Gadgets
Nvidia's RTX Spark Laptops Go on Sale Worldwide From $2,599, and Early Reviews Say Buy Them for AI, Not Games
Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI began selling the first Windows laptops built on Nvidia's Arm-based superchip on Friday. Reviewers found class-leading local AI speed, an RTX 4070-class graphics chip and gaming that still trips over emulation.
Santa Clara, Calif. · Noah Park, Gadgets · Oct 16 2026
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Nvidia’s first Windows laptops went on sale around the world on Friday, Oct. 16, nine days after preorders opened. The company said RTX Spark machines from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI are available through the manufacturers’ websites and major retailers, starting at $2,599, with more systems to follow and prices that vary by region.
The launch lineup covers nine models: the Asus ProArt P14 and P16, Dell XPS 16, HP OmniBook Ultra and OmniBook X 14, Lenovo Yoga Pro 9n, Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, and MSI’s Prestige N16 Flip AI+ and Prestige N16.
“RTX Spark brings the power of NVIDIA AI, RTX graphics and CUDA together with Microsoft Windows in one PC for creating, gaming and running personal AI agents,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and chief executive, said in the announcement. Yusuf Mehdi, an executive vice president at Microsoft, said Windows is being built “to be the platform for hybrid intelligence, where AI can run locally when it makes sense and reach the cloud when needed.”
At the center of each machine is a single superchip that pairs an Nvidia Blackwell RTX graphics processor with a Grace processor co-designed with MediaTek. The two share up to 128 gigabytes of memory, and Nvidia rates the chip at up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance. The pitch is that one thin laptop can run large AI models and agents locally, edit 8K video and render 3D scenes as large as 90 gigabytes, even when unplugged.
Image: NVIDIA
Reviews published on Thursday, ahead of the on-sale date, largely backed the AI claim. Tom’s Hardware tested a top-end Surface Laptop Ultra with the full 20-core chip and 128 gigabytes of memory. Running a set of agentic AI tasks on the Qwen 3.8 27B model, it finished about 25 percent faster than a 14-inch MacBook Pro with Apple’s M5 Max, and roughly twice as fast as AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395. “The RTX Spark platform is the fastest overall at this task today,” the site concluded.
Nvidia is leaning on that strength with software. On launch day it highlighted guided installers for agents including GitHub Copilot, Hermes, OpenClaw, Perplexity, Pi and WorkBuddy, along with its own Nemotron 3.5 Bolt, a 74-billion-parameter model built to run in 24 gigabytes of memory on supported RTX Spark configurations.
Windows Central, which also tested the Surface Laptop Ultra and an Asus ProArt P16, called the graphics processor “the star of the show,” with performance close to an RTX 4070 or 5060 in most workloads and image generation that beat the discrete laptop GPUs it compared. The processor was less impressive. Windows Central put it roughly level with Apple’s M4 Pro and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite, behind Apple’s top Max chips in single-core work.
Image: NVIDIA
Gaming is the weak spot. Most Windows games are compiled for x86 processors and run on RTX Spark through Microsoft’s Prism emulation, and the chip’s memory bandwidth tops out at 300 gigabytes per second, shared by the processor and the graphics. In Tom’s Hardware’s testing, the CPU-heavy Gears of War: E-Day averaged 77.7 frames per second at near 1080p only with frame generation turned on, and the game hung once during a map change. “This platform won’t replace a dedicated gaming laptop,” the review said.
Some promised features are not ready on day one. Windows Central reported that Copilot+ PC features such as Recall, Click to Do and on-device semantic search will arrive in the coming months, and that it could not get OpenClaw to connect after setup. Tom’s Hardware said Microsoft’s secure agent features for Windows 11 were also not yet available to test.
Image: NVIDIA
The other hurdle is price. Entry models start at $2,599, but the Surface Laptop Ultra that Tom’s Hardware tested lists for $5,899 with 1 terabyte of storage, and the site said lead times for that configuration already stretch to late December. Windows Central suggested that most buyers who do not run AI models all day would be better served by an Intel or AMD laptop with a dedicated Nvidia graphics card.
Techtember’s earlier report on RTX Spark preorders and prices lists the starting price of each model.
*Video: NVIDIA on YouTube, "The Road to NVIDIA RTX Spark"*Sources: NVIDIA, “NVIDIA RTX Spark PCs Available Today - A New Beginning for Windows PCs,” GlobeNewswire, Oct. 16, 2026, https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/10/16/3382553/0/en/nvidia-rtx-spark-pcs-available-today-a-new-beginning-for-windows-pcs.html; Tom’s Hardware, Jeffrey Kampman, “We test the RTX Spark Superchip in Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra,” Oct. 15, 2026, https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/we-test-the-rtx-spark-superchip-in-microsofts-surface-laptop-ultra-nvidias-windows-on-arm-platform-impresses-in-local-ai-but-gaming-isnt-its-strong-suit; Windows Central, Zac Bowden, “Absolutely everything I learned while testing RTX Spark for a week,” Oct. 15, 2026, https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/nvidia/rtx-spark-review-benchmarks-2026; NVIDIA Blog, “All Systems Go: Global PC App Ecosystem Ready for NVIDIA RTX Spark,” https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/local-ai-rtx-spark-laptops-software-updates/; @nvidia on X, Oct. 15, 2026, https://x.com/nvidia/status/2110804342487810232; NVIDIA on YouTube, “The Road to NVIDIA RTX Spark,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJvFta7e76E.
Noah Park, Hardware. Noah Park is a senior correspondent covering PCs, robots, and industrial hardware. Previously covered manufacturing tech for specialty titles; based in Seoul.