[ad_1]
HP’s ZBook mobile workstation line runs the gamut, offering a variety of professional laptops for users that need serious power. The range includes the über-capable ZBook Fury and ZBook Power series, alongside thin-and-light ZBook Firefly systems offering greater portability. But the HP ZBook Studio 16 G10 (starts at $3,201; $8,915 as tested) sits right in the middle, offering a spectacular system for mobile media creators. Its 16-inch size hits the sweet spot between grab-and-go 14-inch and bulky 17-inch models, and the combination of Intel Core i9 power and an Nvidia RTX 4000 “Ada” GPU makes short work of demanding apps. But a couple of shortcomings keep the Studio G10 from joining the Dell Precision 5680 and the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 as an Editors’ Choice award-winner. Configurations: Customizing the ZBook Studio 16 G10Like all ZBooks, the Studio 16 G10 offers a wide variety of processors, graphics cards, memory and storage options, and more. The cheapest customizable model sells for $3,201 (though HP’s website offers limited-time sale configurations as low as $2,129). It combines a basic Intel Core i5 processor, 16GB of memory, and Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, the last frankly disqualifying it as a true workstation in our eyes.
Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we test.
Our $8,915 review unit was near the other extreme, with a Core i9-13900H CPU (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads); Nvidia’s RTX 4000 “Ada” professional GPU with 12GB of VRAM; a 2TB NVMe solid-state drive; the max 64GB of memory; and HP’s 3,840-by-2,400-pixel DreamColor non-touch display. Your configuration options include an assortment of Intel Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 processors, SSDs up to 4TB, and a choice of Nvidia’s independent software vendor (ISV)-certified professional GPUs or consumer GeForce RTX 4070 or 4080 silicon for game creators (or just players).
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The DreamColor display is famous for use with color-critical professional applications and boasts a speedy 120Hz refresh rate. You can also opt for an OLED touch screen with the same high resolution or save a few bucks with a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel base panel.
The Design: A Resilient and Durable ZBookThe HP is built for both the office and the road, with a sturdy chassis made of CNC-milled aluminum. It’s surprisingly light, weighing just 3.8 pounds, and measures 0.78 by 14.2 by 9.2 inches. The all-metal design provides more than just a premium look and feel; it helps the ZBook meet MIL-STD 810H standards against travel hazards such as shock, vibration, extreme high and low temperatures, humidity, sand and dust, and high altitude. It’s not as heavily armored as a fully rugged laptop, but it’s tough enough to take on a business trip or use for media work when shooting on location.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
While some mobile workstations emphasize CPU power for jobs like machine learning or data science (and the Core i9-13900H certainly qualifies), our Studio’s factory-calibrated HP DreamColor display tilts it toward media-creation tasks such as color-grading video footage, designing professional graphics, or CGI rendering. Surrounded by pleasingly thin bezels, the 16-inch panel offers ample brightness and vivid, rich color; in our tests it fell just 1% short of its advertised 100% DCI-P3 color coverage and actually exceeded its claimed 400-nit brightness.The keyboard looks bog-standard at first glance, with full-size tile keys, 1.5mm of travel, and no numeric keypad. In actual use, it felt pretty good to type on, and I was able to bang out plenty of typo-free text during my time with the ZBook. The keys don’t have the travel and tactile response of a mechanical desktop keyboard, but they’re perfectly comfortable and precise.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
But HP offers two keyboard extras that are worth noting. The first, called Z Light Space, unlocks a hidden feature—gaming-laptop-style per-key RGB backlighting, which you can customize for different apps. This means you can highlight your most-used shortcut keys in tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Premiere, AutoCAD, or SolidWorks. There are even preloaded color maps for popular apps and use cases if you don’t have the time to customize your own. I’m a sucker for keyboard customization and glad to see something like this offered on what should be one of the most capable productivity machines around.Second, when you order or configure your ZBook Studio G10 you can opt for what HP calls the Z Command Keyboard—a Mac-like layout that should make it much easier for Apple users to make the switch to a new HP notebook.The buttonless touchpad may not have that sort of customization, but its large size and smooth surface offer plenty of room for gestures and basic interaction. The clickable pad manages to offer a nice tactile click without being loud.My most serious complaint about the Studio’s design is HP’s decision to offer only a lowball 720p webcam. Today’s workplace is filled with virtual meetings where face-to-face time takes a back seat to video chats across time zones. Especially since HP has led the way in adding 5-megapixel webcams to its Spectre and other consumer laptops, it’s a severe disappointment that this ZBook doesn’t have at least a 1080p camera. The webcam does, however, have IR face recognition for Windows Hello, giving you an alternative for secure logins if you don’t want to use the provided fingerprint sensor.The laptop boasts a quad-speaker setup, with Bang & Olufsen tuning for the two tweeters and dual woofers built into the chassis. No laptop’s audio can compete with a desktop speaker system, but the volume and sound quality of the ZBook Studio 16 are good enough for media work if you leave your headphones at home.Connectivity: Most of the Ports You WantIf you’re worried about connectivity, you can relax, or mostly relax. On the laptop’s left side are a power connector, two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, and an audio jack. On the right, you’ll find a third Thunderbolt 4 port, a microSD card slot, and a USB 3.2 Type-A port along with a security lock slot. Wireless connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
