RTX Spark Laptops Are Here: What $2,600 Buys You, and Who Should Wait

Microsoft held its first Windows and Surface event in more than two years on Wednesday, October 7, and spent most of it on a chip it did not make. NVIDIA's RTX Spark is the headline, the Surface Laptop Ultra is the showcase, and a row of laptops from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI stood behind it. Preorders opened during the keynote. The first machines ship Friday, October 16.

We have not touched one. Everything below comes from Microsoft's and NVIDIA's own pages, ASUS's press release, and the live reporting from the event, so treat it as a map of what was announced rather than a verdict on how it runs.

What RTX Spark actually is

Strip away the keynote language and RTX Spark is an NVIDIA system-on-chip for Windows laptops. NVIDIA's own description is a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores joined to a Grace CPU with up to 20 Arm cores, sharing one pool of up to 128GB of unified memory. The two halves talk over a 600GB/s link, and the whole thing runs the full CUDA stack. NVIDIA quotes one petaflop of FP4 AI performance for the top part.

That unified memory is the point. On a conventional laptop the GPU's own 8GB or 12GB of VRAM is the ceiling. On RTX Spark the GPU can see most of the system memory, which is why the demos were about running large language models and Blender renders locally rather than about frame rates.

There are two versions of the chip. Windows Central reported in September that the laptop-focused part pairs an 18-core CPU with a 5,120-core GPU and 24GB or 32GB of memory, while the full part has the 20-core CPU, 6,144 GPU cores and anywhere from 24GB to 128GB. The entry price on every launch laptop we found buys the smaller chip. That matters, and we will come back to it.

The Surface Laptop Ultra

Microsoft's product page lists a 15-inch touchscreen at 120Hz with a quoted 2,000-nit HDR peak, 100% DCI-P3 coverage and Dolby Vision IQ. It is touch only, with no pen support, which is a strange omission for a Surface at this price. Memory goes up to 128GB and the SSD up to 2TB, and Microsoft describes the storage as upgradeable.

The port list is the most generous Microsoft has ever put on a Surface Laptop: three USB-C, one USB-A, HDMI, a full SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a separate magnetic USB-C charging port that Microsoft is calling a first for a PC. It is MagSafe by another name, and about time. The machine is quoted at under 18mm (0.7 inches) thick and under 4.5 lbs (2 kg). Microsoft claims 2.5 times the thermal capacity of its existing Surface Laptops and says it holds more than 99% of its performance on battery, which is a claim worth checking when reviews land, because thin Windows laptops have a long history of throttling the moment you unplug.

Pricing per BGR's live coverage is $2,599.99 for the 18-core, 5,120-core model and $3,699.99 for the 20-core, 6,144-core model. Microsoft's own page confirms the $2,599.99 starting figure and the Platinum and Nightfall colors, and runs a trade-in promotion from October 7 to November 23. Fast charging needs at least a 115W charger; the 140W Surface supply ships in select markets only. A Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a small desktop with the full 128GB, is $5,999.

The rest of the launch lineup

ASUS is the only other maker with a confirmed US price today: the ProArt P16 and ProArt P14 start at $2,599.99 at Best Buy, with first units arriving October 16. ASUS quotes the P16 at 12.9mm (0.51 inches) and 3.9 lbs (1.77 kg) with a 99Wh battery, and the P14 at 13.9mm (0.55 inches) and 3.3 lbs (1.48 kg) with 90Wh, both with 120Hz OLED panels. Memory runs 24GB, 32GB, 36GB or 48GB on most configurations, with 64GB and 128GB reserved for the high-capacity models.

HP's OmniBook Ultra 16 and OmniBook X 14, announced at IFA in September, offer 32GB, 64GB or 128GB with 1TB or 2TB SSDs and 3K OLED displays; HP quotes up to 17 hours from the 16-inch model's 99Wh battery. Lenovo's Yoga Pro 9n and Yoga 9n 2-in-1 complete the set, the Pro with a 15.3-inch 165Hz OLED and up to 128GB, the convertible topping out at 64GB. Neither HP nor Lenovo had published US pricing when we checked, and we are not going to repeat retailer placeholder listings as if they were confirmed. NVIDIA says compact desktops from Acer and others follow in November.

Who this is for

If you run local models for work, this is the first Windows laptop that does what a high-memory MacBook Pro does, and it does it with CUDA, which is where most of the tooling already lives. A 64GB or 128GB RTX Spark machine is a smaller, cheaper substitute for a workstation under a desk. Video editors and 3D artists who live in NVIDIA-accelerated apps are the other obvious audience.

For everyone else, the math is harder than the keynote made it sound. The $2,599 configurations carry the smaller chip and, from what has been published, 24GB or 32GB of memory. That is a lovely amount of RAM for a laptop and a modest amount for the "run big models locally" pitch that justifies the price. The configurations that make the pitch true start well above $3,000. As we covered last week, memory prices are still climbing, and a platform whose whole appeal is lots of unified memory is the worst possible place to be shopping during a memory shortage.

Then there is the Arm question. A Grace CPU is an Arm CPU, so this is Windows on Arm with an NVIDIA badge, and every caveat from the Snapdragon X era applies: emulation for older x86 software, driver gaps for some peripherals, and the occasional app that simply does not run. Microsoft spent real time at the event on Windows ML, llama.cpp support and a redesigned Copilot that runs on local models, all of which help the AI story. None of it fixes a decade-old accounting plugin.

One more thing. A lot of what Microsoft showed on stage is coming to the Windows you already have. The new Windows Search with inline actions is rolling out to Insiders now, the redesigned Copilot app was shown as a Windows feature rather than a Surface one, and NVIDIA said its new Nemotron model lands October 15. If what caught your eye was the software, you do not need a $2,600 laptop to get most of it.

Our take: this is the most interesting Windows laptop platform in years, and almost nobody should preorder one. Let the reviewers find out what the smaller chip does on battery and whether 32GB really runs the models people care about. The price is not going anywhere before then.

Specifications, prices and dates in this article come from Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra product page, NVIDIA's October 7 blog post, ASUS's press release, and the BGR, Windows Central, Thurrott and Ubergizmo reports linked above, as read on October 7, 2026. Configurations and pricing may change after publication, and nothing here is based on hands-on testing.