Review
*The “for creators” that ASUS has in their marketing sure is doing a lot of heavy lifting… *
The bottom line: Even though it’s a niche laptop in 2026, ASUS and Nvidia are going to sell every single one of these that they make. If you need one of these, don’t convince yourself that the 32gb version will be reasonable for your needs. You want the 64 or 128gb version, for sure.
can it boot linux? – Yes! I am working on Arch linux, but Debian Trixie works currently. There’s a battery/charge firmware bug that’s already being worked and the screen brightness controls did not work until I manually went to another kernel, but it does work on the Asus. I think the Asus is a little easier to get Linux working on than the Microsoft Surface Ultra. I’ll soon be trying the Dell RTX Spark as well, and will report back.
The bootloader is not locked – press ESC to bring up the boot menu.
Shared / Dedicated Memory
A LOT of reviews got this wrong, and it wasn’t covered super well in the review guide. This “reserve GPU memory” is largely for old programs that DO NOT understand unified memory.
I reserved 16gb but otherwise I could load 27b Q8 models just fine, and with no speed penalty.
This is with hermes 70b loaded and working fine in LM Studio. No speed penalty! (Because it’s the same memory, DUH)
Here’s Hermes 70b ( in q8)
It’s not fast though 3-5t/s, but it Runs Fine ™
TODO: More thoughts later – this is basically a retail laptop so moving really fast with notes/review/etc.
Speed Figures
But wait – you say – isn’t this faster than DGX Spark!?!
Yes, marginally. This is thanks to the higher-clocked LPDDR5.