NVIDIA RTX Spark PCs Open for Preorder — a 128GB Dev Box Costs $5,999

A 128GB local-AI PC is now something you can buy, but the price is about $6,000, more than double an analyst’s estimate of around $2,899.

Products built on NVIDIA’s PC chip, RTX Spark, have gone up for preorder. Microsoft opened preorders for new Surface devices, and the 128GB unified-memory developer desktop, the “Surface RTX Spark Dev Box,” costs $5,999 in the U.S. For developers who want to run big AI models on their own PC without the cloud, that is a new option, but not at the price people were hoping for.

What kind of chip is RTX Spark

RTX Spark is an Arm-based superchip for Windows, unveiled at Computex this year. NVIDIA designed it together with MediaTek and worked with Microsoft on Windows support. The reported specs:

GPU: 6,144 CUDA cores and 5th-generation Tensor cores
CPU: 20-core Arm (10 performance cores and 10 efficiency cores)
AI compute: up to 1 petaflop (FP4)
Memory: up to 128GB of LPDDR5X unified memory (CPU and GPU share one pool)

We could not find NVIDIA’s official spec sheet, so these are based on reports. We also could not find the memory bandwidth (speed).

What you can buy now, and the prices

Product	Memory	Price (U.S.)	Ships
Surface Laptop Ultra	up to 128GB	from $2,599; top 128GB / 1TB configuration $5,899.99	from October 16
Surface RTX Spark Dev Box	128GB + 2TB SSD	$5,999	November (Microsoft.com only)
ASUS ProArt P16 (128GB)	128GB	$6,999.99 (single source)	October 16

All prices are preorder prices. The ProArt price comes from a single report, and we could not confirm it on ASUS’s official listing.
One outlet noted that the Dev Box costs $2,000 more than AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo ($3,999). Among 128GB-class machines, it is also higher than NVIDIA’s DGX Spark ($4,699).

Claims we could not confirm

“Fine-tune 100B+ models locally”: we could not confirm that this spec is in an official announcement. By arithmetic, a 100-billion-parameter model squeezed to 4 bits is about 50GB, so the weights fit in 128GB. But “fits” only means fits; real speed and the fine-tuning method (LoRA and so on) need to be verified per product.
“$2,899-class”: that number is a Morgan Stanley analyst’s pre-launch estimate for the 128GB configuration. The actual preorder price is $5,999.

What could change for developers

What follows is our estimate and advice based on the reports.

CUDA-based local development on Windows may become possible. But how well PyTorch, Ollama, llama.cpp and vLLM run on Windows on Arm will only be clear from post-launch reviews.
Check speed (bandwidth), not just capacity. Even at 128GB, the speed at which text appears depends a lot on bandwidth. This product’s bandwidth is not yet confirmed.
Judge it on price for what you get. Among 128GB-class machines, compare against DGX Spark ($4,699) and Ryzen AI Halo ($3,999), and ask whether you really need Windows.
It’s still preorder. The Dev Box is U.S.-only and ships in November, so real performance reviews will come about a month from now.

What to watch

RTX Spark’s memory bandwidth and local-LLM benchmarks, CUDA and PyTorch compatibility on Windows on Arm, and prices from other makers (Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI).