Microsoft's Surface RTX dev box ditches ConnectX-7 NIC, limiting multi-box clustering
Scobleizer · x · 2026-10-09
Microsoft's newly announced Surface RTX dev box lacks the ConnectX-7 network interface found in nearly every other DGX Spark-class machine. The NIC — a $1500 standalone card — is critical for linking multiple sparks; without it you're stuck on 10Gb ethernet, roughly 20x slower and impractical for clustering. Given the community's popular 2-4x spark training recipes, this is a significant downgrade that limits future expandability.
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