Why you can’t just build your own RTX Spark PC

The Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark has 128GB of memory. So does my desktop, basically. My desktop also has a GeForce RTX 5090, the fastest consumer graphics card Nvidia has ever made, and one that’s an absolute monster for AI tasks.

So why did the laptop finish my massive local AI workload almost 20 minutes faster? Because my desktop has all that memory in the wrong damned places.

I’ve been putting the staggeringly expensive $7,000 Asus ProArt P16 laptop through some unusual tests for my AI-focused RTX Spark review, including running a sprawling real-world research workload through OpenAI’s gigantic 120-billion-parameter gpt-oss model. Rather than asking an AI to write a poem about Jensen Huang or make me a picture of a cat on a motorcycle, I wanted to see whether this specialized hardware could handle the sort of stupidly ambitious local AI work I’d normally reserve for cloud models.

It can. More interestingly, my monster desktop can too. Just much, much slower.