A machine that has gained a weight, a power brick and a shipping season, but not yet a price, sits in a crowded room where its own sibling and its rivals have already named their numbers. Asus is placing the ProArt GR1X among a generation of compact machines built around the same silicon, asking buyers to trust a performance story that still rests on sparse arithmetic and unmeasured bandwidth. Its eventual cost will be read against memory prices that have climbed sharply this year, and that is the true measure the market is waiting to apply.
Asus ProArt GR1X Joins Crowded RTX Spark Field Without a Price as AMD's Gorgon Halo Ships 192GB
A 20-core chip and 128GB are the least surprising things about it
Mark
Asus finally gave the GR1X specs. Why does the missing price matter so much?
Mimi
Because every rival around it has one. Microsoft's Dev Box is $5,999, DGX Spark is $6,950, and GMKtec's 192GB box is $6,599. Without a number, buyers can't place the GR1X.
Luke
And the 'rival to the Mac Studio' line comes from reports, not from a benchmark. Nothing here has been independently tested.
Mark
It also looks a lot like Asus's Ascent GX10.
Mimi
Same 150 x 150 x 51mm chassis, same 1.48kg, same 240W adapter, and the same 140 x 80mm fan size. The silicon is the same GB10 family as DGX Spark too.
Luke
Careful, though. The source says it may be a reskin, not that it is one. Asus hasn't said so.
Mark
What about the 1 petaflop figure?
Mimi
It's a sparse FP4 number. Other vendors footnote that; the GR1X page doesn't. Dense throughput will be lower.
Luke
By how much, we don't know. Same for how fast big models will run, since Asus doesn't list memory bandwidth.
Mark
And AMD's Gorgon Halo?
Mimi
Up to 192GB at 273GB/s, with up to 160GB allocatable to the GPU, per Framework and GMKtec. That beats any RTX Spark box's total memory.
Luke
Worth noting the 160GB figure is attributed to those vendors, and the 495 is described by The Register as essentially an overclocked Strix Halo.
O Pulso
- The price is still missing, leaving buyers unable to weigh the GR1X against rivals that have already published theirs.
- Its 1 petaflop FP4 figure is sparse-only, and the product page omits the caveat that competitors include.
- The GR1X looks much like the Ascent GX10 in chassis, weight and power brick, which invites questions about how distinct it really is.
- Gorgon Halo boxes offer 192GB with posted prices, so the GR1X faces a capacity and cost comparison it has not yet entered.
- Rising memory costs have pushed prices upward across the category, and the year-end shipping window leaves little time to settle the question.
A machine that has gained a weight, a power brick and a shipping season, but not yet a price, sits in a crowded room where its own sibling and its rivals have already named their numbers. Asus is placing the ProArt GR1X among a generation of compact machines built around the same silicon, asking buyers to trust a performance story that still rests on sparse arithmetic and unmeasured bandwidth. Its eventual cost will be read against memory prices that have climbed sharply this year, and that is the true measure the market is waiting to apply.
Asus has now given the ProArt GR1X a power brick, a weight and a rough shipping window, but it has not yet given it a price. The RTX Spark mini PC, first shown at Computex 2026, will be sold mainly in 64GB and 128GB unified memory configurations through a small set of premium retailers before the end of the year.
The hardware is firmer than it was. The machine pairs a 20-core RTX Spark N1X with a 6,144-core Blackwell GPU, carries a 240W USB-C power supply and weighs 1.48kg in a compact chassis of roughly 1.1 liters. Its specification has shifted since June, when it was called the ProArt Mini PC, and the chassis, weight and adapter closely match Asus's own Ascent GX10, suggesting a close relative rather than a new design.
The performance claims carry conditions. The 1 petaflop FP4 figure relies on sparsity, a caveat other vendors print and this product page does not. Memory bandwidth, which will largely decide real-world speed, is still unlisted, and nothing has been independently tested.
The competition is already set. AMD's Strix Halo has long been the default for 128GB mini PCs, and its successor Gorgon Halo offers up to 192GB at bandwidth matching the DGX Spark, with vendors publishing prices around $6,600 and higher. Memory costs have pushed prices up across the category, and the GR1X will have to justify its own number when it arrives.
Asus has now given the ProArt GR1X a power brick, a weight, and a rough shipping window. It has not given it a price. The company says the RTX Spark mini PC, first shown at Computex 2026, will be sold mainly in 64GB and 128GB unified LPDDR5X configurations through a limited set of premium retailers before the end of 2026, according to its recent launch announcement.
