretty good and here is the webcam on the surface laptop 7 with the X Elite it is also a 1080b webcam we have dual front-facing microphones here so you guys let me know which one looks better and then which laptop sounds better down in the comment section below and now let's talk about the display size-wise they are very close the surface is just slightly larger now the Mac has that Notch but we don't have that face ID whereas here we don't have a notch but we have Windows hello now as far as the resolution the Mac is actually slightly higher it's slightly more dense but not too far off but the surface does have a few key advantages first off this can actually run at 60 HZ or 120 and has variable refresh rate where it can go from 24 for movies up to 120 to save battery life that is really nice cuz on the Mac we're stuck at 60 and it is also 600 nit Peak brightness compared to 500 and the other thing is that the surface is actually a touch screen so you also have that ability built in so this is a banger of a screen but I think it does have one downside and that is reflectivity even though the HDR is better at 600 nits the blacks look so much deeper on the MacBook because of that really good antireflectivity coating so even right now on the surface I see my face pretty clearly so if you're going to be outside well you're going to have to deal with a lot of Reflections this thing almost looks like a mirror with me seeing the whole ceiling behind me and this is not a ultra bright room now viim did point out that from the side the viewing angles on the surface are a lot better oh than the Mac even though both of these are LCD displays so that is a positive now watching bright HDR scenes the surface definitely gets brighter but because of the lack of contrast I don't know if it's because of the anti- reflectivity not being as good or maybe the processing or both you definitely get much deeper blacks and richer color on the Mac so overall I prefer that and now let's get into performance but first I want to give you guys a battery life update because we've been doing all this testing but not really hitting the systems hard on the Mac we are 91% we started with 100 and on the surface we are at 82% so it used quite a bit more battery and the surface actually has a slightly larger battery 54 W hours compared to 52.6 on the air and now let's go ahead and do an SSD speed test I'm going to run both of these here of course our Mac has a 256 gig compared to this one which is a 512 so that's a nice upgrade of course with the Mac you can spend extra 200 bucks and upgrade it as well but we want to see what you get with what most people are buying and here are the full results as far as the read speeds the surface is over 30% faster the right speeds it's faster but not by a whole ton and even if we got the 512 on the Mac the read speeds on the surface would still be quicker and now I have geekbench 6 opened up right here of course we have the M3 that's an 8 core processor compared to a 12 core here but let's go ahead and run our CPU Benchmark now one of the things I love about this surface now that is X Elite is we are not losing performance when we are on battery maybe a slight difference in single core but it doesn't matter compared to the previous Intel versions and here we go we have the results and of course in single cord the M3 is so fast we are looking at about 20% faster and in terms of multicord the X Elite surface is about 177% faster 14,880 which is killer and now I have speedometer 3.0 running this tests the overall web application for performance and the general web speed and look at this guys we have 30.5 compared to 29 that is a 5% performance difference this is the closest that a Windows laptop have has ever gotten to a Mac with the same generation machines and just using this laptop here um unzipping files opening up settings just using as a laptop this is the fastest quickest experience I've ever had in Windows extremely Snappy so quick and it just makes me happy how responsive and nice it is to use it while we've been using it I mean this thing is super impressive and now I have figma opened up on both with this high resolution high quality project brought To Us by 500 designs one of the best design studios in California and here we have a lot of high resolution layers I'm going to start out by just zooming in here and seeing how responsive it is and how quick it is to load these high resolution Graphics so zooming in everything's loading up really quick of course we have the M3 here which has really good performance let's go in here let's zoom in here all right waiting a little bit to load this bam it's loaded up and let's test this out on the surface I'm going to go to the same spot here nice and smooth zooming in bam right there so I think just as quick as the Mac maybe even quicker and now I have 12 high resolution layers here opened up we're going to go ahead and Export these all right guys we have our results and the M3 Takes a Minute 36 seconds compared to a minute and 53 for the X Elite so the M3 is about 15% faster and I guess that kind of lines up with our single core performance so M3 is still quicker than the ex Elite but this is not slow by any means and now I have cinebench opened up right here we are going to do the 10minute test because we know that the MacBook does not have a fan whereas the surface has two of them uh and we have a couple programs here we have the arm 64 version of Hardware monitors so we're going to give you guys a lot of info