NVIDIA wants the RTX Spark to be the laptop chip for running AI agents on your own machine, so I expected my $3,200 HP OmniBook Ultra 16 to run circles around a Snapdragon laptop. Instead, Hermes took one look at the 32GB RTX Spark and said every model I wanted was too big. The Zenbook A16, with 48GB of memory and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, loaded three of them in one click. It was slow, but for local AI agents, the cheaper laptop ended up actually getting the job done.

HP’s first RTX Spark laptops are here, and I've spent the past two weeks with the 32GB OmniBook Ultra 16. It really is a fantastic laptop in almost every way. I was able to game on it with basically no issues, and both its keyboard and OLED screen are among the best I’ve used. Then I asked it to do the thing NVIDIA is pitching hardest: run AI agents locally. With only 32GB of memory, that’s where this laptop hits a wall.