Reviews

HP Zbook 15 G2 review

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

20 May 2015

In Geekbench 3 the HP was even further ahead; its result of 13,995 trounced the Dell and Apple's scores of 11,422 and 12,873.

The HP boasts discrete graphics, too. Nvidia's Quadro K2100M is a mid-range part that has ISV certification, which means it'll work with most professional graphical applications. It's got enough power to beat the integrated Intel graphics inside the Dell XPS and 13in Macbook Pro, and it's able to beat the XPS 15. Only the larger Macbook and its Intel Iris Pro chipset proved a little quicker.

There's a big gulf between Macbooks and Windows machines when it comes to battery life, and nothing about the ZBook changed the status quo. In our standard battery test the HP lasted for three hours and 35 minutes only seven minutes short of the Dell XPS 15, but miles behind the eight hour lifespan of the Macbook Pro 15. If you want a machine to last a full day away from the mains, look elsewhere.

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Heat and noise results also showed the downside of such grunt. The processor topped out at 99C when its cores were stress-tested, and at this point the chip couldn't use Turbo Boost instead, it was reigned in to its stock speed.

The graphics core kept a little cooler and, thankfully, the noise wasn't too bad. The Macbook and XPS machines are all a little quieter, but the HP's modest whine won't prove distracting and, with less demanding work, it was virtually silent.

The storage plays its part in this machine's impressive performance. The 256GB SanDisk A110 SSD hit sequential read and write speeds of 692MB/s and 411MB/s better than the Dell, but not quite as swift as the Macbook's PCI-based SSD.