Let me be clear from the top. If you are looking for the raw benchmark data, the thermal charts and synthetic scores for Nvidia’s RTX Spark, you can head over to my live blog running right now.

…ok are all the speeds and feeds people gone? Good, because while I’m over there doing the math, and everyone else on the internet combs over the numbers, data doesn’t explain what it actually feels like to use a machine with a locally hosted AI brain.

You have to unlearn years of cloud-tethered habits (like relying on a browser-based chatbot tab) and start treating your operating system like an overly eager digital intern. And over the past few days, I found this out and quite frankly, it’s a bit of a breakthrough.

So, before you dive into the frame rates, here is a diary of my first week ditching the M5 MacBook Pro, and living exclusively on an Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra with RTX Spark (and 128GB of unified memory).

I returned from the Surface Laptop Ultra event in San Francisco pretty late, but I didn’t feel tired. I was caught up in the excitement of tearing this machine out of the box and seeing what it could do.

And my first test? Nothing to do with productivity. Instead, I installed Hermes agent with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next to play The Sims 4 — build a house and get a job.

Now with that out the way, this first test did not instill me with immediate confidence in Nvidia’s vision of a local agentic future.

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