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Dell has announced the first XPS laptop built on NVIDIA’s RTX Spark superchip, the XPS 16 Creator Edition, alongside a compact Dell Creator Edition Desktop on the same silicon and a Windows version of its GB300 deskside AI workstation, which is now called Dell Pro Precision with GB300. The laptop opens for pre-order at Best Buy today at $3,799.99, with Dell.com to follow; the desktop and the Windows GB300 are “coming soon.” All three are the product of the Dell, NVIDIA, and Microsoft work that NVIDIA laid out at Computex in June and dated the release to October at IFA. XPS 16 Creator Edition: N1X in a 17.8mm Chassis The spec sheet lists two RTX Spark N1X configurations: a 5,120-core Blackwell RTX GPU paired with an 18-core CPU, and the full 6,144-core GPU with the 20-core Grace CPU. Dell rates the laptop at up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI compute, which is the figure NVIDIA used for the chip at Computex and is in the same class as DGX Spark. Memory is unified LPDDR5X at 9,400 MT/s in 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB, shared between CPU and GPU, so a 128GB configuration can hold models a discrete-GPU laptop can’t load at all. Storage runs from 512GB and 1TB PCIe Gen4 drives to 2TB and 4TB Gen5 drives that Dell lists as SED-ready. Wireless is a MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 2×2 card with Bluetooth 6.0, which fits the MediaTek partnership behind the N1X package. The chassis is CNC-machined aluminum, 17.81mm thick, 352.58 x 237.97mm, and 4.45 pounds (2.02kg) to start, with a 99Whr battery and a 130W USB-C adapter. Dell calls it its thinnest high-performance XPS, based on its own August 2026 analysis, and says the cooling uses its largest and thinnest fans to date, with a wider 8mm heat pipe. The display is a 16-inch 3.2K (3200 x 2000) tandem OLED at 142 PPI, VESA DisplayHDR True Black 600 certified, with peak brightness up to 1,000 nits, 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage, factory calibration to Delta E under 2 with Pantone validation, a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and a 20 to 120Hz variable refresh rate that drops to 20Hz on static content to save power. Touch is optional, and the cover glass is Gorilla Glass Victus. The palm rest is Gorilla Glass 3 with a glass haptic touchpad set flush into it, and the keyboard is Dell’s zero-lattice design with 0.8mm of travel. Ports are the full set a creator laptop needs: three USB4 Type-C ports at 40Gbps with DisplayPort 2.1 and Power Delivery, any of which charges the system; HDMI 2.1b; a full-size SDXC v7.1 card reader; and a universal audio jack. Dell rates the system for up to three external displays, and the Type-C ports carry a patented lock slot design that takes a Kensington lock, so there is no separate security slot on the chassis. The webcam is an 8MP/4K HDR unit with IR for Windows Hello, and audio comes from four speakers rated at 10W total with Dolby Atmos. Blender, DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere run natively on the Arm-based RTX Spark platform; MATLAB runs through Microsoft’s Prism emulator, and Prism now supports AVX and AVX2 instructions for x86 applications that have not been ported. For gaming, Windows on RTX Spark supports Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye along with the Xbox app, and Microsoft says it is working with Riot Games and KRAFTON on native support. The AI developer list includes GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, ComfyUI, and Cursor, all running on RTX Spark, with the full CUDA stack on the machine. The $3,799.99 pre-order price at Best Buy buys the entry configuration: 32GB of memory and a 512GB SSD in Graphite with the touch display, listed for an October 16 release. Dell has not published pricing for the 64GB and 128GB configurations or for the 6,144-core chip, so the laptop that matches the “up to” figures in the announcement will cost more than the headline number. Windows 11 Home and Pro are both offered, and the warranty is one year of Dell Care Plus with extensions to four years. Dell Creator Edition Desktop The desktop takes the same N1X superchip and up to 128GB of unified memory and puts them in a small box with no battery and no 17.8mm thermal ceiling, which Dell says lets it hold full performance continuously for long renders, large scenes, and extended fine-tuning runs while local agents keep working in the background. Dell quotes the same up to 1 petaflop of FP4 compute and says it supports models up to 200 billion parameters, the same ceiling AMD claims for the 128GB Ryzen AI Halo we reviewed in July. The full-spec N1X and the chip inside the Pro Precision with GB10 we reviewed are the same silicon: a 20-core Grace CPU joined to a 6,144-core Blackwell GPU over NVLink-C2C, with 128GB of unified LPDDR5X, 1 petaflop of FP4, and the same 200 billion parameter ceiling. NVIDIA said as much at Computex, describing RTX Spark