THE CRUNCH
Microsoft has opened preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a compact Nvidia-powered workstation priced at $5,999 and slated to ship in November. The machine runs on Nvidia's Arm-based RTX Spark platform with 128GB of unified memory, a 100-watt thermal envelope and Tensor cores, the silicon features used for AI workloads. Its flat, 3D-printed anodized aluminium chassis doubles as a heatsink, with top vents that resemble those on an Xbox Series X. It launches alongside the new Surface Laptop Ultra.
The price sits above the DGX Spark mini PC that Nvidia launched last year, though that gap reflects a broader squeeze: shortages of RAM and other components have been pushing PC prices up across the market. The timing is notable given that Nvidia itself recently introduced a 64GB version of the DGX Spark, with partner systems from Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP and MSI starting at $4,999 from October 23, partly because dense AI models can now run comfortably in far less memory and soaring RAM prices make oversized memory configurations a costly burden.