Asus ProArt P14 (RTX Spark) review: Nvidia's super-premium chip makes for a MacBook-like experience

It's a little hard to really get a grip on the Nvidia Spark N1X's importance. From some people's points of view, this is a real revolution in the world of the PC, bringing in a new generation of ARM-based machines running Windows.

On the flip side, the launch prices of said machines make them niche prospects. The Asus ProArt P14 is one of the more approachable laptops in the range of new options, but is still a pricey beast, especially in the configuration I've just spent a week using.

This is a laptop that can really sing when it's used the right way, but I'm not quite sold on Nvidia's new chip being a silver bullet against the dominance of the MacBook Pro and its own M-series silicon.

Price and Availability

Nvidia unveiled the RTX Spark back in May, at Computex in Taiwan, but machines featuring the chip are very fresh. They largely went on sale in mid-October, and you can generally buy either directly from their makers or from retailers in your area.

In the case of the Asus ProArt P14, the starting price is set at £2,699.99 here in the UK for a version with 24GB of RAM. That's instead $2,599.99 in the US.

If you raise that to 32GB of RAM (like the version I've been using), you'll instead need to pay £3,199.99 / $3,099.99. That's quite a chunky hike just for another 8GB of RAM, it must be said, especially given that there's no change in SSD capacity here in the UK, which stands at 1TB in both versions.

In the US, the SSD appears to be capped at 512GB in both versions, even more perplexingly. All of this applies to the 5120-core GPU and 18-core CPU version – there's a more powerful version that pushes prices well past the $5,000 mark if you want it.

Design and Specs

I'll start with the design of the ProArt P14, because it's quite frankly a considerably more straightforward part of assessing this laptop. Asus has fairly transparently built a competitor for the MacBook Pro here, and that aim has led it to a pretty darned lovely design.

I've been using the silver version, although it also comes in a matte black that looks extremely fetching. Each one is finished in a beautiful metallic material that leaves a far more premium impression than the Ceraluminum that Asus prefers for its slightly more accessible everyday laptops.

Closed, and from the back, the laptop looks so much like a MacBook Pro, in fact, that it's only really the ProArt logo that gives it away – and that logo is quite cool, since it's a bit more vague than a full-on brand logo.

Opening the ProArt P14 up, you'll find a gorgeous 3K OLED touch display topped by a webcam and with slim bezels.

Below that, there's a generously spaced keyboard with a good amount of key travel. It has a power button with a fingerprint reader above it for biometric security, and a huge trackpad below. This is a full haptic pad, and it's quite something to use, with an extremely glossy finish.

To the right and left of the keyboard are stereo speakers, with an interesting cut-out design that makes them catch the eye a little more than in some of the competition. That brings us to the ports; on the left edge of the laptop you'll find an HDMI port, two USB-C ports for display and power delivery, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

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The right-hand edge houses another of these same USB-C ports, a USB-A port and a full-sized SD card reader. That's a good amount of I/O for a creator-focused laptop, with that SD card reader in particular being the sort of thing that can get missed off lower-cost laptops (albeit the MacBook Pro very much has one).

Back to that display for some more spec: it's a 2880×1800 OLED panel at 16:10 aspect and with 120Hz refresh, offering 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut – all of which should make it a great pick for colour-accurate work in creative fields, whether that's photography, video or something else.

Meanwhile, the whole thing runs (of course) on the RTX Spark N1X, Nvidia's latest and greatest. As I've already covered, the variations in the specs that you can find for the ProArt P14 are pretty wide, and I'm surprised that Nvidia is making two versions of its chip available without giving them a proper named differentiator (like the M5 and M5 Max, for instance). That can't help with potential customer confusion.

Here in the UK, the basic spec will come with the N1X packing a 5120-core GPU and 18-core CPU, along with 24GB of RAM, but I've been using the version with a 6144-core GPU and 20-core CPU with 32GB of RAM. Whether that uplift is worth it to you will come down to a few factors, but I strongly suspect that most people will end up going with the more affordable version.