we couldn't previously let's go ahead and start on this 10minute stress test and taking a look at the frequencies here uh overall the highest that I seeing is was 3.4 I'm seeing 3.2 right over here so it's not clocking super high the highest we saw was 4 GHz but that is not staying for full CPU load now on the Mac we're running at 3.5 flat and you can see that we're already at 106° as far as the temperature that's the average of the core so this thing is getting hot now with the X Elite I'm seeing 87 89 over here on the CPU sensors um and the max was 96 but I can hear the fan barely can hear the fan but obviously it's working to keep this chip nice and cool we're looking at about 88 587 compared to 103 average right now um so nice and cool and surprisingly very quiet and hold on a second this is weird So Far We've ran for almost 3 minutes and we are getting Chip throttling running at 2.5 GHz across the board even though we're in the best performance mode so even though it's running cool it dropped those clock speeds I don't know why that's happening maybe it's just to make sure your battery life still stays pretty good but we have all those cores whereas on the Mac we're throttling because of heat and nothing else but it's running at 3 GHz so it's running faster clock speeds now another interesting thing about the ex Elite is that we have 12 performance cores here compared to four there are no efficiency cores and the this is actually designed to be a server chip originally and they brought it down for a laptop so it could just be that this ship needs a lot more wattage if you're running a full load across the system at high frequencies but we don't want this thing to get crazy hot crazy loud and kill the battery so that might be why all these are pretty much underclocked at this full load now of course the Mac is going to keep slowing down and we will see ultimately what the final performance is because that's what actually matters and now I have my thermal camera here this is the M3 MacBook Air we're seeing 43° C at the hottest point with that huge hot spot and on this one oh my goodness 47° C uh but you guys see the heat is being spread out over here that's probably where the fan is I thought this thing had dual fans but we're seeing that spread over here so possibly only has one but it's interesting that it's so much hotter 46 compared to 42 now on the fanless MacBook Air look at this guys 2.2 it actually dropped all the clocks there I've seen it happen a couple times and it'll go back up right there 2189 that is so interesting uh because it has a fan and it's just not going very high as far as clock speeds now this is also interesting look at our task manager we're only using 73% of the total CPU capacity here whereas with every other system we've tested you're maxed out at 100% so it could just be because you're R to can't feed enough power to get the right clock speeds they're running at lower clock speeds and we're not maxing out the CPU even though technically it could do that that is just odd looking at the Mac here we're only running at 9 Watts on the CPU I believe this is running at 23 Watts for the max could be slightly lower now uh but it does use a lot more power and I think because they limited it to that 23 WTS no higher that's why this could be happening this chip check technically can go up to 80 if you have crazy cooling but they probably put in that hard cap to give you that great battery life all right guys we have our scores and this is impressive we have 550 points on the M3 air of course it does thermal throttle but the exolite surface got 841 that is a difference of 50 3% so even though the clock speeds ran low the performance is here if we take a look at the M3 MacBook Pro that has a fan that scored 633 so the X Elite still smokes it that is very impressive in terms of performance but what about the graphics performance so here I have 3D Mark opened up we're going to test Wildlife extreme the unlimited mode and then we are going to test their brain brand new graphics test as well all right we have our results and we have 41.9 FPS on the M3 compared to 38.3 to so that is a difference of about 10% but you have to remember we have the base MacBook Air this is a 9 core GPU not the 10 core the 10 core gets about 48 so that is definitely a difference in graphics performance this is more on the level of the M2 and now let's go ahead and run the brand new test this is the steel Nomad light we're running unlimited mode to make sure that it's fair with the different resolutions and this is a nonr traced test uh but of course the M3 does have Ray tracing if you're going to use that all right guys wow so this is a a tougher test this is new uh we have 21.9 FPS on the Mac remember this is the bend n core here we got 14 14.78 that's a difference of 48% and people mention that the X Elites optimized for a 3D Mark Wildlife that a lot of people run and here we could see because the difference went from 10% to uh 48% so as far as graphics performance that just is not great and we cannot run solar Bay which will use raate tracing so um same thing with using cinebench the GPU test you also cannot run that even though on other systems you could use softer rate tracing instead it's just slower this won't even let it run that maybe they don't want you to use a lot of extra power when it's just not supported so that is very uh interesting now when we compare a 16 gig model of the M3 chip to um an X Elite that also is going to be maybe a larger one we'll do some other tests that could harness Graphics a little bit more to see what are real world differences are but so far if you need good graphics performance that is not a strength of the X Elite now let's do a test for creatives I have Lightroom classic opened up right here and I also with this test want to see how emulation works because a lot of these applications like Lightroom classic they are not designed yet for Windows arm Adobe is working on and other companies are as well but you could still run it right now at least with this um running emulation Premiere Pro does not work yet uh but let's see what the performance is like we know the storage is really fast I'm going to switch through these images here which all have a bunch of effects added and thankfully it is very Snappy with the X Elite beating out the Mac or tying it sometimes the Mac is slightly faster I was thinking with emulation we're going to have some slowdowns that that is actually quite nice previously with the sq3 um it would be super slow let's go ahead and zoom in here nice and quick a little bit behind the Mac but really close and now I'm going to edit all 50 these high resolution edited images but first I went into our preferences here and with the M3 we can use the GPU for full Graphics acceleration but with the X Elite it is disabled because of an error it's just not designed to use it and so we saw on some Intel laptops it would only get half acceleration here it's not going to use that at all I'll also mention that because we only have 8 gigs of RAM on here compared to 16 the 8 gig model is a lot slower than the 16 gig M3 because of Apple's dumb choice just to not give it enough RAM it's a major bottleneck so this is going to be interesting all right let's hit export here I'm starting my timer and out of the ge-o the exite might be going quicker here I the bar is larger so let's see what happens all right guys I am impressed wow okay so the M3 with 8 gigs took a minute and 53.95 basically a minute 54 the surface with xite took a minute and 39 so even without Graphics acceleration just cuz the CPU is fast we have 16 gigs of RAM it beat out the M3 with 8 gigs now the M3 with 16 gigs is a minute and 3 seconds so that does still win out uh but the graphics here aren't that powerful anyway so I guess that doesn't matter I am just really shocked that even with emulation this is not natively supported with arm on Windows it still did faster that is crazy now in our next test when we have a 16 gig Mac it'll be more even as far as the specs we'll do some more real world creative tasks we'll do some video editing as well running denture resolve which is designed for this so make sure you guys are subscribed but so far this has been one impressive comparison and now let's take a look at our battery life after hours and hours of shooting after all these tests getting stuff set up uh looking at the Mac we're at 50% battery we only ran through half of it which is very impressive and with the ex Elite we are at 32% so yes that is lower it obviously uses more power than this m 3 but with that said in our previous comparisons using Intel based um thin and light laptops they literally would be almost dead or we had multiple times where they died uh were hit you know 5% we had to plug them in before we were done with our testing so to have 32% now 31 it just dropped after all of this that is impressive and then with that the very little fan noise that we had when it turns on it's very very quiet in a room with sounds you're probably not going to notice it that's also very impressive so overall does the new X Elite beat out the Mac well in a lot of ways it did in a lot of ways more ways than we've ever seen before and even in the test that it lost other than some of those Graphics it wasn't by much and overall this is one impressive machine for 13 99 512 16 gigs to get great battery life to have a nice screen other than the reflectivity nice keyboard trackpad nice speakers um it's nice it's very impressive and just using it data day um just the snappiness the responsiveness I've never felt a Windows laptop that was so Snappy and responsive so if you're looking for a laptop that's windows-based and you're using email web applications General programs even if it's not yet fully optimized for arm on Windows this is the first time ever that we have a laptop at a great price with great features that competes with the mac and even beats it in multiple ways wow good job Microsoft good job Qualcomm this thing is fantastic I can genuinely recommend this to friends to family uh it's a killer machine you will not be disappointed now if you guys want to see more in-depth videos some more comparisons some more testing that we didn't do here make sure you click that Circle above cuz we have some great videos coming check out one of those videos right over there this been Max and I'll see you in the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Max Tech

Views: 205,024

Keywords: snapdragon x elite, x elite, copilot plus, copilot plus pc, m3 vs x elite, snapdragon x plus, m3 pro vs snapdragon x elite, windows on arm, m3 pro, qualcomm snapdragon x elite, windows vs mac, m3 max vs snapdragon x elite, qualcomm x elite, x elite benchmark, qualcomm snapdragon, m3 chip, x elite vs m3 pro, snapdragon x, snapdragon laptop, snapdragon x elite review, snapdragon x elite benchmarks, surface laptop 7 vs m3 macbook air, x elite review, x elite vs m3

Id: rYGUG_2Oge8

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2024