THE CRUNCH
Pre-orders are now live for laptops built around Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, with devices due to ship on Friday, October 16. Asus, Microsoft, Lenovo, HP and Dell all have models listed, including the new Surface Laptop Ultra, with entry pricing at $2,599.99 for the Asus ProArt P14 with 24GB of memory. Best Buy and B&H are carrying a range of machines, while Asus, HP and Microsoft also sell configurations directly from their own stores.
The pricing ladder climbs steeply. Best Buy's lineup runs from the $2,599.99 ProArt P14 up to the Surface Laptop Ultra at $3,999 with 48GB of memory, and also includes the Dell XPS 16 at $3,799.99 and the Lenovo Yoga 9n 2-in-1 at $3,099.99. To reach the chip's maximum 128GB of unified memory you need to buy direct: Asus offers the ProArt P16 with 128GB and 2TB of storage for $6,999.99, while HP's OmniBook X and Ultra 16 hit 128GB for $5,109 and $5,309 respectively, both with 1TB of storage. Dell and Lenovo have no direct sales yet, so their machines are currently pre-order only via Best Buy.
There is a catch worth knowing before you click buy. RTX Spark is actually two chips: a full version with a 20-core Grace CPU and 6,144-core Blackwell GPU, and a cut-down part with an 18-core CPU and 5,120-core GPU. Listings simply say "RTX Spark N1X", so you have to read the description for core counts. So far, the reduced chip has appeared only in laptops with 24GB or 32GB of memory, while 48GB and above get the full version. Storage mostly tops out at 1TB, with 2TB configurations rare and expensive.
The launch lands amid growing competition in this class of machine. AMD has been promoting benchmarks for its Gorgon Halo chips, the range positioned directly against RTX Spark devices, with the first Gorgon Halo machines already on sale at prices above $7,099. As of early October, no independent performance results for RTX Spark had surfaced beyond a few Geekbench leaks, so buyers are effectively pre-ordering on spec sheets alone.