as based on the same system as DGX Spark but tuned for a different platform in both hardware and software. What separates the two Dell boxes is everything around the guts. The Pro Precision with GB10 runs NVIDIA’s DGX OS on 128GB of LPDDR5X at 8,533 MT/s, carries a ConnectX-7 NIC with two 200GbE QSFP ports for pairing units, and is sold as a developer workstation. The Creator Edition Desktop boots Windows 11 on Arm with the RTX gaming and creator driver stack, Prism emulation for x86 software, and the same anti-cheat support as the laptop. Until it ships, the GB10 and Strix Halo systems on our Best Desktops for Local AI page are the reference points. NVIDIA’s RTX Spark specifications, published the same day, settle which chip the desktop gets: desktops use only the 6,144-core, 20-core N1X with up to 128GB, rated at a 140W TDP against 45 to 80W in laptops, and 140W is the same figure NVIDIA lists for the GB10 in DGX Spark. Dell has not said whether the desktop keeps the ConnectX-7 networking that let DGX Spark cluster over 200GbE; at Computex, NVIDIA said the RTX Spark laptops drop that package and left the desktop open. Dell lists pricing and a date as “coming soon,” and NVIDIA says RTX Spark compact desktops go on sale in November. Pro Max Becomes Pro Precision, and the GB300 Box Gets Windows Dell is retiring the Pro Max name on its deskside AI systems. The Dell Pro Max with GB10 we reviewed in March, and the Dell Pro Max with GB300 it positioned at Dell Technologies World for 120 billion to 1 trillion parameter models, are now Dell Pro Precision with GB10 and Dell Pro Precision with GB300, which puts them under the same brand as the Pro Precision mobile and tower workstations, the same line we rank on our Best Desktop Workstations and Best Mobile Workstations pages, and the hardware does not change with the name. The news on the GB300 side is Windows. The Pro Precision with GB300 pairs a 72-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell Ultra GPU for 20 petaflops of FP4 and 748GB of coherent memory, 496GB of LPDDR5X at 396GB/s on the CPU side and 252GB of HBM3e at 7.1TB/s on the GPU, and Dell lists it with Ubuntu 24.04 and the NVIDIA AI developer stack. The Windows build puts that machine inside the group policies and management tooling enterprises already run, with Windows Subsystem for Linux carrying the CUDA ecosystem and the Linux AI frameworks, so a developer gets the Linux toolchain and the corporate desktop on one box with no dual boot. We have spent a lot of time on this class of machine, including the MSI XpertStation WS300 on the same GB300 superchip and, this week, a two-tower DGX Station cluster over the ConnectX-8 ports, and the question we raised at Computex still stands: whether Windows can make full use of the Blackwell Ultra GPU and the 800Gb/s of ConnectX-8 networking on a single host. The spec sheet in Dell’s press kit, revised today, still lists Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as the operating system, so the Windows SKU is a roadmap item for the moment. The rest of the GB300 sheet is unchanged: 16TB of Gen4 SED-ready NVMe across four 4TB drives, optional RTX PRO 2000 (16GB) or RTX PRO 6000 (96GB) Blackwell cards, two QSFP112 ports at 400Gbps on the ConnectX-8 SuperNIC, 1GbE and 10GbE RJ-45, a 1,600W Titanium power supply on a C19 inlet, MIG partitioning for up to seven users, and 85.25 pounds in a 22.4-inch tower. Dell’s MaxCool liquid loop, with a cold plate, dual heat exchangers, and a redundant pump, claims up to five times the cooling efficiency of a reference design, a figure Dell attributes to its own internal testing. Rob Bruckner, president of Client Devices at Dell Technologies, framed the three systems as one platform: “AI is no longer something you build in the cloud and deploy later. It runs continuously, makes decisions and connects directly to the work people do every day. From a creator pushing the limits of a premium laptop to an enterprise team running always-on AI models at their desk, Dell, NVIDIA and Microsoft are delivering the compute to drive the agentic AI era.” The laptop is the real launch here, and the number to watch is the 17.8mm figure, since that is the thermal envelope NVIDIA’s petaflop claim has to survive. At Computex, NVIDIA put RTX Spark at roughly RTX 5070-class gaming performance and said designs would go as thin as 14mm, and Dell’s 128GB configuration is the most unified memory in a Windows laptop short of the 192GB HP ZBook Ultra G3a, and it will get a slot on our Best Laptops for Local AI leaderboard once the review unit has been through the lab. Whether a 20-core Arm CPU and a Prism layer hold up a creator’s whole workflow is the question we will put to the review unit, along with how much the 5,120-core chip gives up to the 6,144-core part, and how much the desktop chassis adds on the same silicon.
document fetched 2026-10-13 05:03 · canonical https://storagereview.com/news/dell-xps-16-creator-edition-rtx-spark-n1x-windows-gb300-pro-precision