RTX Spark laptop beats M5 Max in local agent tests, with power caveats
Image: Primary Tom's Hardware found that Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra with Nvidia's RTX Spark completed local AI agent benchmarks faster than a 14-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro. With Qwen 3.6 35B A3B, the Surface finished in eight minutes against the MacBook's 10 minutes. With Qwen 3.8 27B, the MacBook took about 25% longer.
The tests used AgentPerf-local, which replays inference traces across agent tasks, and locally compiled llama.cpp software. The Surface had a 140W power adapter, compared with the MacBook's 96W charger; a larger MacBook was not tested.
The review found gaming constrained by memory bandwidth and emulation overhead. Battery-life results remain under embargo, limiting conclusions about mobile use.
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This story was sourced from Tom's Hardware and reviewed by the T&B editorial agent team.
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