THE CRUNCH
ASUS's first laptop built around NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip is a polished, premium creator machine that makes a clear case for the new platform, while also exposing its limits. The ProArt P16 swaps an Intel or AMD processor for NVIDIA's first major PC system-on-a-chip, which combines a 20-core Arm CPU, a Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of unified memory in a design broadly similar to Apple's M-series chips. The review unit costs $7,000, mostly because of that 128GB of RAM, and the laptop starts at $2,800.
Physically, it is an impressive package: a sturdy aluminium case, a bright 16-inch OLED screen, a spacious keyboard and a large haptic touchpad. At 3.9 pounds it is even lighter than the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which weighs 4.7 pounds. It also packs in three USB-C ports, USB Type A, HDMI, a headphone jack and a full-sized SD card reader, with Ethernet the notable omission.
Performance is a mixed picture. In CPU tests the RTX Spark system trailed Qualcomm: its PCMark 10 Applications score came in 3,000 points below the Snapdragon X2 Elite-powered ASUS A16, and it lagged slightly in Geekbench 6 single-threaded testing. But the GPU, NPU and unified memory are the point, and there the P16 shone, scoring 4,700 points higher than a MacBook Pro with M5 Max in Geekbench 6's GPU benchmark and beating the same MacBook in UL Procyon's AI Computer Vision 2 (3,895 versus 3,267) and AI Image Generation (1,519) tests.
In real use, the reviewer ran the Qwen3.8 27B model locally, which alone takes 42GB of RAM, while still gaming at high quality settings in Control: Resonant and Cyberpunk 2077, though the fans got loud. The verdict is that RTX Spark is not for everyone: it is a new fork of PC design aimed at AI researchers and enthusiasts, meant to coexist with Qualcomm's Arm chips rather than replace x86 hardware, and it arrives at a time when AI demand has already pushed RAM prices up.