Surface Pro 7 and Visual Studio experience (fan noise?)

1

Hello everyone,

This question was originally posted on the Surface Reddit forum without much success.

After more than 20 years using Mac and Linux I decided to try .Net because of the wonder of F# and I felt in love with it. Also I realized that experience with Visual Studio for Windows has nothing to do with Mac or Linux equivalents and that the general desktop experience has changed a lot so I decided I will get myself a surface pro 7 for Xamarin and Web development.

I am sure the machine can perform well enough for software development either with i5 (fanless) or i7 (with fan and more L cache and performance). And although I would like to have the most power I would hate to have a constant fan noise so I am unsure between models, specially because of the constant compiler checkings and the IDE consumption and simulators for Xamarin and Web dev servers/dockers.

Is there anyone with surface pro (6 or 7) in this forums who can share their experience?

Also if anyone has other experiences with tablet convertible windows laptops or similar hardware mostly for portable and modern development I will gladly read your opinions.

2

Been running on a Surface 6 for over 12 months now and I give it a hard time. By “hard time” I mean plenty of C# F# development using all to usual tools. Running docker containers with docker desktop. Running SQL express server. Running GIS applications. And crunching plenty of data.
Overall I have been quite impressed with the perf of the Surface.

In terms of your concerns about fan noise, very rarely I find that the CPU runs hot as a result of dev work. Typically I only get fan noise from other processes, eg when I’ve opened my 20th chrome tab after a week, or simply just have overloaded the system with too many open apps, or it is from some other cause, eg the .NET optimisation service last week was running hot for some reason.

My only complaint is I need to reboot my system when using docker or Sandbox and closing the lid, as there is a noticeable reduction in perf with each lid close. I’ve not been able to work out why.