What do you get if you cross a cellular workstation with a gaming laptop computer? The HP ZBook Studio G8 (begins at $1,894; $4,488 as examined) is usually ordered with one in every of Nvidia’s formerly-known-as-Quadro skilled GPUs, however can be obtainable with Nvidia gaming graphics like our check unit’s GeForce RTX 3070, and its keyboard has RGB rainbow backlighting that may take a look at house on a deluxe gaming rig. Excessive-frame-rate avid gamers will not like our Studio’s 15.6-inch OLED show, which is gorgeous however restricted to a vanilla 60Hz refresh charge, however the system provides as much as a prize platform for 4K video editors or different digital content material creators.
A Distinctive A part of the Lineup
We have reviewed most of HP’s ZBook laptop computer workstations, from the heavyweight flagship ZBook Fury 15 G8 to the ZBook Energy G8 that targets engineering college students and different budget-minded customers. Final yr’s ZBook Studios had solely Nvidia Quadro GPUs, with the GeForce model dubbed ZBook Create G7; the eighth technology applies the Studio title to each.
At 3.96 kilos, the ZBook Studio G8 is nearly as skinny and lightweight as the three.74-pound ZBook Firefly 15 G8, which is billed as HP’s trimmest cellular workstation, however significantly extra highly effective. The $1,894 base mannequin has an Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a 1080p IPS display screen backed by Nvidia T1200 graphics.
For $4,488, our evaluation unit raises the stakes. It is acquired an eight-core, 2.6GHz (5.0GHz turbo) Core i9-11950H processor, 32GB of reminiscence, a 2TB NVMe SSD, the 8GB GeForce RTX 3070, and an OLED contact display screen with 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) decision. One other display screen alternative is the non-touch 4K DreamColor show we raved about in our Fury G8 evaluation, whose 120Hz refresh charge makes it one of the best decide for avid gamers.
The aluminum-clad HP measures 0.69 by 13.9 by 9.2 inches (HWD), making it minutely greater however a bit lighter than the Dell Precision 5560 (0.73 by 13.6 by 9.1 inches, 4.3 kilos). The highest and facet display screen bezels are skinny however there is no flex should you grasp the display screen corners or press the keyboard deck; the system has handed MIL-STD 810H torture exams for journey hazards reminiscent of shock and vibration. A fingerprint reader within the palm relaxation and a face-recognition webcam provide you with two methods to skip typing passwords with Home windows Good day, although the webcam has no privateness shutter.
Subsequent to the ability connector on the Studio’s proper facet are two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 performance, an SD card slot, and a mini DisplayPort video output (items with skilled GPUs have HDMI as a substitute). The left edge has one USB 3.1 Kind-A port, an audio jack, and a safety lock slot.
Take a Good Look
The 4K OLED contact show is an actual spotlight, with sky-high distinction, inky blacks, and pristine white backgrounds. High quality particulars are ultra-sharp, with no hint of pixelation across the edges of letters, and colours are wealthy and effectively saturated. Viewing angles are huge and brightness is ample (although I used to be by no means tempted to show it down as I’m by the very sunniest screens). Reflections on the contact glass are minimal.
The identical Omen Gaming Hub software program preinstalled on HP’s gaming rigs controls the RGB-backlit keyboard, providing static lighting (simply the WASD keys, say) or multicolor animations and particular results. The keyboard commits the HP cardinal sin of cursor arrow keys organized in a row as a substitute of inverted T, with half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-sized left and proper, however is in any other case spectacular, with devoted Residence, Finish, Web page Up, and Web page Down keys and a handy guide a rough, responsive typing really feel.
Buttonless touchpads aren’t supreme for workstations as a result of many computer-aided design (CAD) and different skilled apps make heavy use of proper and center buttons, however the ZBook’s giant pad glides and faucets easily and takes simply the correct quantity of stress for a quiet click on.
Bang & Olufsen-tuned audio system above the keyboard pump out loud and vivid sound, with only a trace of echo at prime quantity. Bass is surprisingly punchy and it is easy to make out overlapping tracks. HP Audio Management software program gives music, film, and voice presets and an equalizer plus speaker and microphone noise cancellation.
HP piles on the specialised software program, with the Home windows 10 Professional preload (I used to be provided the improve to Win 11 throughout testing) bolstered by every part from HP Simple Clear (briefly freezing the keyboard and touchpad for a rubdown with a disinfecting wipe) to HP QuickDrop for sharing recordsdata with a smartphone. Safety is a precedence, with BIOS safety, assist for the Tile Bluetooth location service to discover a lacking laptop computer, and HP’s sandboxed Certain Click on Safe Browser. HP ZCentral Distant Increase lets a distant system use the ZBook’s highly effective CPU and GPU server-style.
