Nvidia's RTX Spark Laptops Hit Windows With 128GB Unified Memory

Unplugged, this 16-inch ASUS ProArt Creator 16 is still running a 27-billion-parameter large model. In Ifanr's testing, the battery dropped from 100% to about 85% in just ten minutes. The machine weighs about 1.77 kg and is 12.9 mm thick at its thinnest point, making it one of the first products built on Nvidia's RTX Spark platform. The first models went on sale October 16.

In the past, the bottleneck for running large models locally was usually not GPU compute but video memory. Ifanr points out that even with a top-end RTX 5080, the video memory is only 16GB, which makes it hard to even load the weights of larger models. RTX Spark takes a different approach: the CPU and GPU share the same memory, known as unified memory, so the GPU can directly access the entire memory pool, up to 128GB. The CPU portion of the chip was designed by Nvidia in collaboration with MediaTek, and it uses Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem, the GPU programming toolchain commonly used by developers, so code that ran on desktops can be moved directly to laptops.

Measured results vary by model and machine. When Ifanr ran Qwen3.5 35B-A3B (Q4 quantization) with Ollama and Open WebUI, generation speed reached 59.65 tokens per second. Tokens are the basic units in which models process text. Switching to the denser Qwen3.8 27B, the speed was 20.98 tokens per second after warm-up. On the ASUS machine, running Qwen 3.8 27B with LM Studio, generation speed was about 14.3 tokens per second. These are the media's own hands-on tests, not unified evaluations by independent institutions.

For people who need to deploy models at customer sites, debug hardware on the go, or work with materials that are inconvenient to upload to the cloud, the platform already has practical uses. The WorkBuddy agent software can download local models, and some tasks can be completed offline. Nvidia also says its NVIDIA PAIR feature can share the computer's AI inference capability with other computers on the same home network. However, WorkBuddy does not yet support automatic switching between on-device and cloud models, so users must choose between local and cloud models themselves.

Price and ecosystem are the biggest reservations. The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at 21,988 yuan, and the entry model comes with only 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage. On gaming, Microsoft and Nvidia are working with developers one by one to get anti-cheat systems running, and Microsoft says Call of Duty will arrive on the RTX Spark platform in 2027. For ordinary users who only use cloud tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini, Ifanr's conclusion is direct: there is no need for now to replace their current laptop just to run large models locally.