ASUS ProArt P16 review: NVIDIA's RTX Spark shines for AI, at $2,800 and up

ASUS's first laptop built around NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip starts at $2,800 — and the review configuration, stuffed with 128GB of unified memory, costs $7,000. That price gap tells you who this machine is for, and it isn't most people.

The ProArt P16 is the first notebook to ship with NVIDIA's first major PC platform, an Arm-based system-on-chip the company, alongside Microsoft, has positioned as a full "reinvention" of the PC. Strip away that framing and you get a genuinely impressive premium laptop with one clear audience: people running local AI models. For everyone else — gamers, general multimedia creators — the pitch gets shaky fast.

What makes the ProArt P16 different?

Under the hood, RTX Spark bundles a 20-core Arm CPU, a Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of unified memory into a single chip. If that architecture sounds familiar, it should: it mirrors how Apple configures its M-series silicon, the design that made MacBooks compelling again starting in 2020.

Unlike Apple's transition, though, RTX Spark won't fully replace x86 hardware from Intel and AMD. Think of it as a parallel branch of PC design aimed at AI researchers and enthusiasts, coexisting with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips, which cover entry-level and midrange Arm systems.

The reviewer argues the competitive effect may be the platform's biggest contribution to Windows PCs: with NVIDIA planting its flag in the Windows world, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm will have to push harder on future hardware. The downside is price pressure — RTX Spark is yet another memory-hungry platform arriving when AI demand has already driven RAM prices through the roof.

The hardware itself shows how far ASUS's premium laptops have come. The ProArt P16 pairs a sturdy aluminum case with a bright 16-inch OLED screen, a wide keyboard with deep key travel and a large haptic touchpad. At 3.9 pounds, it's lighter than the 16-inch MacBook Pro at 4.7 pounds — MacBook-esque in its sleekness, as the reviewer puts it, except with an ASUS badge.

Port selection is generous for a slim machine:

• three USB-C connections
• USB Type-A
• HDMI
• a headphone jack
• a full-sized SD card reader

Ethernet is absent, but that's become a rarity in thin, pro-grade laptops anyway.

How does it actually perform?

Using the ProArt P16 felt like the first time turning on an M-series MacBook Pro: everything is fast, and massive simultaneous downloads didn't slow the setup process down. For $7,000 and 128GB of RAM, that's the least you'd expect.

The CPU benchmarks tell a more mixed story. The ProArt P16 scored 3,000 points lower in PCMark 10 (Applications) than the ultra-slim ASUS A16 tested earlier this year, which ran a Snapdragon X2 Elite chip. It also lagged slightly in Geekbench 6's single-threaded CPU test — a sign, the reviewer writes, that Qualcomm's CPUs are simply more capable.

The GPU, NPU and unified memory are where RTX Spark pulls ahead:

• 4,700 points higher than the MacBook Pro with M5 Max in Geekbench 6's GPU benchmark
• 3,895 points in UL Procyon's AI Computer Vision 2 benchmark, versus 3,267 for the MacBook
• 1,519 in Procyon's AI Image Generation test — 600 points ahead of Apple

The practical payoff goes beyond numbers. The laptop ran OpenClaw and the Qwen3.8 27B model — which alone eats 42GB of RAM — while leaving plenty of memory free for everything else, at the same time as playing Control: Resonant and Cyberpunk 2077 at high quality settings without slowdown. The fans got loud enough to sound like they might lift the machine off the desk, but performance never dipped.

NVIDIA has said RTX Spark's graphics hardware sits roughly at the level of an RTX 5070 mobile GPU while drawing far less power, and the testing bore that out. Control: Resonant ran at 70 fps in 1,440p with "ultra" settings, medium ray tracing and 4x frame generation — and hit 120 fps with settings lowered.

What's the catch for gaming?

The Arm CPU means most games run through Microsoft's Prism emulator, which costs performance immediately and invites compatibility bugs. Native Arm64 builds exist for popular titles like Fortnite, DOTA 2, Marvel Rivals and the upcoming World of Warcraft: Forever, so the problem may fade in a few years. Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Gears of War: E-Day ran without much trouble, but anyone allergic to emulation issues should stick with an Intel or AMD gaming laptop.

NVIDIA says it's working with the major anti-cheat companies to support RTX Spark, but some multiplayer titles may simply not run on the new systems. Similar compatibility questions hang over older Windows software generally, though the reviewer hit no issues during testing — Microsoft's x86 emulation has grown more seamless since Copilot+ systems launched two years ago.

How good are the screen, keyboard and battery?

The 16-inch "Lumina Pro" OLED display delivers deep black levels and extreme contrast, and it peaks at 1,600 nits — bright enough to sear eyeballs at times and directly competitive with Apple's 1,600-nit Mini LED MacBook Pro panels. That brightness also makes it genuinely usable for outdoor work in sunlight.

The keyboard's depth and spacing make typing a dream, and the haptic touchpad ranks among the best on any Windows PC. The dual speakers sound solid and support Dolby Atmos spatial audio, though a quad-speaker setup would have matched the machine's price class. The jet-black finish, like most black PCs, is a horrendous fingerprint magnet that looks messy within minutes and is annoying to keep clean — an anti-fingerprint material would be a welcome future addition.

Battery life is the weakest number: ten hours and 51 minutes in the PCMark 10 Applications battery test, well below the 15-plus-hour range of many premium machines and behind Dell's XPS 16, which managed nearly 12 hours. The consolation is consistency — benchmarks and gaming performance didn't waver at all on battery power. NVIDIA credits RTX Spark's overall efficiency for sustaining that performance curve without burning too much power.

Should you buy it?

If you work in AI and know exactly how you'll exploit the hardware, you're the buyer NVIDIA is targeting — and the AI performance edge probably justifies the cost. For gamers, the math doesn't work: at Best Buy, an ASUS Zephyrus G16 with an RTX 5070 GPU and a 240Hz OLED screen currently sells for $2,124, delivering better gaming performance, higher refresh rates and full compatibility with every Windows game, no emulation required. Multimedia editors are also better served by AMD or Intel systems with the widest tool compatibility, even though Adobe has brought its flagship software to the platform.

The verdict is clear-cut: the ProArt P16 is an impressive premium laptop whose high starting cost and unusual hardware make it truly tempting only for AI professionals. The reviewer gives the entire RTX Spark platform at least a year before recommending it to general users or even gamers — great PCs already exist for them, and for now RTX Spark belongs to the AI obsessives.