First N1X benchmarks: Apple’s M5 Pro leads Nvidia’s RTX Spark by 53% single-core
Notebookcheck's 21 October verdict on the first retail RTX Spark laptops finds Nvidia's N1X behind Apple's M5 Pro on single-core, multi-core and efficiency, while its Blackwell GPU beats the M5 Pro but not the M5 Max and AI results come out roughly level. The machines also cost more: a 128 GB Surface Laptop Ultra was priced $2,200 above a 64 GB MacBook Pro 14-inch with M5 Pro. Nvidia's only price advantage is at 128 GB, a capacity Apple sells solely with the dearer M5 Max.
The details
- Notebookcheck published its cross-device verdict on the Nvidia RTX Spark N1X on 21 October 2026, written by managing editor Andreas Osthoff, concluding that the chip "cannot compete with Apple's current M5 Pro and M5 Max in single-core performance" and that it also trails them in multi-core performance and efficiency.
- In Cinebench 2024 single-core the N1X scored 130 points in the Asus ProArt P16 (H7607) and 131 points in the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, against 201 points for Apple's M5 Pro and 199 points for the M5 Max; Geekbench 6.7 single-core came in at 3,092 and 3,096 for the two N1X laptops versus 4,295 for the M5 Pro and 4,336 for the M5 Max.
- Multi-core results ran the same way: Cinebench 2024 multi-core gave 1,726 points (ProArt P16) and 1,682 points (Surface Laptop Ultra) against 2,347 for the M5 Pro and 2,490 for the M5 Max, while Geekbench 6.7 multi-core returned 20,296 and 20,031 versus 28,436 and 30,057 — a 40% to 50% lead for Apple on the Surface comparison.
- On efficiency the gap is wider than on raw speed: in Cinebench 2024 single-core the N1X managed 4.26 points per watt in the ProArt P16 and 3.92 points per watt in the Surface against 9.57 points per watt for the M5 Pro, drawing 30.5 W and 33.4 W at system level where the MacBook Pro needed 21 W; multi-core efficiency was 13.6 and 14.9 points per watt against 23 points per watt for the M5 Pro.
- The Blackwell GPU is where the N1X wins: it scored 3,134 in 3DMark Steel Nomad against 2,323 for the M5 Pro's 20-core GPU, but the M5 Max's 40-core GPU reached 4,386, and in Geekbench 6.7 OpenCL the N1X's 144,949 beat the M5 Pro's 88,251 while falling just short of the M5 Max's 148,149 — for scale, an RTX 5090 Laptop GPU scores 4,959 in Steel Nomad.
- AI performance came out close to level: in MLPerf Client the Qwen 3 8B test produced 53.8 tokens per second on the ProArt P16 and 54.8 on the Surface Laptop Ultra against 52.3 on the M5 Pro, although Apple was far ahead in Geekbench AI single-precision CPU, 5,018 against 1,606 and 1,668.
- A 16 October 2026 Notebookcheck price comparison by Vineet Washington put a Surface Laptop Ultra with the 20-core N1X and 128 GB of RAM at $5,900 as tested against a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and 64 GB at $3,700, summarising the gap as "$2,200 more for worse performance"; Notebookcheck's Surface Laptop Ultra review gives no official starting price and lists the cheapest configuration it found as an Amazon listing at $2,599.99 for an 18-core model with 24 GB and a 512 GB SSD, with its own 20-core, 64 GB, 1 TB review unit at $4,299 from Microsoft.
- Notebookcheck's Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark review verdict of 19 October 2026 priced the top configuration with 128 GB of RAM at $7,000, recorded Wi-Fi battery life of under 10 hours, and measured fan noise of around 50 dB(A) under heavy load from its 16-inch 4K 120 Hz tandem OLED panel.
- Nvidia's one pricing advantage sits at the largest memory option: Apple's own MacBook Pro page lists the M5 Pro with an 18-core CPU, up to a 20-core GPU and up to 64 GB of unified memory, with 128 GB available only alongside the more expensive M5 Max and its up-to-40-core GPU.
- The N1X pairs up to 20 Arm cores — 10 Cortex-X925 performance cores at up to 4.1 GHz and 10 Cortex-A725 efficiency cores at up to 2.8 GHz, built on a 3 nm process — with a Blackwell GB20B GPU of 5,120 or 6,144 CUDA cores boosting to 2,535 MHz, up to 128 GB of LPDDR5x-9400 at 300 GB/s, a 600 GB/s NVLink between the CPU and GPU tiles, and a mobile TDP of up to 80 W; Notebookcheck says Microsoft, Asus, Lenovo, Dell, HP and MSI all now offer RTX Spark hardware.