Nvidia RTX Spark and Surface Laptop Ultra: Your questions answered

Rich is the Content Director of XDA, MakeUseOf, and How-To Geek, and I've been reporting on all things consumer tech since 2013. More recently, I've had more of a focus on Windows, and I've reviewed pretty much every mainstream laptop under the sun. If you see me somewhere, come say hello and let me ask you awkward questions about why you use the tech that you use.

I've been testing out the Surface Laptop Ultra for the last week or so, and it's a pretty exciting product. It's a brand-new laptop from Microsoft, and it runs on Nvidia RTX Spark, a brand-new Windows on Arm platform that's meant to be way more powerful than what Qualcomm is offering.

I'm still not quite ready to publish a full review, as I'm aiming to be thorough more than I'm aiming to be fast. However, I posted on Twitter and Threads to field questions about it, and there were a lot of them. Unfortunately, while I was allowed to say I have the product, I couldn't yet answer most questions.

How much money does that thing cost?

The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599.99. The unit Nvidia supplied for me costs $5,899.99, including the 6,144-core GPU, 128GB RAM, and 1TB storage. It's the most expensive one, and it's a little unfortunate that you can only get 128GB RAM with 1TB storage. If you want 2TB storage, you have to get 64GB RAM, which costs $1,200 less.

Let’s see that battery life

Battery life varies wildly by how you use it. I could get 10 hours from it, but if you're using it for things you're supposed to be using it for, you're getting more like two hours.

Thermals, fan noise - These are my major concerns. Followed by battery life. Should we keep the cord always connected?

Yes. Like a traditional Intel-powered laptop with discrete graphics, it's probably assumed that you're plugged in most of the time. The good news is that there isn't much of a drop in performance if you unplug it.

I think part of the issue with battery life under more intense work loads is that you're not going to want to keep the power profile on "efficient".

And yes, there are fans, they do get loud, it does get hot. Interestingly, I've not seen noticeable performance drops from it though.

It will be good if you can tell us that how good it is to do the fine-tuning of models having at least 12 billion parameters

The two models I've been using are Qwen3.8 27B and Qwen3.6 35B, the latter of which is much faster. Haven't run into any issues, and I'll talk more about things like tokens per second in my review.

How's trackpad experience comparing to MacBook Pro?

Microsoft always makes great touchpads, at least in recent years since it went haptic.

Why the CPU power is not good! Since you already tried it, do you think focusing on GPU and memory is enough?

There are a few reasons the hardware is what it is. The CPU is made by MediaTek. It's not using custom Arm cores like Qualcomm's Oryon. Nvidia's GPU and unified memory is the real story.

Also, Nvidia's N1X chipset has been in development for a while, too long in fact. If it appears to be behind, it's because of the issues Nvidia had actually getting this thing out of the gate. I'm really interested to see what the second generation looks like.

Compared to the DGX Spark, how does it perform, if you have a DGX Spark

I do not have a DGX Spark, but Adam Conway does. He'll be writing about that on XDA soon. Stay tuned.

Can it compete with MacBook Pro Apple Silicon? What software it can _not_ run?

I don't actually know of any software that doesn't run on Windows on Arm laptops, or even any that doesn't run well. I'm sure that there are some obscure games that don't run. But hey, Nvidia officially promised that every app or game ever made will work, so who knows?

As far as competing with a MacBook Pro, I don't actually have one. I will say that CPU tests are pretty weak, and while GPU tests are stronger, M5 Max seems to come out on top everywhere I've checked.

We need a wireless laptop

I have good news.

Why should I get it for coding if I can pay for Claude subscription?

This is a great question. The answer is that you don't have to pay for cloud-based AI services. You can even just vibe-code an app in Claude and have the app run a local model, so your subscription pays for the development of the app, but you don't need to rack up API tokens when actually running it.

How many watts is that power brick?

140W. It ships with Microsoft's new Magnetic Connect in the box, which is kind of neat because the port is also a USB Type-C port.

Could you game on it? And how's the temp???

It ran every game I tried. I was mostly playing Gears of War: E-Day, which runs in emulation for some reason. When Microsoft was talking about partnering with studios to build for Arm, I asked why it didn't partner with itself to handle Gears. And yes, it gets hot.

The model that Nvidia sent me is not meant for gaming. The less-expensive configurations with 24GB or 32GB RAM are made for gaming and content creation, while 128GB RAM is meant for local LLM work flows. This is also why the RTX Spark mini PCs cost so much; those are only for local LLM work flows.

What’s the Geekbench 7 single-core score?

About 2,630 when plugged in, 23,678 multi-core. On battery, 2,565 and 23,984. GPU test came in at 116,055.

Does it run Cyberpunk 2077?

I can confirm that it runs Cyberpunk 2077 just fine.

Why is the power brick so big?

Other than the fact that this is the highest-wattage power adapter for a Surface ever, it's a wall adapter, so you don't get a brick that sits on the floor with an extension cable that plugs in. Microsoft does sell it separately though, and you should buy one, because the power cable in the box is laughably short.

I’m looking forward to the big-boy Intel Surface Laptop Ultra, to complement this cute Surface Laptop Ultra RT.

Unlike the Surface Laptop with its Snapdragon processors, I really don't think the Surface Laptop Ultra will be released with an Intel version.

How does it behave when you close the lid and open it 5min, 5hours and 5 days later?

I actually changed the settings so that it doesn't sleep when I close the lid. That's another issue with battery life. If you're hosting a local model that's powering an app, it needs to always be running.

Meanwhile, my M1 MacBook Air (base spec) ticks along just fine performing every task I ask of it with aplomb... (Dev, Lightroom, video editing etc)...

It's really important to remember that the Surface Laptop Ultra is not meant to compete with the MacBook Air. That's what the regular Surface Laptop is for. Those use cases outlined there are great on a Snapdragon machine.