Surface Laptop 4 with Ryzen 5

I’m curious to see if anyone has bought /used a Surface Laptop 4 with the Ryzen 5 processor? Every review I’ve seen is of the 15″ laptop with Ryzen 7. My wife needs a laptop and tried using my M1 MacBook Air, but she doesn’t really like the Mac OS and I wanted to see if this would be a good laptop for general use (MS Office, Edge, Skype, etc.). Anyone have any ideas?

Conversation 6 comments

  • mi1984

    17 May, 2021 - 4:45 pm

    <p>keep your eye on the size of the SSD, I don’t know why for the prices their small</p>

    • Daishi

      Premium Member
      19 May, 2021 - 7:50 am

      <p>This is literally <em>the</em> reason why they won’t be on the list when we get my wife a new laptop soon. For the asking price the size of the storage is just not acceptable.</p>

  • rob_segal

    Premium Member
    17 May, 2021 - 6:43 pm

    <p>The performance is good for an ultrabook. Battery life is good. Graphics performance is good enough for those tasks you listed. The slight throttling while on battery (an AMD thing) won’t be noticeable. It will handle general use. The 16gb RAM/256gb storage is a nice sweet spot, but is sold out.</p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    18 May, 2021 - 2:20 am

    <p>The performance is supposed to be good. I haven’t used one myself, but the review on heise.de was interesting, Microsoft aren’t using the new 5000 series Ryzen chips, as is commonly known, but they aren’t using stock 4000 series processors either, they are a special version of the 4000, customized for Microsoft; this includes a slightly higher clock speed and, while not all 5000 series chips have moved to the new Zen architecture, the chips in the Surface Laptop 4 can actually match or beat some equivalent 5000 series chips.</p><p><br></p><p>Certainly they are still as fast or faster than Intel Tiger Lake, according to the review and benchmarks, so there shouldn’t be any problems.</p><p><br></p><p>For MS Office, Edge and Skype, any Ryzen 4000 or 5000 series is still overkill and should be for a good few years to come. I am still using a 2018 Lenovo ThinkPad with 8th generation Intel Core i5 and it is more than fast enough for a 4K monitor, Outlook, Excel, Edge, Brave, TeamViewer, mRemoteNG and VisualCode all running at the same time, without the fans spinning up much, so any current AMD Ryzen or Intel based laptops should be more than adequate.</p><p><br></p><p>My only hold-off on the Laptop 4 is the lack of USB-C docking – we have standardised on USB-C docks at work. If docking or sharing existing USB-C docks isn’t a problem, then nothing should stand in the way.</p>

  • trevorcurtis

    18 May, 2021 - 7:51 am

    <p>I don’t have the new Surface Laptop 4, but I have an HP Envy x360 based on the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U platform. With six cores and RADEON graphics it handles everything well, even with an 8GB/256GB configuration. It won’t handle video editing well or do justice to intense games, but for all the basic productivity and creative tasks it is a great platform. Battery life on my machine is pretty good.</p>

  • shark47

    31 May, 2021 - 5:38 pm

    <p>Thanks all. I ended up buying it. It’s only been a week, but it works well. Also, my USB-C dock does work with it, which is a plus.</p>

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