The crucial thing to know is that, much like a laptop powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, these laptops run Windows on ARM. That means some benefits (most generally in the form of power consumption and battery life), but also the occasional spectre of compatibility issues, which have become rarer and rarer over time.

Performance and Display

The ProArt P14 is a beautiful bit of hardware, but when you're paying this sort of money, you're likely to be far more concerned with how it performs than how it looks (at least above a certain baseline that it clears).

Using the P14 as my daily driver for a week was an interesting process, not least because the vast majority of my work encountered absolutely no issues. It sort of goes without saying that a chipset Nvidia's touting as the future of computing can handle general productivity without any hitches or issues, but there we are.

The N1X, in all its glory, had no problem whatsoever when it came to my daily workflow, across a Chrome browser stuffed to the brim with tabs, high-resolution YouTube videos, and Photoshop instances. That's really just about the limit of what I work with most of the time, and on my personal M3 MacBook Pro it's never been an issue, either.

Performance was pretty smooth throughout my week using the laptop, although there have been odd hitches now and then, often the first time I've opened or used an application. That might be a familiar tune for those with Qualcomm-based laptops, but the landscape is miles better now than it was a couple of years ago.

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That said, the trap here is that every so often you might just stumble upon an app, game or programme that doesn't want to run well on ARM, and it can be pretty hard to know when that might happen.

Speaking of gaming, with Nvidia's hands all over the RTX Spark, you might assume that it would be a doozy of a mobile gaming chip. Well, not really. It's competent enough, and with the right tuning (especially lowering your resolution) you can get solid results, but it's nothing to ruffle major feathers at Intel or AMD.

On Cyberpunk 2077, I found the Steam Deck preset was the most reliable choice at 2880x1800 resolution, but even with Frame Generation turned to Dynamic, I still topped out at 60fps on the dot.

That's solid, as I've said, but nothing to make you drop your jaw, although it's also running at a pretty high native resolution. Dropping this will clearly get you some sizeable performance gains.

Finally, it's also worth noting that the amount of fan noise you get with high-stress tasks like gaming is pretty significant, to keep all that new hardware cool under the laptop's hood.

Reassuringly, though, the display that you'll do this work and gaming on is a genuine beauty. Asus has a long history of putting stunning screens on its laptops, and this OLED is no different. It's pin-sharp, super bright, lovely to use as a touchscreen, and basically doesn't have any flaws that I discovered.

Verdict

Much like with the recent arrival of the first Googlebook laptops, it's a bit complicated to separate out the laptop from the tech underpinning it. In this case, Nvidia's new RTX Spark N1X is a major new arrival, but in the Asus ProArt P14 it doesn't necessarily feel that groundbreaking.

This is partly a good thing – using the ProArt P14 is much like using any other high-end creative productivity machine, and that's a testament to the power on offer in Nvidia's chip. On the flip side, it's not exactly an experience that's blown me away, and the price being asked for these machines might mean you'd want more from them.

In particular, the fact that its gaming performance is middle-of-the-road, rather than class-leading, feels like a missed opportunity from a computing brand so strongly associated with GPU performance.

I think most people won't find that this ProArt P14 is the best choice for them in 2026, frankly, especially with Apple having established such a clear position when it comes to high-end laptops. Still, it's a very solid start from Nvidia, and it's fascinating to speculate where things could end up in a few years' time.

Also Consider

For those who want oodles of power in a sleek, metallic frame, but don't fancy dicing with Windows on ARM, there's an obvious pick – the latest MacBook Pro. Sure, you could upgrade the M5 to one of its fancier variants if you have the cash, but for the vast majority of professionals, the standard M5 will be brilliant, and it looks like good value compared to Asus' offering.

If you do want Windows, though, with a 14-inch screen and a lovely design, then I'd point you at the 2026 version of the Dell XPS 14. It's a seriously gorgeous laptop, with pricing being its only real flaw, but it still looks like solid value when put next to an RTX Spark machine. Power comparisons might be worth delving into, but again, for most people this will be a simpler, winning pick.