With 1,344 dimming zones, it’s the brightest laptop screen ever made. Using my colorimeter, I measured 987 nits of brightness in SDR and 1,945 nits in HDR in a 9 percent window. The result is pretty stunning HDR performance. Games and movies look spectacular on this screen, even without the perfect black levels OLED would provide. Add in the 120-Hz refresh rate, and you have a beautiful display for gaming—especially in more visually immersive, single-player games.
But the screen is highly reflective. This was also true of the standard Surface Laptop, but it’s noticeably more reflective than a MacBook. Even with the brightness fully maxed, I still found myself staring at my reflection when viewing websites with dark backgrounds—and that’s despite this being unquestionably the brightest screen ever put in a laptop. The reflections are really my only complaint. Otherwise, it’s one of my favorite displays I’ve tested.
The 1080p webcam isn’t particularly impressive. It struggles in low light, and the image is pretty noisy. The MacBook Pro webcam has better image processing, brightening faces without overexposing.
The Nvidia N1X Arrives
The Nvidia N1X is a first-of-its-kind chip in Windows laptops. Qualcomm broke open the floodgates in 2024 with its Snapdragon X chips, of which the Surface Laptop was an early adopter. These were primarily an answer to the MacBook Air, and later to what would become the MacBook Neo. But Qualcomm’s chips never scaled up to the performance needed to match something like the M5 Pro or M5 Max MacBook Pro. That’s where the Nvidia N1X steps in.
Both the Snapdragon X and N1X use a System on a Chip (SoC) design, which packages the CPU, GPU, and memory together. It’s the same design Apple Silicon chips use, and—importantly—it lets both the CPU and GPU access local memory. This is crucial for enabling the much faster local AI processing, which needs to feed that GPU as much memory as possible. The N1X comes in two configurations: an 18-core system (5,120 GPU cores) and a 20-core system (6,144 GPU cores). Think of these like Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max, with the main differences being GPU performance and configuration options. For example, if you want 128 GB of memory to hammer home that AI performance, you have to go with the 20-core N1X. In fact, the 18-core model is limited to just 24 GB or 32 GB of RAM (and from what I’ve seen so far, the Surface Laptop Ultra is the only N1X laptop to be sold with only 24 GB of memory).
