NVIDIA's AI laptop has great hardware, but Windows holds it back

NVIDIA sells two small AI machines built on nearly the same chip, and a How-To Geek review says only one feels finished. The DGX Spark, a mini PC, feels ready. The RTX Spark, a Windows laptop or small desktop, has impressive hardware but software that gets in the way.

Same chip, different jobs

Both use one of NVIDIA's compact chips built for AI work. Both can have up to 128GB of memory and reach about a petaflop of a measure called FP4 performance. The DGX Spark is pitched as a personal AI supercomputer. The RTX Spark is meant for AI and everyday use.

Where they differ

• Power: the DGX Spark's chip draws about 140 watts. RTX Spark laptops are capped at 45 to 80 watts.
• Operating system: the DGX Spark runs a customized Ubuntu, a Linux system. The RTX Spark runs Windows.
• Linking up: the DGX Spark can join other units. As of October 2026, up to eight can share 1TB of memory.
• Ports: the DGX Spark has no headphone jack, USB-A port or card reader.

The DGX Spark is built to be used remotely, as a server for AI jobs or for working on AI models. A second RTX Spark laptop cannot pool its memory with the first.

Where the laptop wins

The reviewer tested a Lenovo Yoga 9n 2-in-1. Its memory is about 10% faster than the DGX Spark's, at 300GB/s versus 273GB/s. That gave more tokens per second, a measure of how fast an AI model writes, in both llama.cpp and Ollama. The DGX Spark still wins when a task depends on raw computing power.

The lower power limit also helps battery life. In regular use, the laptop needed charging only a handful of times in over a week. A heavy AI job drained it in under two hours.

Where Windows holds it back

On paper, the RTX Spark is the first true Windows AI laptop with enough memory to run powerful AI models. In practice, the reviewer found it far more unfinished than the DGX Spark. The problem is the software, not the chip. The available text cuts off before the full list of complaints.

What is not known yet

The material does not give prices or ship dates for either machine. It also does not say whether software updates will fix the Windows problems.