A week with Nvidia RTX Spark laptops: fast, pricey, power-hungry
Three Verge writers spent a week testing Windows on Arm laptops built around Nvidia's RTX Spark N1X chip, including a 128GB Surface Laptop Ultra, Asus ProArt P16, Lenovo Yoga 9n and HP OmniBook Ultra. All tested machines carry a 20-core CPU and 6,144 CUDA cores and cost between $3,199.99 and $6,999.99, aimed at developers, coders and creators who may also want large unified memory for local AI models. Everyday work and common Arm apps mostly held up, and games generally neared 60fps at 1440p on medium settings with DLSS, but CPU-bound titles dropped frames and the authors measured graphics performance somewhere between an RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 laptop GPU; battery life landed around five to five and a half hours, draining faster under heavy local AI or gaming loads.
Nvidia's first Arm laptop SoC directly challenges Apple, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm in high-end Windows laptops, with on-device AI as a headline selling point.