Surface Pro 7 Core i5-1035G4 performance can throttle by as much as 27 percent to be slower than the Core i7-8565U

The 10 nm Intel Ice Lake Core i3-1005G1, Core i5-1035G1, and Core i7-1065G7 made their debut early last month on the Dell XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 series with pretty good results across the board even though the integrated Iris Plus GPU was hit or miss and overall performance-per-dollar wasn't so impressive. The Dell system has paved the way for additional Ice Lake devices including those from Razer and, more recently, the Surface Pro 7.

We had the chance to benchmark the Surface Pro 7 Core i5-1035G4 SKU with our full benchmark results shown below. Unlike the Core i5-1035G1, the Core i5-1035G4 integrates more GPU Compute Units (48 vs. 32) and a slightly faster CPU Turbo Boost clock rate (3.7 GHz vs. 3.6 GHz). Before jumping into the data, it's worth noting that the Core i5-1035G4 is passively cooled in the Surface Pro 7; a larger laptop equipped with the same Core i5-1035G4 CPU and a proper fan would likely return better results than what we've recorded below on the Surface Pro 7. Thus, our analyses on this page represent only the performance of the Core i5-1035G4 on the Surface Pro 7 because results will likely differ on other laptops or tablets. The data also does not include any AI features of Ice Lake or gaming benchmarks due to 3DMark issues on our test unit.

Raw multi-thread performance is most similar to the 12 nm AMD Ryzen 7 2700U in the Dell Latitude 14 5495. Because of the lack of a fan in the Surface Pro 7 Core i5, however, performance can drop by as much as 27 percent over time when the tablet is subjected to prolonged stress. We suspect that larger laptops with better cooling would be able to sustain faster Turbo Boost clock rates to be more similar to the Ryzen 7 3700U in the Dell Inspiron 15 5585 in overall CPU performance.

Meanwhile on the graphics side, 3DMark 11 ranks the Iris Plus G4 about 50 percent faster than the UHD Graphics G1 in the Core i3-1005G1 or almost 90 percent faster than the average UHD Graphics 620 taken from 173 individual PCs. This puts the Iris Plus G4 just 10 percent behind the 10 W GeForce MX150 even though real-world performance will still significantly favor the Nvidia GPU due to its more mature drivers. As of this writing, graphics drivers for the Surface Pro 7 are months behind Intel's latest official releases.