Microsoft is finally sharing details about its first builder-class PC.
Earlier this year, Microsoft teased the Surface Laptop Ultra, describing it as “the most powerful thing we’ve ever made.” And while we know some details about it including its super bright MiniLED display and NVIDIA RTX Spark chip, other specs have been hard to come by. But today at an event in San Francisco, Microsoft finally gave us a closer look at its upcoming flagship notebook.
Now before we go any further, it’s important to highlight that the Surface Laptop Ultra will be a very beefy system, so buying one simply to browse the web, edit videos or even game on it will be overkill. This machine is more for developers and AI researchers than your typical PC user and to help drive that point home, Microsoft described the Surface Laptop Ultra as a “builder class PC.”
The Surface Laptop Ultra comes standard with a 15-inch Mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio and up to a whopping 2,000 nits of peak brightness. It also has a huge haptic touchpad that Microsoft says is 30 percent larger than what you get on typical 15-inch Surface notebook along with a ton of ports including USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, 3.5mm audio and a full-size SD card reader. However, the most interesting new port is what Microsoft is calling Magnetic Connect, which combines the speed and convenience of magnetic charging with a traditional USB-C jack while still transmitting power, video and data.
When it comes to performance, the Surface Laptop Ultra is based around NVIDIA’s RTX Spark chip and will support up to 128GB of unified memory and is capable of pushing up to one petaflop of FP4 AI compute. It also has 2.5 times more thermal capacity of any of Microsoft’s previous notebooks and unlike most Windows PCs, the company says the Surface Laptop Ultra delivers 99 percent of its max performance even when it’s not plugged into the wall. When compared to a MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip, Microsoft claims the Ultra delivers 6.2 times faster video generation, 4.3 times faster image creation and is 2.1 times faster to the first token.
More specifically, the Surface Laptop Ultra will be available in two main configurations: one with an RTX Spark N1X chip with an 18-core CPU or an even more powerful version featuring a 20-core CPU. RAM tops out at 32GB for the base model, but it can go all the way up to 128GB when paired with a 20-core RTX Spark processor. On Microsoft’s product page, the size of the Ultra’s SSD tops out at 2TB, but since storage is user-upgradable, you can always add more on your own.
As for the rest of its design, the Surface Laptop Ultra features an aluminum chassis that measures just 18mm thick (0.7 inches) and weighs 4.5 pounds. It also comes with user-removable storage, so it should be easy to upgrade or replace your SSD post-purchase. And finally, the Ultra will be available in two colors: platinum and nightfall.
The Surface Laptop Ultra is available for pre-order today starting at $2,599. Alternatively, if for some reason the Surface Laptop Ultra doesn’t seem powerful enough for you needs, Microsoft also announced the Surface RTX Dev Box, which is also available for pre-order now starting at $5,999.
