Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops make no sense — until they do

Nvidia makes laptop CPUs now. That still feels weird to type!

Over the past month, PCWorld has been hammering on several laptops powered by Nvidia’s new RTX Spark platform, including Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra, HP’s OmniBook Ultra, and the absolutely insane $7,000 Asus ProArt P16 I reviewed with 128GB of unified memory. We’ve tested everyday performance, played games, and run local AI models ranging from relatively petite LLMs all the way up to OpenAI’s gargantuan 120-billion-parameter gpt-oss model. I even pitted the top-of-the-line ProArt against my monstrous GeForce RTX 5090 desktop in an AI cage match.

So after weeks of poking, prodding, benchmarking, and generally trying to make these things sweat, what should you actually expect from an RTX Spark laptop?

Quite a lot—just probably not in the ways you’d expect.

AI is RTX Spark’s superpower

RTX Spark laptops are AI PCs in the most literal sense—not because Windows has a Copilot button or somebody sprinkled “AI” across a marketing slide, but because the hardware itself is designed to run serious AI workloads locally.