Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is available for preorder for $5,999

Microsoft’s Nvidia-powered Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is available for preorder now and is slated to ship in November for just about $6,000. It’s pricier than the DGX Spark mini PC Nvidia launched last year, but PC prices have been climbing due to shortages of RAM and other components.

The Dev Box’s flat, 3D-printed anodized aluminum chassis doubles as a heatsink and resembles the top vents on an Xbox Series X. It was introduced alongside the new Surface Laptop Ultra and runs on Nvidia’s Arm-based RTX Spark platform and 128GB of unified memory. With that much memory, along with a 100-watt thermal envelope and Nvidia’s Tensor cores, you could probably get an impressive gaming experience on the Dev Box. But as its name suggests, it’s mainly aimed at developers. It’s optimized for running local AI, including “models exceeding 120B parameters,” for tasks like testing AI models, prototyping AI agents, or running AI coding tools on-device.

The Dev Box is also one of Microsoft’s Project Zenith devices, so it ships with a developer-optimized Windows 11 Pro setup and some preinstalled developer tools, including Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI, GitHub Copilot, WSL, Python, and Node.