Did This Guy Find a Surface Laptop Ultra Prototype on the Side of the Road? Maybe. Here Are Some Benchmarks

<p>A <a href="https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/i%E2%80%99ve-spent-a-month-with-nvidia%E2%80%99s-rtx-spark-in-microsoft%E2%80%99s-surface-laptop-ultra.351087/" target="_blank" title="(Opens in a new tab)">TechPowerUp</a> forum user who claims to have "found" an engineering sample of an unreleased <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/hands-on-microsoft-surface-laptop-ultra-computex-2026" target="_self">Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra</a> 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.</p><p>Nvidia showed off <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-rtx-spark-reinvent-pc-computex-2026" target="_self">RTX Spark series of laptops</a> 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 <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/intrigued-by-nvidia-rtx-spark-laptops-start-saving-now-computex-2026" target="_self">such grand plans</a>, and now we have details on how such a laptop might perform. It's mostly pretty good, but maybe not great.</p><p>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.</p><p>It's a "prototype (EV1.5) of the yet-to-be-released <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-announces-nvidia-spark-surface-laptop-ultra-computex-2026" target="_self">Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra</a> 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.</p><script>