That’s a pretty good selection of ports—provided you don’t need to plug in an HDMI monitor or make a wired Ethernet connection. If you do, then you’ll want to bring along a USB-C dock with the connections you need. With that complaint on record, I was happy glad to see an old-fashioned barrel connector for the power supply. USB-C can’t handle the higher wattage that a machine like this needs, but that comes with the silver lining of not having to sacrifice one of the Thunderbolt ports for powering the laptop.Internal Components: What’s in a Workstation?Finally, it’s worth remembering that the HP ZBook Studio 16 G10 is a workstation first and a business laptop second. While we’ve discussed some of the hardware inside that makes this classification possible, a few more details are worth pointing out.The first is that the Studio’s internals are far more involved than those of your average desktop replacement. The thermal demands of powerful CPUs and GPUs demand extra cooling, which the ZBook provides in the form of dual fans and large air vents on the back of the machine. HP uses metal instead of plastic fans for the sake of a stronger, thinner fan-blade design, and also borrows one of the neatest cooling features seen in recent gaming rigs—vapor-chamber cooling that uses the evaporation and condensation of fluid to dissipate heat.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
On top of the hardware, as mentioned, mobile workstations carry independent software vendor (ISV) certification, meaning they’re optimized for serious professional software. For the performance-minded, this means that each configuration meets certain requirements and avoids some of the more common bottlenecks to smooth work under heavy loads. More crucially, it means you can be sure a ZBook will run the demanding apps unique to industry users.Finally, our ZBook Studio 16 G10 is one of HP’s Wolf Pro Security Editions, meaning it comes with the company’s strongest security features, including three years of coverage by HP Wolf endpoint security. This gives IT managers more tools for managing and securing both the laptop and the data on it, as well as on-device features like CPU isolation, malware prevention, and a tamper-lock feature that signals IT if the machine has been tampered with (say, if a drive is removed in hopes of swiping sensitive data, for example).Power Unleashed: Testing the HP ZBook Studio 16 G10To see how well the ZBook Studio 16 measured up, we compared it to some of the best mobile workstations we’ve reviewed. The abovementioned Dell Precision 5680 has similar specs, including the same processor. Others, like the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 and 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M3 Max), are simply the finest notebook workstations we’ve tested, making them perfect yardsticks for measuring any newcomer in the category. Finally, we ran the numbers of HP’s previous-generation ZBook Studio G9, giving us a clear picture of what performance improvements the latest hardware brings.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
These results drive home the Studio G10’s position in the workstation world, demonstrating capable performance for all sorts of applications if not quite posting category-leading results. Like its competitors, the new HP annihilates simple benchmarks like PCMark 10 (any high-end workstation is grotesque overkill for apps like Word and PowerPoint), but—notably due to having Nvidia’s second-fastest instead of fastest professional mobile GPU—doesn’t win any gold medals, especially when up against Apple’s formidable M3 Max.Graphics TestsFor non-gaming laptops, we run a quartet of synthetic graphics benchmarks. Two are DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for rigs with discrete GPUs). Two more come from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance. These tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.
Interestingly, the ZBook Studio G10 pushed ahead of most competitors in graphics performance, thanks to its capable Nvidia RTX 4000 “Ada” enterprise GPU inside. If number-crunching is a lower priority for you than rendering eye candy, the HP Studio may be the better workstation to get.Workstation-Specific Tests We run two more benchmarks to simulate workstation workloads. The first, Blender, is an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system’s CPU and one the GPU (lower times are better).Our most important workstation test, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets from popular independent software vendor (ISV) apps. We run the 1080p tests based on PTC’s Creo CAD platform; Autodesk’s Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games; and Dassault Systemes’ SolidWorks 3D rendering package. The more frames per second, the better.
It’s not very surprising that the combination of Intel’s Core i9-13900H processor and Nvidia’s RTX 4000 delivers excellent scores and speeds in the sort of high-octane grunt work that workstations are meant for. In Blender, for example, the Studio G10 showed sizzling render speed in both subtests. We were more surprised by how well the G10 performed in SPECviewperf, handily outperforming the ThinkPad P16 in Creo and topping its predecessor by 99fps in SolidWorks as well as clinching the top score in Maya.Battery and Display Tests We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
With a battery life of just under six and a half hours, the ZBook Studio 16 G10 wasn’t far off the mark set by competitors like the Lenovo and close to the less powerful Studio G9. But battery life is an area where competitors have made great strides: The Dell showed unplugged stamina worthy of an ultraportable (more than 13 hours), while the MacBook Pro lasted for almost 28. Obviously our video rundown isn’t one of the heavy workloads these machines are made for, but it does show how far some laptops have come in terms of efficiency.Even in an age of OLED displays, we’ve called HP’s DreamColor screens as good as laptop panels get, and the Studio G10 doesn’t change our mind. The factory-calibrated 4K panel looks great right out of the box, with vivid and accurate color reproduction.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Verdict: Power, Portability, and PrecisionWhen it comes to mobile workstations, power is almost always the focus. And while HP’s ZBook Studio 16 G10 definitely delivers power, we’re even more impressed by its versatility. The durable chassis and built-in security are welcome additions for any workstation, and we love features like the customizable keyboard backlighting.We can’t ignore some flaws such as the low-res webcam and the absence of HDMI and Ethernet ports, but the laptop still manages to be relatively portable without sacrificing raw power and performance. It stings even more to see these problems on such an expensive system. If you need a highly capable laptop for rendering or media work—and can swing the elite price—it’s a worthwhile investment.
Pros
Robust performance
Scads of configuration choices, from mild to massively powerful
Choice of professional or gaming GPUs
Sleek design with MIL-STD durability
Stunning DreamColor display is perfect for pros
Customizable keyboard
View
More
The Bottom Line
HP’s ZBook Studio 16 G10 impresses with a robust build, powerful config options, and a gorgeous screen. It’s a versatile choice for pro workstation grunt to go, but brief battery life, a ho-hum webcam, missing ports, and a sky-high price temper our enthusiasm.
Like What You’re Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
[ad_2]