The hardware details are firmer than they were. The machine uses the 20-core RTX Spark N1X, paired with a 6,144-core Blackwell GPU and a 140W TDP. It ships with a 240W USB-C power supply built to the USB Power Delivery 3.1 EPR specification, weighs 1.48kg (3.26lb), and measures 150 x 150 x 51mm, roughly 1.1 liters. Reports have claimed it will rival the Mac Studio.
The specification has shifted along the way. Asus announced the device on June 1 as the ProArt Mini PC, with up to the same 20-core chip, up to 128GB of memory and up to 140W of thermal headroom, promising availability from Fall 2026. When it renamed the machine in late August, it hinted at several RTX Spark chip options, dropped the 140W reference and listed 180W of USB-C power delivery. Now the 140W figure is back as a TDP and power input has risen to 240W. The cut-down 18-core N1X appears to be reserved for laptops, which fits Nvidia's RTX Spark spec table listing only the 20-core part for desktops.
The GR1X may be closer to a reskin than a new design. Asus's Ascent GX10, its Linux-based take on Nvidia's DGX Spark, has the same 150 x 150 x 51mm chassis, the same 1.48kg weight and a 240W adapter. Asus's October 5 release for a 64GB GX10 describes two 140 x 80mm fans, the same size the GR1X page lists. The overlap goes into the silicon too: RTX Spark is based on the same GB10 chip as DGX Spark, as The Register has noted, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in September 2025 that the N1 processor was "going to go into the DGX Spark."
None of the headline performance figures have been independently tested. The 1 petaflop of FP4 performance is a sparse number; Nvidia's DGX Spark datasheet, Asus's own GX10 release and Microsoft's Surface RTX Spark Dev Box announcement all footnote it as relying on sparsity, while the GR1X page carries no such caveat. Dense FP4 throughput will be lower. The claim of running 120-billion-parameter models with up to 1 million tokens of context is conditional as well, and Asus's October 8 release concedes that what fits depends on model architecture, quantization and context length. Speed depends largely on memory bandwidth, which Asus's product page does not list.
The sharpest competition may come from AMD rather than Nvidia's partners. The Ryzen AI Max+ 395, known as Strix Halo, has long been the default chip for 128GB mini PCs, including AMD's own Ryzen AI Halo developer platform, which went on sale through Micro Center in June for $3,999.99. It pairs a 16-core CPU with a 40-CU Radeon 8060S and a single LPDDR5X pool, but its 256GB/s of bandwidth trails Nvidia's chip.
Its successor, Gorgon Halo, narrows that gap and opens a capacity lead. The Register calls the Ryzen AI Max+ 495 essentially a factory-overclocked Strix Halo, with clocks about 100MHz higher. It supports up to 192GB of LPDDR5X-8533 at 273GB/s, matching DGX Spark, and up to 160GB can go to the GPU, according to Framework and GMKtec, more than the whole memory pool of any RTX Spark machine now on sale.
Unlike Asus, Gorgon Halo vendors are naming prices, and they are high. GMKtec's EVO-X5 Pro with 192GB and 2TB sells for $6,599, against a listed regular price of $6,799. Peladn's YO2 495 costs CNY 49,999 (about $7,454) in China. Lenovo's ThinkCentre X Ultra starts at $3,699 when orders open in November, with up to 128GB and clustering of up to four units. Framework's 192GB Desktop is still listed as coming soon.
Memory costs are pushing everything upward. Nvidia has raised its 128GB DGX Spark to $6,950, nearly 75% above its launch price, while partner 64GB GB10 systems are expected around $4,999. According to The Register, a 128GB Strix Halo box cost $2,000 to $3,000 a year ago and about $4,000 by this summer. Asus's ProArt laptops start at $2,599.99, with memory tiers as low as 24GB. The GR1X's 64GB and 128GB tiers put it against Microsoft's $5,999 Dev Box, the DGX Spark and the $6,599 EVO-X5 Pro.
What to watch for is a price, a published bandwidth figure, a firm date, and reviewer tests of the thermal and gaming claims.
Citações Notáveis
Asus's October 8 release concedes that what fits depends on model architecture, quantization, and context length.— Asus, as reported by TechRadar
The Ryzen AI Max+ 495 is essentially a factory-overclocked version of the Strix Halo APU.— The Register
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