A purported engineering sample of the Surface Pro 8 has once again shown up online, complete with some new images – and a few extra bits of info about the hardware inside the machine, including a couple of benchmarks.
This prototype Surface Pro was previously spotted on eBay, and so apparently that was a genuine auction and sale – which you’d imagine is something Microsoft will be investigating at some point – and this is the successful buyer of the hybrid (the sole bidder) now providing further details on Reddit (as spotted by Wccftech). Of course, take all this with the usual skepticism which should always be employed around these kind of leaks.
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As we mentioned before, the main disappointment here is that the apparent next-gen Surface Pro looks the same as the Surface Pro 7 – the core design of which hasn’t changed in ages.
And given that, obviously folks are hoping for a design improvement, especially considering the much slicker appearance of the Surface Pro X. Equally, the addition of Thunderbolt connectivity is on the wish-list, too, but we have to bear in mind that this is possibly an early sample model where new hardware is inside an old chassis, and design changes simply haven’t been implemented yet (but are planned).
We don’t know, and indeed we don’t know if this is a genuine prototype for sure – but the extra evidence provided here certainly seems to point that way.
As we saw before, the new owner of the purported Surface Pro 8 highlights that the machine has an 11th-gen Tiger Lake mobile CPU – which makes sense – running at 2.72GHz in one of the pics (supposedly this will be the Core i7-1165G7, as per the previous rumor – it’s also recorded as running at 3.8GHz in a benchmark here).
There’s 32GB of RAM on board – double the maximum configuration currently available with the Surface Pro – and that memory is reportedly running at 4200MHz. The SSD is a 1TB affair.
Benchmark corner
The Reddit poster, ‘unreliable noob’, also ran a couple of tests with the hybrid, with one being the World of Tanks benchmark where the prototype hardware achieved a ‘good’ rating at 1080p resolution and medium settings. A Novabench test saw the device record a score of 2,180, with a CPU score of 1,273 and a GPU score of 411.
According to the eBay buyer of the purported prototype, there are no asset tags or other identifying marks on the portable, so we can finish this story with a further reminder that we should treat any conclusions drawn here about what Microsoft might be planning with the next Surface Pro with a great deal of caution.
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