DGX Spark as a daily driver

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I bought an NVIDIA DGX Spark!<br>It’s actually quite a competent general purpose computer while being super tiny and power efficient.<br>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.

FIGURE 1 My small form factor PC next to the DGX Spark.<br>EXIF dataCameraFUJIFILM GFX100SLens125Aperturef/NaNShutter1.7 sISOISO 100Softwaredarktable 5.5.0+1325~g5f523d43b6Date2026-05-16 14:06:47Download<br>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.<br>If you want, you can just install another Linux distribution easily (Fedora works well), although there may be a couple weird bugs with the Realtek Ethernet driver so the NVIDIA version of the Linux kernel has a couple of patches.<br>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).<br>It’s really nice how it doesn’t heat up the room or make noise.<br>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.

FIGURE 2 Fastfetch system specs.<br>Download<br>1 Can it run Crysis?

It turns out, it can totally run Crysis.<br>The DGX Spark is quite decent at gaming in fact.

FIGURE 3 Yes, it can run Crysis!<br>EXIF dataCameraFUJIFILM GFX100SLensSIGMA 70mm F2.8 DG MACRO A018Aperturef/2.8Shutter1/70 sISOISO 1600Softwaredarktable 5.5.0+1479~g9e36df0344Date2026-07-15 22:18:24Download<br>This is Crysis Remastered running at 3200 x 1800 resolution with everything set to High and DLSS set to Performance.<br>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.<br>It’s probably the best avenue to play most games.<br>It uses FEX to translate x86_64 to arm64, fulfilling a similar role as Rosetta 2 on Apple devices.<br>It also bundles DLSS, RTX, and stuff so you can expect to play modern AAA titles with ray tracing turned on.

Obviously, the “bang for the buck” isn’t great compared to dedicated gaming machines.<br>After all, the DGX Spark is quite expensive.<br>You probably wouldn’t want to buy the DGX Spark just for gaming.<br>My small form factor PC with a dedicated NVIDIA graphics card is better at gaming at a lower price.

The GPU of the DGX Spark is somewhat comparable to the RTX 5070 but with much slower memory bandwidth and much lower power, and there’s some overhead from FEX (whereas the performance penalty of Proton is usually rather tiny, or sometimes games are even faster in Proton than on Windows), so you can expect maybe two thirds of the performance.

Many modern Steam games with great graphics work just fine out of the box, including:

Cyberpunk 2077<br>Portal RTX<br>Indiana Jones and the Great Circle<br>Running Train

and many more! Generally, modern games on common game engines like Unreal, Unity, and Godot have a very high chance of just working, with bells and whistles like RTX and DLSS working too.

FIGURE 4 Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark results.<br>Download<br>FIGURE 5 Running Train.<br>EXIF dataCameraApple iPhone 14 Pro MaxLensiPhone 14 Pro Max back triple camera 6.86mm f/1.78Aperturef/1.8Shutter1/121 sISOISO 100Software26.6Date2026-07-10 15:07:46Download<br>The main categories of games that don’t work are:

Games with aggressive anticheat that don’t work on Linux, such as League of Legends<br>Some older games that need tinkering to get working (see the software that needed tinkering section)<br>Non-Steam games have a lower chance of working

2 Local LLM inference

The main reason for most people to buy the DGX Spark is probably to dabble with local LLM inference.<br>I am happy to report that the DGX Spark has aged like fine wine in this regard.<br>It just keeps getting better!

Whereas early reviews lambasted it for apparently mediocre performance (bottlenecked by the memory bandwidth), a litany of novel tricks have enabled it to be literally several times faster now than when it first came out!

NVFP4 gave a huge boost. It wasn’t originally supported on DGX Spark when it first came out, to much chagrin, but it became available soon...