The short version
- The first RTX Spark laptop reviews landed around October 16, the day they went on sale in the US. The most-tested machines are the Surface Laptop Ultra, ASUS ProArt P16 and HP OmniBook Ultra 16.
- Reviewers agree the Blackwell GPU is the star, landing between a laptop RTX 4070 and RTX 5070 in games, and that it's very fast at local AI.
- The weak spots are price, single-core CPU speed, anti-cheat games and battery life that falls short of a MacBook Pro.
- Prices start at $2,599.99 (about ₹2.47 lakh) in the US. There's still no India price.
The scores so far
Image: Zerocade
The ASUS ProArt P16 has done best, with a 9/10 from Notebookcheck and 4.5/5 from Trusted Reviews. The Surface Laptop Ultra split opinion more, from 4/5 at Windows Central to 6/10 at The Verge, with battery life the common complaint. Expert Reviews summed up the ProArt as a very encouraging start, while flagging that buying first-generation tech is risky.
Battery: good, but not what Arm promised
Linus Tech Tips' battery tests, reported by Notebookcheck, are the most quoted. Playing 1080p video, the ProArt P16 lasted about 12 hours and the Surface Laptop Ultra 9 hours, roughly level with a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro.
The catch is battery size. The ASUS packs a 99.9Wh battery, 38% bigger than the MacBook's, so it isn't more efficient. Under a heavy graphics load, the Surface lasted just 53 minutes and the ProArt 1 hour 9 minutes, against about 1.5 hours for the MacBook. Expert Reviews measured 10 hours 47 minutes in its own test, against about 20 hours for an M5 Pro MacBook Pro.
Image: Microsoft
CPU and creative work: the Mac still wins
Hardware Canucks put a $5,900 Surface with 128GB against a $3,700 MacBook Pro. According to Notebookcheck's write-up, the Surface was slower in Cinebench, Blender, Photoshop, Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve. Expert Reviews' Geekbench 6 numbers show why: the ProArt scored 2,192 single-core and 20,280 multi-core, against 4,287 and 28,655 for an M5 Pro Mac mini. Single-core speed is the clearest weakness.
Graphics compute is a different story. The same Geekbench GPU test gave the ProArt 146,754 against the Mac's 88,671.
Local AI: where it shines
This is the use Nvidia built it for. In Expert Reviews' Llama 3.1 8B test, the ProArt produced its first word in 0.27 seconds and ran at 55.9 tokens a second, against 0.69 seconds and 48.8 tokens for the M5 Pro Mac mini. With up to 128GB the GPU can reach, much bigger models fit too. It's not a clean sweep, though. In Hardware Canucks' local AI tests against the MacBook Pro, the 128GB Surface won only one, despite having twice the memory.
Games: a gaming laptop, but not a good-value one
PC Gamer tested the ProArt P16 against two RTX 5070 laptops. The Spark machine lost in most games but drew far less power. In Metro Exodus it hit 75fps at 43W, while the Razer Blade 14 hit 84fps at 97W.
Image: Zerocade, from PC Gamer's results
Expert Reviews compared it with an MSI Raider 16 HX running an RTX 5070 Ti, a more expensive gaming GPU. In Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing at 2560x1600, the gap is wide.
Image: Zerocade
Frame generation narrows things for single-player games. Doom: The Dark Ages went from 70fps to 132fps with DLSS Balanced and 3x frame generation. Trusted Reviews put it simply: gaming is a little behind a discrete RTX 5070.
Compatibility has improved a lot. Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye and Denuvo all work. EA's Javelin anti-cheat doesn't yet, so Battlefield and EA Sports FC are out. Expert Reviews says kernel-level anti-cheat as a whole isn't supported, naming PUBG, Call of Duty, League of Legends and Valorant. Tom's Hardware also couldn't get Red Dead Redemption 2 to run on the Surface.
So who is it for?
On paper, people running AI models and doing GPU-heavy creative work on Windows, who want that in a thin laptop. If you mainly play games, reviewers point to a regular Intel or AMD laptop with a GeForce card, which costs less and runs everything.
For Indian buyers, the anti-cheat gap is the deciding detail. Valorant and PUBG don't run yet. Our RTX Spark India post has every model's US price in rupees, and we'll update it when an India launch is announced.
