Microsoft Surface Ultra Laptop review: The first real computer with artificial intelligence

The Surface Laptop Ultra is a real competitor to the MacBook Pro for Windows, and Microsoft has never been so close to taking down Apple — if it weren't for lack of battery life.

The Surface Laptop Ultra is a real MacBook Pro competitor for Windows - if it weren't for the lack of battery life.

The brightest laptop screen ever made. Design and build quality similar to MacBook. The magnetic USB-C port is smart. Works well without electricity. Music ready speakers

Battery life can't compete with the MacBook Pro. Some very popular games are still not supported. Low-end RAM options limit AI capabilities.

A new fleet of Windows laptops has arrived, and the flagship is the Surface Laptop Ultra. It's been one of my most anticipated laptops of the year since it was announced. Not only does it promise to be a faster evolution of the Surface Laptop (which I already loved a lot), but it also introduces an entirely new piece of silicon: the Nvidia RTX Spark N1X Superchip.

The goal is a single laptop that can handle AI, gaming, content creation, and pretty much anything else you can throw at it. If it looks a little like a MacBook Pro, you're on the right track. But unlike previous attempts to dethrone Apple, the Surface Laptop Ultra is trading with the best of the best. I just wish it had the battery life to really keep up with the MacBook Pro.

This is not Microsoft's first attempt to produce a more powerful laptop. The company first did this in 2021 with the Surface Laptop Studio. At the time, it was the company's answer to the MacBook Pro: a hybrid laptop and tablet aimed at the growing class of content creators and media professionals. Even with the AMD discrete graphics card (although not particularly good).

The Surface Laptop Ultra rejects the Studio form factor experiment and opts for a simpler but polished approach. It's a powerful foldable laptop designed for people who need extra performance—whether for gaming, content creation, or on-device AI workflows. I think the ideal demographic is someone who does some of these things.

But after opening the Surface Laptop Ultra, it gives me more compliments. The keyboard is fantastic, a very large touchpad with tactile feedback. I still hate the placement of the power button (why not put it on the top right instead of between the keys as an obvious button like every other laptop?), and the keycaps could be a bit bigger. But overall, I was very happy and comfortable typing and drawing on the laptop.

I was very satisfied with the sound. The above-mentioned lower vents also hide the four speakers, which have a wonderful sound. I was really impressed with how loud, rich, and full the sounds are, perhaps second only to the 16-inch MacBook Pro (and the 15-inch MacBook Air). There's even a hint of bass!

Besides those speakers, there are a lot of useful ports. You've got the usual stuff for a laptop of this type, including HDMI, USB-A, a headphone jack, an SD card slot and three USB4 Type-C ports. This system can support up to three external 4K displays or one 5K display. Regardless of resolution, you're maxed out at a 120Hz refresh rate. It lags behind the latest MacBook Pro, which can support two 5K displays with a 120Hz refresh rate. But all in all, I'm really happy with this binding combo - in fact, it might be the most complete offering I can think of.

The Surface Laptop Ultra has a trick up its sleeve involving magnets. The Surface Laptop has long used Surface Connect, a proprietary magnetic power port that can also connect to Microsoft's Surface Dock. The Surface Laptop Ultra now uses USB-C, and the way Microsoft engineered it to be magnetic is impressive. Disappointingly, only the USB-C port on the right has this magnetic feature, but all USB-C ports offer power. You can always buy third-party plugins that do the same thing, but it's a really nice innovation.

What I appreciate about all Surface Laptop designs is the 3:2 aspect ratio display. I often find that vertical space is more useful, especially if you often work with documents, spreadsheets, and websites. Combined with a smaller 15-inch touchscreen (compared to the standard 16-inch screen), this laptop is more compact and portable. Slimmer than the 16-inch MacBook Pro, it fits a little easier in a laptop bag.

The screen is very sharp and has a pixel density of 257 pixels per inch, which is barely higher than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Like the MacBook Pro, the Surface Laptop Ultra's display uses Mini-LED backlighting. OLED is far more commonly used in Windows laptops, which make up for their lack of brightness with sharper contrast and stronger color performance. But here, the Surface Laptop Ultra clearly has its sights set on the MacBook Pro. That may soon change with the rumored launch of the MacBook Pro OLED.

With 1344 dimming zones, this screen is the brightest laptop screen ever made. Using my colorimeter, I measured 987 nits of brightness in SDR and 1945 nits in HDR in a 9% window. The result is stunning HDR performance. Games and movies look spectacular on this screen, even without the perfect black level that OLED offers. Add a 120Hz refresh rate and you've got a beautiful screen to play on, especially in single-player games that are more visually immersive.

