HP Zbook 15 G2 review

Mighty processing power and a huge price – is this workstation worth almost £3,000?

IT Pro Verdict

It’s got great power, decent ergonomics and versatile design, but the HP loses out to its rival thanks to a high price, middling screen quality and its sheer size.

Pros

  • +

    High-end processor; Discrete ISV-certified graphics; Numerous ports and a well-made exterior; Customisable specification

Cons

  • -

    Bland looks; Heavier and thicker than rivals; Middling screen quality

Workstation laptops have a reputation for being ugly and bulky but, with Ultrabooks and Apple notebooks all the rage, that's just not good enough anymore these machines now have to be powerful and truly portable.

HP's latest ZBook, the second generation 15.6in model, certainly ticks the right boxes when it comes to power. It's anchored by an Intel Core i7-4910MQ, which is one of Intel's most potent mobile processors.

Specification and Performance

That chip certainly has the grunt to handle high-end work applications. It's got four cores with Hyper-Threading, so it can address eight concurrent tasks, and it runs at a stock speed of 2.9GHz that rises to 3.9GHz with Turbo Boost. That's impressive, and that's not all it's also paired with 16GB of memory.

It's a potent combination that romped through our application benchmarks to a score of 1.09, with individual Explorer and video rendering results of 1.27 and 1.26 indicating this machine's multi-tasking and media prowess. That's far ahead of some rivals: the latest 13in Macbook Pro could only score 0.78.

It streaks ahead of other competitors in synthetic benchmarks, too. The HP scored 5,849 in PCMark 7, while the Dell XPS 15 and Macbook Pro 15in couldn't get beyond 5,800 points.

Mike Jennings

 

Mike Jennings has worked as a technology journalist for more than a decade and has been fascinated by computers since childhood, when he spent far too long building terrible websites. He loves desktop PCs, components, laptops and anything to do with the latest hardware.

Mike worked as a staff writer at PC Pro magazine in London for seven years, and during that time wrote for a variety of other tech titles, including Custom PC, Micro Mart and Computer Shopper. Since 2013, he’s been a freelance tech writer, and writes regularly for titles like Wired, TechRadar, Stuff, TechSpot, IT Pro, TrustedReviews and TechAdvisor. He still loves tech and covers everything from the latest business hardware and software to high-end gaming gear, and you’ll find him on plenty of sites writing reviews, features and guides on a vast range of topics.

You can email Mike at mike@mike-jennings.net, or find him on Twitter at @mikejjennings