Fastest AI laptop ever built keeps its crown for now as Nvidia unleashes RTX mobile workstations — $18,600 Dell Pro Max 18 Plus laptop doubled in price in 14 months, and it could be unseated within days
Dell Pro Max 18 Plus leads current local AI rankings, yet Nvidia's launch could unsettle results RTX Spark offers 128 GB shared memory for larger locally run models Spark's 300 GB/s bandwidth trails Dell's graphics memory at 896 GB/s The Dell Pro Max 18 Plus still holds the title of fastest AI laptop, topping local AI rankings ahead of every other machine tested.
Its RTX PRO 5000 chip reached 185.1 tokens/s on the Phi model, 140.5 tokens/s on Mistral, and 119.7 tokens/s on Llama 3.
However this lead faces a test on October 16 2026, when Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops go on sale from several manufacturers, with preorders already open.
RTX Spark arrival Microsoft is expected to field the Surface Laptop Ultra from $2,599, while Dell is bringing the XPS 16 Creator Edition from $3,799.99.
Asus, HP, Lenovo and MSI are also launch partners, while Acer and Gigabyte are expected to add models later.
Nvidia rates RTX Spark at up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance, with 6,144 CUDA cores and up to 128 GB of shared memory.
The 1 petaflop figure covers only FP4 calculations that exploit sparsity, an upper limit that everyday workloads may not reach.
The company also claims the chip can run large language models of about 120 billion parameters locally, with a context window of one million tokens.
That is slightly above the 109 billion parameters that the Dell Pro Max 18 Plus can reportedly handle locally.
This does not automatically mean that RTX Spark will outperform Dell's workstation in AI workloads, as model capacity alone does not determine inference speed.
The price Dell buyers paid for the lead The Pro Max 18 Plus offers Core Ultra 5, 7, or 9 processors and RTX PRO 1000 to 5000 graphics, with prices starting at $3,488.
Dell's top configuration, equipped with an RTX PRO 5000, 128 GB of memory and two 1 TB drives, cost $9,245.52 when the laptop launched.
A similar configuration later appeared at roughly $14,000, while the laptop now sells for almost $18,600, double its launch price after 14 months.
The top model is built around the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor with 24 cores, a 5.5 GHz boost clock and a 55 W rating.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.techradar.com — the content belongs to TechRadar.
