ASUS opened pre-orders today on the ProArt P16 and ProArt P14, the first ProArt laptops built around NVIDIA’s RTX Spark superchip. They are also, quietly, among the first mainstream creator laptops that don’t run on an Intel or AMD processor at all.
That second part is the story, and it takes some digging to find. ASUS describes the chip as “an ultra-efficient NVIDIA Grace CPU” and leaves it there. The word that matters — Arm — appears exactly once across the announcement materials, buried in a product-page paragraph about battery life: the P16’s “power-efficient Arm-based design helps extend battery life for creativity anywhere.”
Translated: these are Windows on Arm machines. Native Arm64 apps run directly. Everything still compiled for x86 goes through Windows’ translation layer. That has improved a great deal since the Snapdragon-powered Acer Swift 14 AI led the last Windows-on-Arm push, but it still isn’t universal. For anyone running older plugins, niche creative utilities, or specialized production software, it’s the first question to answer — well before the memory configuration.
What RTX Spark Actually Is
NVIDIA announced RTX Spark with Microsoft at GTC Taipei in June, after three years of the chip being referred to by its codename, N1X. It fuses a 20-core NVIDIA Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU carrying up to 6,144 CUDA cores, linked by NVIDIA’s NVLink-C2C interconnect, and feeds both from a single shared pool of up to 128GB of LPDDR5X memory. ASUS quotes up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance.
The unified memory is the architectural point. On a conventional laptop, a discrete GPU gets its own fixed slice of video memory, and a model that doesn’t fit doesn’t run. Here CPU and GPU draw from the same pool, which is how a thin laptop ends up advertising 120-billion-parameter language models with a one-million-token context window — a claim ASUS makes specifically for the 128GB P16.
ASUS is not alone. NVIDIA has said it plans more than 30 laptops and 10 desktops on the platform, with Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Acer all building RTX Spark machines. Microsoft is unveiling its own — the Surface Laptop Ultra — at a San Francisco event today, with Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang on stage, according to Reuters. ProArt is an early entry, not an exclusive one.
P16 and P14
Both laptops run the same N1X silicon and the same ASUS Lumina Pro OLED touchscreen panel spec: Delta E under 1, up to 1,600 nits peak HDR brightness, 120Hz variable refresh, 100% DCI-P3, Pantone validation, and an anti-reflection coating ASUS rates at a 65% reduction in reflected light.
ProArt P16 takes a 16-inch 4K (3840 x 2400) panel with NVIDIA G-SYNC, a 99.9Wh battery, memory options at 24, 32, 64 and 128GB, and up to 2TB of storage. ASUS calls it the thinnest 16-inch ProArt ever at 0.51 inches at its slimmest — it tapers to 0.63 inches — and 3.90 pounds, rating it 14% thinner and 9% lighter than the previous generation.
ProArt P14 uses a 14-inch 3K (2880 x 1800) panel, a 90Wh battery, memory at 24, 32, 48 and 128GB, and up to 1TB of storage. At 3.26 pounds it’s the lightest ProArt laptop ASUS currently sells.
Port selection is nearly identical: three USB4 Type-C, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, HDMI 2.1 FRL, a combo audio jack, and WiFi 7 with Bluetooth 5.4. The P16 takes an SD Express 7.0 card reader and the P14 a slower one — ASUS’s product page specifies SD Express 4.0, though the press release spec sheet lists plain SD 4.0, a different standard. Both come in Nano Black and Neo White, both ship with a 140W USB-C adapter, both carry a six-speaker Dolby Atmos array and a three-mic array, and both are tested to MIL-STD 810H methods.
One counterintuitive detail: the smaller laptop has more cooling. ASUS describes the P16’s inward airflow design as dual-fan, while the P14 page specifies a third fan. Both run what ASUS calls 0 dB ambient cooling, stopping the fans entirely under moderate load, and both include a dust filter on the intakes.
The Cost Argument
ASUS leans hard on an economic pitch: owning local AI capacity converts metered cloud spending into fixed hardware. The company claims that for users running demanding agent workloads daily, cloud token costs may exceed the price of a ProArt RTX Spark PC within five to ten months.