Efficiency Testing: A Workstation/Inventive Conflict
Because the ZBook Studio G8 straddles the workstation and artistic professionals’ worlds, I selected two of every for our benchmark comparisons. The HP ZBook Fury 15 G8 and Dell Precision 5560 are our Editors’ Selection titleholders for full-bore and light-weight cellular workstations respectively, whereas the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Excessive Gen 4 and Acer ConceptD 5 are 16-inch desktop replacements for picture, video, and multimedia specialists. You possibly can see their primary specs within the desk under.
Productiveness Assessments
The primary benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates quite a lot of real-world productiveness and content-creation workflows to measure total efficiency for office-centric duties reminiscent of phrase processing, spreadsheeting, net looking, and videoconferencing. We additionally run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive check to evaluate the load time and throughput of a laptop computer’s storage.
Three benchmarks concentrate on the CPU, utilizing all obtainable cores and threads, to charge a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that firm’s Cinema 4D engine to render a posh scene, whereas Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Professional simulates well-liked apps starting from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine studying. Lastly, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p decision (decrease instances are higher).
Our remaining productiveness check is Puget Programs’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which makes use of the Inventive Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known picture editor to charge a PC’s efficiency for content material creation and multimedia functions. It is an automatic extension that executes quite a lot of normal and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The ThinkPad X1 Excessive narrowly gained our PCMark productiveness race, a tremendous exhibiting for a Core i7 going up towards Core i9s, but it surely was principally a four-way tie, with the Dell virtually making it a five-way tie—and all 5 laptops smashing the 4,000-point mark that signifies very good efficiency for Microsoft Workplace or Google Workspace. The HP predictably excelled in our CPU exams and positioned in the midst of a really quick pack in Photoshop.
Graphics Assessments
We check Home windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Evening Raid (extra modest, appropriate for laptops with built-in graphics) and Time Spy (extra demanding, appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We additionally run two exams from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses each low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like picture rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Automobile Chase exams, rendered offscreen to accommodate completely different show resolutions, train graphics and compute shaders utilizing the OpenGL programming interface and {hardware} tessellation respectively. The extra frames per second (fps), the higher.
The ZBook Studio’s gaming GPU carried the day in our most demanding gaming simulations (3DMark Time Spy and the 2 GFXBench exams), with the ZBook Fury shut behind. The GeForce RTX 3070 will likely be just a little pressured should you attempt gaming at 4K decision, however offers out-of-this-world efficiency at 1080p (although once more, it deserves a faster-than-60Hz show).
Workstation-Particular Assessments
We run two further packages to simulate workstation functions, in addition to Adobe Premiere Professional for which we do not have sufficient outcomes to say. We modified the lineup as a result of the Acer ConceptD 5 is not right here. The primary, Blender, is an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We document the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW automobiles, one utilizing the system’s CPU and one the GPU (decrease instances are higher).
Maybe our most essential workstation check, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms out and in of strong and wireframe fashions utilizing viewsets from well-liked unbiased software program vendor (ISV) apps. We run the 1080p decision exams primarily based on PTC’s Creo CAD platform; Autodesk’s Maya modeling and simulation software program for movie, TV, and video games; and Dassault Systemes’ SolidWorks 3D rendering package deal. The extra frames per second, the higher.
Because the Acer ConceptD 5 did not full our workstation exams, we inserted outcomes from one other 15.6-inch flagship, the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2. The ThinkPad X1 Excessive was an upset winner within the Blender renders whereas the P15 prevailed in SPECviewperf, however the ZBook Studio carried out brilliantly as a light-weight different to the ZBook Fury.
Battery and Show Assessments
We check laptops’ battery life by enjoying a regionally saved 720p video file (the open-source Blender film Tears of MetalTears of Metal) with show brightness at 50% and audio quantity at 100%. We be sure that the battery is absolutely charged earlier than the check, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We additionally use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software program to measure a laptop computer display screen’s colour saturation—what proportion of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 colour gamuts or palettes the show can present—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per sq. meter).
Workstations and artistic desktop replacements spend extra time plugged in than ultraportable laptops for frequent fliers, so these machines’ battery life is sufficient if not spectacular. Competing in a really elite group, the Studio’s OLED display screen delivered dazzling colour constancy and satisfying if not distinctive brightness (the Precision’s and Fury’s panels shone even brighter).
A Inventive Sensation
The HP ZBook Studio G8 comes near unseating the Dell Precision 5560 for our Editors’ Selection award amongst light-weight cellular workstations, however the Dell retains the title for providing double the HP’s most 32GB of reminiscence and 2TB of storage. When you’re content material with these quantities, nonetheless, the ZBook Studio is a improbable weight-saving different to the formidable ZBook Fury.
And should you’re into digital content material as a substitute {of professional} CGI rendering, engineering, or knowledge science, the Studio’s stellar efficiency and beautiful OLED display screen make it a straightforward Editors’ Selection decide as a artistic desktop substitute. The show’s 60Hz refresh will disappoint avid avid gamers, however you possibly can’t have every part.