'It's a beast, but not at everything' — RTX Spark-powered Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra lives up to expectations, but you need to be a big fan of local AI

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, featuring Nvidia's RTX Spark, launches with a hefty price tag of $2,599.99, but the question remains: does its performance justify the cost? Reviews point to a couple of standout features, but also some notable drawbacks.

The laptop's multi-core performance is exceptional, making it one of the strongest CPUs available in a notebook. Its 20-core N1X chip offers 10 performance cores and 10 efficiency cores, excelling in multi-threaded workloads. However, single-core performance lags behind, scoring slightly lower than competitors.

The RTX Spark's standout feature is its ability to handle local AI models. Reviewers consistently praised its performance in this area, outpacing Apple's M5 Max and AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395. In local AI tests, the RTX Spark was the fastest overall, running agentic tasks 25% quicker than the M5 Max MacBook Pro. It also excelled at running 35B-parameter models, finishing about 2.3x faster than other GPUs.

However, the RTX Spark's gaming performance falls short. While it performs "similar to an RTX 4070 or 5060," dedicated gaming laptops with RTX 50-series GPUs still provide a superior experience. The shared memory bandwidth and input latency also limit its gaming capabilities.

The price is undoubtedly the biggest hurdle for potential buyers. The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599.99 for the 18-core model with 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage. The top-of-the-line 20-core version with 128GB of memory and 1TB of storage costs $5,899.99. With rising costs for DRAM and NAND memory, this high price tag may be difficult for many consumers to justify, especially when cheaper alternatives offer comparable performance.