I went through this evaluation myself and ended up in a completely different place than I expected. I found a video out there where a guy benchmarked the Surface 3 against the Surface 3 Pro running a bunch of DAW configurations. Both machines ran these power-hungry DAWs surprisingly well. The Pro could do more extreme stuff, but I don't think you will ever see a meaningful difference when running StaffPad.
And ironically, the video seemed to actually recommend the cheaper non-Pro model because the Pro model's CPU speed is unpredictable as Intel keeps zapping it to give it a boost. In heavy DAW applications, you really want consistent performance, not necessarily the maximum peak performance. And the reviewer noticed a real oddity, which was that the sound levels coming out of the built-in speakers were about twice as loud on the cheaper non-Pro. Go figure. The reviewer surmised that there was probably some setting he needed to adjust. I took some MIDI files into Best Buy and tried them on both machines and sure enough, the cheaper non-pro was MUCH louder. It wasn't close. The basic Surface 3 sounded a lot louder and a lot better. Obviously the Pro has a larger display. For me, that larger display makes it a little less "pad-like" so to speak. If you are going to be working a lot with StaffPad on scores where the display space is really important, they I guess the Pro might be worth something, but I couldn't see spending the extra bucks for a machine that, to me was LESS functional. I would definitely NOT recommend the 64GB. That doesn't leave very much room for OS and apps. If you really think you will never do much more than use StaffPad, then 64GB is OK. But I would look seriously at 128GB. On 7/5/2015 2:53 PM, Robert Patterson wrote: > For those of you out there using StaffPad, is the low-end Surface Pro 3 (i3 > 64GB model) powerful enough to run StaffPad. My main interest in it is as a > music reader and for StaffPad. > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > > To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: > [email protected] > > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: [email protected]
