(Originally went to post this on tested.com, forum ate my post, then I think I got myself temp-banned trying to recreate it. Booo.)

Hey All,

I currently have a first generation Asus Transformer Book T100. I'm looking to get a new Windows 8/10 tablet.

My main goal: Be able to run the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop smoothly.

• It currently works on my T100, albeit sluggishly.
• It works smoothly on my Gigabyte Brix, which has an A8-5545M SOC, so I assume I won't need anything more powerful than that.
• I likely need 4gb of ram.
• I've already tested a Surface 3 (non-pro) and it performs worse than the t100, likely due to the resolution being dramatically higher.

I really don't want to drop 1k on a Surface Pro to accomplish this. I also feel that anything with a 10" screen at 1080p will likely shrink the text too much to be legible, so I'm either look for sub-1080p, or 11inches or higher. Doing some searching, I thought I had found a winner with the Lenovo Miix 2 11. Unfortunately, it seems that lenovo has hardcapped the CPU so it only runs at around 800mhz.

I've also seen the HP Envy X2, but that's nearly getting into Surface Pro 3 pricing territory.

Anyone with any experience on any of the current windows tablets out there, your input is appreciated. Hell, if you have a newish tablet, and are willing to test for me:

You can grab the FG demo here: http://www.fantasygrounds.com

• Load the demo campaign
• Open an image under maps
• Open a NPC under NPCs

Then try moving the map around, rolling the dice on the chat, and moving the NPC window around. I'm basically looking for all 3 of these to be smooth/non-choppy.

All input is greatly appreciated. Or, if anyone knows when the next line of Windows tablets are likely to hit, let me know as well and I can put this off.

Even if the Surface 3 worked well, I wouldn't really recommend it. I have one here for testing and it takes forever to recharge. Also, with the pen, the Surface 3 is $600...

Have you thought about the i3 version of the Surface Pro 3? If you're a student or work in education, you get a 10% discount. I've seem the i3 go on sale for under $650 recently. The i3 model runs fantasy grounds smoothly and the campaign loads much faster, the dice rolls are smooth as butter. It also has a microSD port. I put fantasy grounds on the SD card and it loads much faster than the Atom based Surface 3. You'd probably really enjoy using the stylus and One Note for your dungeoning and dragonsing.

I have a slew of HP tablets here on my desk. They're all Atom based, so they all suffer from Atom's really slow storage problem.

A quick glance on the Amazon reviews for the Lenovo has lots of people complaining about aggressive throttling to keep power consumption low.

No real news on Surface Pro 4. I'm assuming they're waiting on Skylake which means we may see something this holiday season. I'd put money against it coming out for Windows 10 as they just released a i7 128 gig model.

@zelyre: Thanks for the input. Sadly, no education discount here. While I'm a Technical Writer, it is for an IT firm.

Are any of the HP tablets the Envy x2? Or are they all the inspiron ones (Which are atom based).

Also, any experience with the new Asus Transformer Chi 300? Looks like Microsoft has it on sale for $500 right now, which is almost enough to make me impulse buy it, but I can find nearly no reviews. It also seems to only have mini usb, which isn't as much of a problem (I bought the bluetooth arc mouse when I got the Surface 3, and decided to keep the mouse as it was worthwhile).

Yeah, the Lenovo problems are too bad. I really like the design of it and its keyboard dock, but if it's going to throttle the CPU that badly, it kinda defeats the purpose.

@zelyre: My gadgetitis got the best of me, and I got the Transformer Chi 300. The reviews I could find seem pretty positive. Passmark scores on the Core M 5y10 puts it as fast as my Brix's A8 APU, so here's hoping this does what I need.

@silver-streak: Sorry, we really only handle enterprise HP products and very rarely get consumer products. For us, the only HP transformable tablet solution we actually deploy are the HP Revolves.

Is the Envy x2 a CoreM tablet like the Chi is? Performance wise, if the Chi is using the Core M 5Y10, it puts it a hair faster than the Surface Pro 3 i3.

If you remove the "hur dur Windows 8" and "Broken out of the box" reviews on Amazon, it seems to review pretty well. And, if you buy it from the Microsoft store, the PCs they sell don't have bloatware on it. Doesn't look like there's a stylus available for it yet, though.

@zelyre: No worries. I greatly appreciate your input.

And yeah, Windows 8 on tablet is perfect. Hell, Windows 8.1 on PC is pretty darn great too, fuck the haters. Maybe it's me, but I only ever used the start menu in Win7 with hitting the windows key on my keyboard, typing the app name, and hitting enter. That has not changed with 8, and 8 performs better on the same hardware then 7. Here's hoping they repeat that with 10.

As far as potential failure, I did some checking on MS Store's return policy, and it seems reasonable if I get a dud. Here's hoping.

Thanks again for the info.

I've been going through this recently. I'm a PC desktop guy but I generally buy Mac laptops. I was looking for a tablet/pc hybrid and I just bought the Spectre x360. What a piece of crap that thing is. It's built very well but it's super buggy, has bad battery life, the trackpad is meh, and the touchscreen has been causing me nothing but headaches. It's going back today.