Nvidia RTX Spark Could Challenge Dell’s Fastest AI Laptop on October 16

The Dell Pro Max 18 Plus currently leads local AI laptop rankings, but Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops are due to go on sale on October 16, 2026. Several manufacturers are launch partners, and preorders are open.

In reported tests, the Dell’s RTX PRO 5000 produced 185.1 tokens per second on Phi, 140.5 on Mistral and 119.7 on Llama 3. Nvidia rates RTX Spark at up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance, using sparsity, and says it can run models of about 120 billion parameters locally with a context window of 1 million tokens. The company’s performance figure is an upper limit that everyday workloads may not reach.

RTX Spark offers up to 128 GB of shared memory, compared with 24 GB of graphics memory on the Dell configuration described. But Spark’s shared memory bandwidth is about 300 GB/s, versus 896 GB/s for Dell’s RTX PRO 5000. Memory capacity alone does not establish inference speed; Spark would need to beat Dell in the same UL Procyon tests on Phi, Mistral and Llama 3.

The Dell’s top configuration cost $9,245.52 at launch and now sells for almost $18,600, about double the launch price after 14 months. The source reports that an RTX Spark laptop would need to match Dell’s results at 45 W to 80 W of chip power to potentially improve on Dell’s recorded battery life of 3 hours and 39 minutes.