14 DAY TRIAL // The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s most advanced tablet to date, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not affected by some of the issues that also impacted its predecessors.
In addition to the limited Wi-Fi connectivity issues that have already been confirmed by Microsoft and tried to be addressed with the help of some updates rolled out during this month’s Patch Tuesday cycle, it appears that Surface Pro 3 tablets are also hit by problems that are leading to overheating when playing games or running apps on the desktop.
A number of users have already confirmed these problems on the company’s Community forums, with some explaining that overheating happens when the CPU is running at 10 percent of its maximum power.
Here’s one of the messages posted by an affected user, describing the problems in detail:
“All updates installed. Heat issues started on day 1 of owning the device and have had SP3 for 3-4 weeks now. Using the resource monitor I have noticed some apps such as Netflix, Google Drive sync, Chrome when sitting idle will be utilizing 25-30% CPU @ 2.5Ghz. I have not been able to recreate these apps getting stuck in that mode though. After a restart of the apps they go back to 0-1% usage when idle.
“Like another user mentioned the Microsoft mahjong game will be enough to bring the temp enough to be uncomfortable if you are holding the device like a tablet. With other casual games like Tetris and Spelunky the heat is also fairly high. I am not sure if this is normal or not normal. Some heat is expected but doing simple tasks at 5-10% CPU utilization does not seem like a heavy load.”
Needless to say, these overheating issues are making the Surface Pro 3 pretty uncomfortable to hold when using as a tablet, so some of those whose tablets are affected by the issue are thinking about bringing it back to the Microsoft store to ask for a refund.
Microsoft is yet to issue a comment on this, but we’ve reached to the company for an official statement and will update the article when and if we get an answer.
Until now, it appears that it’s all just a process management issue, so Microsoft might actually fix it with a software update during next month’s Patch Tuesday cycle. It remains to be seen however how fast the company actually manages to develop a fix.