But the screen is very reflective. This was also true of the standard Surface Laptop, but significantly more pronounced than the MacBook. Even at maximum brightness, I still find myself staring at my reflection when viewing websites with dark backgrounds – and this is without a doubt the brightest screen ever built into a laptop. Reflections are really my only complaint. Otherwise, it's one of my favorite monitors I've tested.

The 1080p webcam is not that impressive. It has problems in low light and the image is very noisy. The MacBook Pro's webcam has better image processing and makes faces brighter without overexposure.

Nvidia N1X is the first chip of its kind in Windows laptops. Qualcomm opened the floodgates in 2024 with Snapdragon X chips, the Surface Laptop being the first adopter. These were primarily a response to the MacBook Air and later to the MacBook Neo. But Qualcomm's chips never reached the performance needed to match the M5 Pro or M5 Max MacBook Pro. This is where the Nvidia N1X comes into play.

Both the Snapdragon X and N1X use a system-on-chip (SoC) design that packages the CPU, GPU, and memory together. This is the same design used by Apple's silicon chips, and most importantly, it allows the CPU and GPU to access local memory. This is important to enable much faster local AI processing, which needs to feed that GPU as much as possible. The N1X comes in two configurations: an 18-core system (5120 graphics cores) and a 20-core system (6144 graphics cores). Think of it like Apple's M5 Pro and M5 Max, with major differences in GPU performance and configuration options. For example, if you want 128GB of memory to hammer out AI performance at home, you'll need a 20-core N1X. In fact, the 18-core model is limited to only 24 or 32 GB of RAM (and from what I've seen so far, the Surface Laptop Ultra is the only N1X laptop sold with only 24 GB of memory).

I tested the 32GB model paired with the higher-end 20-core CPU. In terms of core count, the graphics card in this N1X configuration sits squarely between the RTX 5070 Ti and the mobile RTX 5080. In a laptop this thin, but the core looks promising. The count alone doesn't mean you should expect it to perform at the same level in games. The N1X has a maximum power of 80 watts, which seriously limits the frame rate of the game. However, the game as a whole is underpowered by the nature of this arm-based system. For almost every game you play, the Surface Laptop Ultra has to rely on app emulation, which slows down performance. As Nvidia points out, however, emulation has its biggest impact on the CPU. So even if apps like games aren't optimized for the Arm, they should still run just fine. This is exactly what I experienced with the handful of games I tried. You'll need to run most games at medium or lower settings to get decent frame rates, and you'll usually want to play at 1920 x 1200 resolution.

Despite scoring lower than the M5 Max MacBook Pro in 3DMark tests, the Surface Laptop Ultra delivers up to 20 percent faster frame rates in games like Cyberpunk 2077. This is one of the few titles where I can directly compare the two systems. I also tested games like 007: First Light, Marvel Rivals and Black Myth: Wukong. It's exciting to see so many popular titles running on an Arm system, and Nvidia is clearly investing heavily in the future of Arm gaming. However, a fairly high list of multiplayer games are still not compatible due to anti-cheat systems, including PUBG, Valorant, and League of Legends. These are some heavy hitters that will be missed at launch, but Nvidia says support is on the way. I ran into some bugs though like 007: First Light, where I couldn't adjust the display resolution in the options menu. This is disappointing because otherwise the game plays well on the system.

Regardless, these are the most powerful integrated graphics we've seen in a Windows laptop, leaving Intel's Pentlake X9 in the dust. But if you want to have the best gaming performance, it is better to buy a gaming laptop. For example, the RTX 5060 in Lenovo LOQ 15 can draw up to 115 watts and deliver up to 22% better performance in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Marvel Rivals. It's also about a thousand dollars cheaper. If gaming was the main point of the Surface Laptop Ultra, it would feel like a letdown.

But the AI performance is the real reason this laptop (and the N1X as a whole) exists, and it's where it shines the most. I ran it through Procyon's latest AI benchmarks, which include text generation, image generation, and computer vision. The Surface Laptop Ultra is about 25 percent faster than the Dell XPS 14 at producing text on these lighter models, which range from just 3.5 billion parameters to 12 billion. Nice to see, but not exactly a dramatic leap forward. Meanwhile, the Razer Blade 16 with an RTX 5090 (and 32GB of RAM) scored nearly twice as many in these tests. Sure, it's a more expensive laptop, but it claims to be designed for AI.

