A TechPowerUp forum user who claims to have “found” an engineering sample of an unreleased Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra equipped with an Nvidia N1X chip has posted an informal review, giving us another look at Nvidia’s new RTX Spark platform. Though we’ll need to see more, initial impressions are middling at best.
Nvidia showed off RTX Spark series of laptops at Computex, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked about reinventing the PC around a system designed for AI agents. The proof would always be in the pudding with such grand plans, and now we have details on how such a laptop might perform. It’s mostly pretty good, but maybe not great.
The forum user, Fouquin, says they found the device “sitting along the side of the road just North of Redmond, Washington,” though he later called his tale “story crafting,” so who knows how they really got their hands on it.
It’s a “prototype (EV1.5) of the yet-to-be-released Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra with Nvidia’s RTX Spark N1X inside, and [I] have been playing with it for about a month now,” Fouquin writes. It’s fitted with a 20-core Arm CPU and a Blackwell GPU featuring 6,144 CUDA cores. The laptop is well-built, with a comfortable and accurate keyboard and tasteful backlighting. It’s mostly stable outside “Performance mode” and responsive to user input.
The Hidden Reason Nvidia Made the New RTX Spark
Fouquin was initially forced to use an old Nvidia driver from late 2025, but during testing, Nvidia released a preview of its 616.00 driver, which added CUDA support to the laptop’s Blackwell GPU. This allowed for proper benchmarks, such as the Phoronix Test Suite. In Cinebench 2024, it scored 1,386 points in the multithreaded test, and just 123 points in single-core testing. In Cinebench 2026, it scored 5,771 points in the multicore test and 540 points in the single-threaded benchmark.
That would put the onboard chip somewhere in the region of an Intel Core Ultra 5 245KF or AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D. TechPowerUp notes that, though you can’t directly compare these informal test numbers to its own reviews, such results would put the Surface Laptop Ultra behind its likely competitors, including the M5 MacBook Pro and similarly priced x86 Windows laptops.
Elsewhere in testing, Fouquin found the LG display’s local dimming was lackluster, resulting in blooming in high-contrast scenes. There was also quite apparent color banding in HDR mode, giving windows a strange vignette look. There’s no chassis flex, though; the laptop feels strong and sturdy, and appears quite repairable with easy-to-remove screws; Fouquin was also able to replace the SSD easily enough.
Recommended by Our Editors
All in all, it feels like a decent first outing for an RTX Spark laptop. Not what Nvidia would have wanted for a first review, but this is an engineering sample, so it’s unlikely to have all the performance and stability tweaks of a commercial release.
Nvidia RTX Spark laptops are slated to launch this fall.
About Our Expert
Jon Martindale
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Jon Martindale is a tech journalist from the UK, with 20 years of experience covering all manner of PC components and associated gadgets. He’s written for a range of publications, including ExtremeTech, Digital Trends, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, and Lifewire, among others. When not writing, he’s a big board gamer and reader, with a particular habit of speed-reading through long manga sagas.
Jon covers the latest PC components, as well as how-to guides on everything from how to take a screenshot to how to set up your cryptocurrency wallet. He particularly enjoys the battles between the top tech giants in CPUs and GPUs, and tries his best not to take sides.
Jon’s gaming PC is built around the iconic 7950X3D CPU, with a 7900XTX backing it up. That’s all the power he needs to play lightweight indie and casual games, as well as more demanding sim titles like Kerbal Space Program. He uses a pair of Jabra Active 8 earbuds and a SteelSeries Arctis Pro wireless headset, and types all day on a Logitech G915 mechanical keyboard.
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