That figure carries assumptions worth reading. ASUS’s own footnote prices the comparison against a 128GB ProArt P16 at $6,000 amortized over 36 months, uses published per-million-output-token list rates from Anthropic and a promotional OpenAI rate checked in September 2026, and assumes a 15:1 input-to-output ratio with 70% cache hits. Change the model, the utilization, or the caching behavior and the math moves. It’s a vendor’s illustrative scenario, not a benchmark — though the underlying direction is real for anyone running agents continuously rather than occasionally.
ASUS also makes the privacy case: prompts, source files and project data stay on the machine, and workflows keep running offline.
The Software Stack
ASUS preloads MuseTree, a local generative tool built on FLUX.2 and Wan models with no token metering, and StoryCube for AI scene recognition and media organization — the same media-management app that anchored the GoPro-branded ProArt PX13 earlier this year. ProArt Creator Hub handles color calibration and system tuning.
The more interesting partnerships are external. ASUS has teamed with ComfyUI, the open-source node-based AI workflow platform, and with Hermes Agent from Nous Research — an open-source autonomous agent that works across desktop apps, the terminal and local files with persistent memory and sandboxed execution. A dedicated Hermes skill drives MuseTree directly. ASUS’s own Zenni Claw assistant handles device-level tasks.
“We built Hermes to provide intelligence you can truly own, rather than simply rent,” said Dillon Rolnick, CEO of Nous Research.
Bundled services include three months of Adobe Creative Cloud (ASUS values the package above $800), three months of Google AI Pro with 5TB of storage, GoPro Premium+, and Goodnotes Essential.
ProArt GR1X Mini PC
The same silicon lands in a 150 x 150 x 51mm desktop box — roughly 1.1 liters. The GR1X runs dual-fan cooling, two M.2 SSD slots supporting up to 4TB, 10GbE networking, WiFi 7, and output to four 4K displays. ASUS positions it as an always-on local AI host for studios and small teams. It arrives later this year in 64GB and 128GB configurations through select premium retailers.
Pricing and Availability
Where you pre-order isn’t a preference here — it determines which machine you can actually buy.
ASUS has split the lineup between retailers. Best Buy carries the lower-memory configurations exclusively. The ASUS Store carries the higher-memory ones exclusively. Neither sells the full range, and the two don’t currently overlap on a single SKU.
ProArt P16 (H7607BA)
| Configuration | Where | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 24GB / 512GB / 4K OLED | Best Buy | $2,799.99 |
| 32GB / 1TB / 4K OLED | Best Buy | $3,399.99 |
| 64GB / 1TB / 3K OLED | ASUS Store | from $4,399.99 |
| 64GB / 1TB / 4K OLED | ASUS Store | not listed |
| 128GB / 2TB / 4K OLED | ASUS Store | not listed |
ProArt P14 (H7407BA)
| Configuration | Where | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 24GB / 512GB / 3K OLED | Best Buy | $2,599.99 |
| 32GB / 512GB / 3K OLED | Best Buy | $3,099.99 |
| 48GB / 1TB / 3K OLED | ASUS Store | from $3,699.99 |
| 128GB / 1TB / 3K OLED | ASUS Store | not listed |
The ASUS Store figures are its listed starting prices, which correspond to the cheapest configuration it stocks for each model. Best Buy shows the 48GB and 128GB tiers as coming soon; Micro Center is listed as coming soon on the 128GB configurations only.
The practical consequence: a shopper who only visits ASUS’s own store sees a $4,399.99 ProArt P16 and no indication that a $2,799.99 version exists — because ASUS doesn’t sell it there. Best Buy does.
One detail worth checking before ordering: the cheapest P16 the ASUS Store carries pairs 64GB of memory with a 3K panel, not the 4K display the P16 is otherwise marketed around. The 4K version of that same 64GB configuration is a separate SKU.
For context on why the top configurations cost what they do, Reuters reports that NVIDIA recently raised the price of its DGX Spark desktop by roughly 75%, to $6,950, citing the climbing cost of its 128GB of memory. ASUS’s own footnote prices a 128GB P16 at $6,000.
A naming caution before you shop: a previous-generation ProArt P16 built on an AMD Ryzen AI 9 processor with discrete RTX graphics remains on sale around $2,399.99. That machine is the H7606. The RTX Spark models are the H7607 and H7407.
Both laptops are listed for release on October 16.