Clearly, this entry-level configuration of the Laptop Ultra is more for AI enthusiasts than true enthusiasts. Adding more memory does not necessarily solve this problem. I'm also testing the 128GB version of the HP OmniBook Ultra (with the same N1X chip), and was hoping to see it run on some of the larger models. And while you can certainly load a 70 billion parameter model into LM Studio, the performance is very slow. Without more raw GPU computing to speed things up, these more impressive models are too slow to use for day-to-day tasks. However, they can still be used in situations that require more complex reasoning, such as coding, when it is worth waiting for the actual correct answer.

Running local AI models as a computational task that many people are willing to do is still a question mark for me. As long as free cloud-based models are faster and more useful, I have a hard time seeing people spending more money just to run a model locally on a computer. This will no doubt change as the models improve, but for now, it will have limited appeal in this area. The real advantage may be in the AI ​​that allows you to access your local files on your computer, allowing you to do things that are not possible in a real ChatGPT session. I ran a very basic test in LM Studio Bionic asking it to analyze a folder of local text files and generate a comprehensive summary using Gemma 4 E4B, a 4.5 billion parameter model. It took 8 minutes to process the request and another 2 minutes to provide the 853 word response. There's enough functionality here to explore and experiment with on-device AI - but the pace can get tiresome. I say all this less to criticize the Surface Laptop Ultra and more just to set expectations for what laptops can do right now.

If the N1X has a serious weakness, it's the CPU. In CPU benchmarks, the N1X is 20-24% slower in both single-core and multi-core performance tests. However, switching from Balanced mode to Performance mode in Windows settings makes a big difference. When enabled, single-core performance increases by 20 percent, a larger delta than other laptops. It's fast enough to not be a major bottleneck, but I expect to see improvements in future generations of the N1X chip.

The Surface Laptop Ultra isn't the only RTX Spark laptop launching today. Most of the major manufacturers of Windows laptops have one, and they all rely on cutting-edge hardware, including just about every possible premium feature. I'm still testing some of these models, including the closest competitor, the Lenovo Pro 9n. It has a 15-inch screen, the same N1X chip, and 32GB of RAM. From what I can tell so far, the performance of these laptops is about the same, within a few percent.

But against something like the Razer Blade 16, the Surface Laptop Ultra faces closer competition. You can get the RTX 5070 Blade 16 model with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for $2,999 — the same configuration and price as the Surface Laptop Ultra. They're similar in size and both are well-built. The Surface Laptop Ultra has a sharper, brighter screen, but the Blade 16 has a faster refresh rate. Higher configurations of the Razer Blade 16 with Intel Core Ultra 9 386H even match the Surface Laptop Ultra's battery life, which lasted only 12 hours in the local video playback test. Both devices are what I call "all-in-one" laptops. I think the Surface Laptop Ultra is the better laptop overall, mainly because of the better keyboard and touchpad. It also has the option to configure it with up to 128GB of storage, while the Blade 16 has a maximum capacity of 64GB. But if you spend more time gaming than running local models, the Surface Laptop Ultra (and any of the N1X devices) is the wrong choice.

The Surface Laptop Ultra is priced roughly the same as the 16-inch MacBook Pro. For $2,999, you get 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Both offer lower-end performance options, either the M5 Pro or the 18-core N1X. The Surface Laptop Ultra lets you configure the system with 128GB of memory with just one TB of storage space, while the MacBook Pro forces you to 2TB. The MacBook Pro still has the edge in terms of polish, whether it's better speakers and a webcam, a less reflective screen, or more comprehensive app support. However, the main downside is battery life. The MacBook Pro has 9 or 10 hours more battery life than the Surface Laptop Ultra. There is no getting around it. The MacBook Pro also tends to be a little quieter. It's part of the magic sauce that makes the MacBook Pro feel so special. The problem was never that we didn't have powerful laptops. The problem is in not making compromises to achieve that performance, and battery life has always been the most challenging challenge to overcome. Unfortunately, the Surface Laptop Ultra (and other N1X laptops) haven't quite caught on yet.

However, I'm drawn to the Surface Laptop Ultra's brighter screen and taller aspect ratio, as well as its 15-inch size. I've always found the 16-inch MacBook Pro a little tough. We may be a few weeks away from seeing what Apple has in store for the lighter touch-screen MacBook Pro. But for now, if you want to dabble in gaming, content creation, and AI workflows, it's probably the best laptop you can buy that isn't a MacBook Pro. And more importantly, I foresee a new era in Windows laptops that will become something truly special in the not-too-distant future.