GoKawiilDGX Spark as a daily driver
I bought an NVIDIA DGX Spark! It’s actually quite a competent general purpose computer while being super tiny and power efficient. It basically just has an ARM CPU, a decent NVIDIA GPU (with the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 5070), 128 GB of unified memory, and a 4 TB SSD.
DISCLAIMER: I work at NVIDIA but I bought this with my own money and the opinions are my own. I didn’t get anything for writing this review. When I bought my DGX Spark, it only cost me $4000, but its price has since increased to $4700.
The DGX Spark runs “DGX OS” but it is in fact just plain old Ubuntu 24.04 with some additions. If you want, you can just install another Linux distribution easily (Fedora works well), although there may be a couple of weird bugs with the Realtek Ethernet driver so the NVIDIA version of the Linux kernel has a couple of patches. Unlike some other ARM devices, the DGX Spark is all ACPI rather than device tree based, so regular Linux builds for arm64 work just fine.
Generally, it is a power-efficient and quiet box (it gets slightly audible under load, but no annoying whine, and is silent when idle). It’s really nice how it doesn’t heat up the room or make noise. Stuff like web browsing and general programming work are super fast.
The CPU has a Geekbench 6 score roughly on par with an M3 Pro 14 core and an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X: 2983 single core and 18183 multi core. Weirdly enough, my results were slightly worse than Geerlingguy’s Dell Pro Max with the same GB10. Perhaps it’s just thermals or random fluctuations. At any rate, it’s better than my SFFPC with its AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX, which scored 2869 and 16973.
1 Can it run Crysis?
It turns out, it can totally run Crysis. The DGX Spark is quite decent at gaming in fact.
This is Crysis Remastered running at 3200 x 1800 resolution with everything set to High and DLSS set to Performance. The game has a platinum rating on ProtonDB, but like other people running NVIDIA graphics, I had to set the Proton version to Experimental for it to work.
The Steam Snap for arm64 is maintained by Canonical and specifically targets gaming on DGX Spark. It’s probably the best avenue to play most games. It uses FEX to translate x86_64 to arm64, fulfilling a similar role as Rosetta 2 on Apple devices. It also bundles DLSS, RTX, and stuff so you can expect to play modern AAA titles with ray tracing turned on.
... continue reading