We tested this souped up mini PC and played Cyberpunk on it.

Due to reasons, we got our hands on one of these golden NVIDIA pocket workstations.

It boasts an eye-catching metal sponge that doesn’t feel like it could be a real manufactured product. It feels pulled from an alternate, vastly more opulent, reality.

We had limited time hands-on with the device and decided to forego a proper review in favor of doing something that few people, if any, were going to use this device for: gaming.

On paper, the specs for its size are impressive, carrying a massive GB10 “Grace Blackwell Superchip” SoC paired with a few goodies:

• MediaTek-ish 20 core (10 X925 + 10 A725) ARM CPU
• 6144 core Blackwell GPU similar to a desktop 5070 configuration
• 128GB LPDDR5X on a 256bit bus, running at 4266 MT/s for a total of 273 GB/s bandwidth
• 10G Ethernet and dual QSFP ConnectX-7 card
• 4 TB Samsung NVMe drive
• PD 3.1 140W power supply

The power, memory bandwidth and thermal constraints sadly affect the GPU performance greatly. This device has mostly underperformed expectations according to many user reports on Reddit communities.

AI

There’s no getting around it, this device has been marketed exclusively for usage in the AI space.

There’s probably hundreds of reports of this device running Ollama, vLLM and various curated demos plenty fast. We also did that. The performance there is more than satisfactory for day to day usage, being largely limited by the abysmal memory bandwidth.

If one of these had HBM it would be much more expensive, and it wouldn’t release in the first place

The memory size exists in an inbetween, able to fit essentially any “development” model with room to spare, but not enough for the SOTA production models like Deepseek r1. In any case, it’s more than enough to enjoy most “r/localLLaMA’s pick” models like gpt-oss:120b and qwen3.

The ability to network these together using the QSFP ports enables running those bigger models and is broadly advertised by NVIDIA in the marketing docs. We didn’t have more than one unit to validate those claims.

The CPU

This chip felt extremely fast in day to day usage on the stock Ubuntu distribution this device ships out of the box.

We ran Geekbench 6 and got an impressive 3054 single core, 19602 multi core score.

This roughly matches a desktop 12 core AMD 7900X, but Geekbench scores hardly translate to other workloads. Most of the tests involve heavy media operations that should be offloaded to the GPU (but they haven’t) and disproportionately benefit memory bandwidth and wide cores. This device has low memory bandwidth for a GPU but it has more than double the usual of a typical AM5 desktop.

Comparing its result to a random 7900X result we can see the scores are all over the place.

Reviewing and comparing CPUs is a dark art and greatly dependent on your desired workload.

The GPU

At first, we were stuck for hours trying to run any demanding 3D workload on this device.

Almost anything that comes to mind that properly destroys your GPU to generate cool graphics is a proprietary, binary-only Windows game. This is problematic on two fronts:

• Getting x64 executables to run on an arm64 system
• Getting Wine/Proton/DXVK to work on top of that

So, avoiding both problems, the first thing we ran was Minecraft. Java worked out in its benefit for once!

The device was able to generate chunks at insane speeds. We added the voxy mod to render entire massive worlds at perfectly frame paced 1440p 60fps. Sadly, there is no footage of this, but the CPU felt exceptionally well suited for this task. Maybe worth checking out against the typical i9 systems that run big Minecraft servers.

We quickly got bored and decided to run something else. First starting in easy mode, the x86 native Linux game Brigador.

Using Valve’s FEX required some troubleshooting.

• The stock Ubuntu distro shipped with the device required a sysctl tweak, FEX prompts you to fix it
• Many seemingly unrelated crashes in various applications were observed, fixed by installing libopenal-dev on the host
• Games ran at 1 FPS in LLVMpipe software render mode. This is because the x86 container FEX downloads doesn’t have the Nvidia driver libraries

Thanks to a GitHub issue, we found that FEXConfig allows enabling “thunking” (“use host libraries”) for OGL, Wayland, DRM… The working configuration was to enable all but openal, for some reason, despite the host library being load-bearing.

The game ran fine and we decided to tackle the big guns: Cyberpunk.

We needed a way to run FEX in conjunction with Proton and all its compatibility layers, containers and shenanigans. Most guides online for arm64 gaming tell you to run Steam but Steam is broken with host libraries enabled on FEX according to a Github issue.

Also according to us, because it didn’t work for hours.

By launching it 20 times with no apparent rhyme or reason, and perhaps that exact host-everything-but-openal setting having something to do with it, the Steam client suddenly opened to our surprise.

We wasted no time and then wasted 1 hour waiting for it to download.

It defaulted to Ultra with raytracing and was surprisingly not a slideshow! We then lowered the settings to the High preset and ran the built-in benchmark at 1440p

Misteps

Right after packing up, a new Proton-GE version released with FEX builtin. This (theoretically) would’ve simplified the whole ordeal by making Steam uneeded, in favor of a native Linux games manager like Lutris or Heroic.

At first, without knowing about the ability to use host libraries, we thought that only open source Mesa drivers would have a chance of working. Cyberpunk is a D3D12 game, which gets converted by Wine into Vulkan. There is a Mesa vulkan driver for Nvidia GPUs in meteoric progress right now, NVK, but it can’t work with Nvidia’s kernel module. It wants nouveau, at least for now.

So we flashed Fedora 34 arm64 image into a NVMe drive and booted from it to keep the stock Ubuntu intact. This device has a normal UEFI and doesn’t have a problem with booting from removable media.

It was stuck at 800x600, recycling the EFI FB. No modesetting, no GPU acceleration, no luck. Nouveau doesn’t support the GB10 chip, so we were quickly back in Ubuntu.

Final thoughts from the writer

At more than 4 thousand monetary units, I find this device hard to justify itself unless those 128GB of LPDDR5X are core to your workload. It essentially occupies the same spot as Strix Halo, “midrange GPU but it has 128G of RAM”.

So, if you know you need it, your boss has probably already ordered ten of them. If you don’t, this device is just a curiosity.

Personally I think Strix Halo is the better product because one can enjoy hassle-free x86 compatibility and an open driver stack, but CUDA-only developers will hardly care about these.

Finally, I believe this device also serves as a beta-test trojan horse for those rumored Mediatek+NVIDIA gaming laptops that may soon come out. With proper driver support in Windows (which currently doesn’t exist from NVIDIA), this SoC eats a lot of gaming laptops out there. Maybe NVIDIA’s trickery can help avoid the massive bottleneck in memory bandwidth compared to a GDDR bank if/when the time comes.