Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra Opens Pre-Orders With RTX Spark and a Magnetic USB-C Port

Microsoft revealed a laptop that still lacked a price and a ship date in May. On October 7 the missing numbers showed up. Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599, pre-orders are open now, and the first units ship on October 16.

Buyers at that entry price get a rather strong package, including an 18-core NVIDIA Grace CPU and a Blackwell RTX GPU with 5,120 cores, as well as 24GB of unified memory and 512GB of storage. The alternative chip option has a 20-core Grace CPU and a GPU with an astonishing 6,144 cores. That top-of-the-line model starts at $3,699.99 for 32GB of memory and a 1TB disk, but it goes up to $5,899.99 for 128GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage. You may even increase the storage capacity to 2TB, and if necessary, the drive can be removed for replacement or maintenance. Both chips have a wide power range, which some reports place between 45 and 80 watts.

Storage on this machine works a little differently because the CPU and GPU are essentially drawing from the same memory pool, like with the LPDDR5X, so you can have a model running a render and a compile all in the background without having to wait for the graphics card. Not surprise, Microsoft is conservative with its headline figure. On a 128GB configuration, the GPU cannot actually tap into the entire amount, and the figure you see will vary depending on the workload. Nonetheless, NVIDIA and Microsoft place the laptop squarely in the range of the top local models, with over 120 billion parameters and a 1 petaflop of AI math.

The 15-inch PixelSense Ultra touchscreen sits prominently above the keyboard, constructed on mini-LED and running at 120Hz, covering the DCI-P3 color space and including Dolby Vision IQ for good measure. The maximum HDR brightness is 2,000 nits, although this is a somewhat small range; sustained brightness is lower. The pixel density is respectable, at 262 per inch. The touchscreen accepts finger input but not pen input, hence there are no Surface Pen accessories available.

This laptop has three USB-C ports, one USB-A, HDMI, a full-size SD card reader, and a headphone connector. One of the USB-C ports on the right side has a special trick up its sleeve: it’s magnetic, so you can snap the charging cable on and it pulls free if you trip over it. This is the first built-in magnetic USB-C charging port on a laptop, a nod to the old Surface Connect plug, and if you want to get fancy, external output can drive up to three 4K displays.

Given the beefy new chip, cooling had to be upgraded significantly, and Microsoft claims that the new thermal arrangement offers 2.5 times the heat capacity of the previous 15-inch Surface Laptop. Larger fans keep everything cool even at lower speeds, yet the thickness and weight remain under 18mm and 4.5lbs, respectively. There are two finishes available: Platinum and Nightfall, however the higher memory choice is only available in the latter. A haptic trackpad that is more than 30% larger than the one on the previous Surface Laptop covers the palm rest.