Surface Pro 8 review: Microsoft?s best Windows tablet gets big upgrade

Microsoft's category-defining Windows 11 tablet finally gets the design and feature upgrade Surface Pro fans have been clamouring for, but it comes with the sting of price hike.

The Surface Pro 8 starts at £999 ($999/A$1,649), without the essential £160 ($160/A$260) keyboard, which is £100 more for the tablet and £35 more for the keyboard than last year's equivalent models.

It's the biggest upgrade since 2014: the design has been revamped to match the more modern-looking Surface Pro X, with rounded corners, slimmer bezels and a switch from magnesium to aluminium for the body. It is 116g heavier and 0.8mm thicker than the last model but looks and feels great.

At 13in on the diagonal, the screen is bigger than the 12.3in of its predecessors. It is still compact compared with a laptop, but the larger screen makes working with multiple windows a bit easier. The display supports a faster refresh rate of up to 120Hz too, which is common on smartphones, high-end tablets and found on Apple's latest MacBook Pro.

Disappointingly the 120Hz screen is a feature yet to be fully realised. The Pro 8 is waiting on a firmware update due next year to enable variable refresh rates, which allows the screen to automatically adjust its speed depending on the content on display, saving battery for static images while being super smooth for fast moving animations. For now it is set to 60Hz by default to save battery life.

The Pro 8 ships with new 11th-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 chips (as tested), which are 10%-15% faster than previous models in benchmarks and matched the performance of the Surface Laptop 4.

A cooling system upgrade keeps the machine silent for most of the time, requiring the fans a lot less frequently than previous versions, which was a very welcome change.