measuredlocally.comRTX Spark laptop vs M5 Max MacBook Pro: the first independent tests
The first independent tests of NVIDIA's RTX Spark laptop are out, and on a long AI agent test it finished almost six minutes ahead of Apple's M5 Max MacBook Pro. I put those figures next to my own machines.
Plays here, from YouTube
NVIDIA's RTX Spark laptops went on sale on Friday 16 October, and that week the first reviewers were allowed to publish their tests. On a long AI agent test, the first of them finished almost six minutes ahead of Apple's M5 Max MacBook Pro.
The agent test
Of the reviews so far, the most useful is from Tom's Hardware. They used a new benchmark from Artificial Analysis, AgentPerf-Local, which replays eight real tasks that an AI agent once worked through, 168 turns of reading and writing. Every machine writes the same number of tokens, so only the hardware changes between tests.
With Qwen 3.8 27B, Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra with 128GB took 18.9 minutes to finish. Apple's 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip and the same memory took 24.74 minutes, and AMD's Ryzen AI Halo mini desktop took 42.1 minutes. That puts the laptop 5.84 minutes ahead of the Mac, by my own maths (24.74 minus 18.9).
Next to my own machines
Microsoft's laptop has the same GB10 chip as my DGX Sparks, and Artificial Analysis's own figure for the desktop DGX Spark on the same test is 17.3 minutes. They set up their Spark their own way, so I would call the laptop and the desktop roughly level (18.9 against 17.3 minutes, 9% longer by my own maths).
Last week I said I would not expect a laptop to keep up with a desktop box for long. Plugged in, over a 19-minute test, it actually did.
For scale, on Artificial Analysis's own page an RTX 5090 did the same Qwen 3.8 27B run in 4.9 minutes. My own RTX 4090, set up in the same way, took 7.31 minutes. So last week's viewer who said a 5090 is enough has a point, as long as the model fits in its 32GB of memory.
A few caveats
- Battery life was still under embargo for most reviewers, but Tom's Guide measured 10 hours 15 minutes of web browsing on the laptop, against over 21 hours for an M5 Pro MacBook Pro.
- The maker gives the laptop's memory bandwidth as up to 300GB a second, a little more than the 273 of a desktop DGX Spark, which answers one viewer's question from last week.
- Delivery for the laptop Tom's Hardware tested is already quoted for late December.
Read more
- Tom's Hardware's test of the Surface Laptop Ultratomshardware.com
- Artificial Analysis's article on its agent test, AgentPerf-Localartificialanalysis.ai
- Artificial Analysis's results for laptops and workstationsartificialanalysis.ai
- Tom's Guide's live testing, with the battery figurestomsguide.com
- Windows Central's review, with the specification tablewindowscentral.com
- NVIDIA's post on the laptops going on saleblogs.nvidia.com
The numbers in this story
| Figure | What it is | From | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18.9 minutes | Surface Laptop Ultra, 128GB, on the agent test with Qwen 3.8 27B | see the story | a reviewer's test |
| 24.74 minutes | 14-inch MacBook Pro, M5 Max, 128GB, on the same test | see the story | a reviewer's test |
| 5.84 minutes | How far ahead the laptop finished | 24.74 minus 18.9 | my own maths |
| 17.3 min | A desktop DGX Spark on the same test, by Artificial Analysis | artificialanalysis.ai | a reviewer's test |
| 7.31 minutes | My RTX 4090 on Artificial Analysis's own RTX 5090 set-up | my own test | measured by me |
| 300 GB/s | The laptop's memory bandwidth, the maker's figure | windowscentral.com | the maker's claim |
If a number on this page is wrong, I would rather know. Tell me in the comments under the video and I will correct it here and pin the correction there. What has been corrected so far is on the corrections page.