The concept behind the portable workstation is not new or particularly difficult. Load up a laptop with top-notch specs to make it as powerful and future-proof as possible, and it doesn’t matter if it adds a few ounces and inches to the load. Apparently, these machines are designed for heavy-duty tasks, such as video editing or CAD work. Historically, money hasn’t been an issue with mobile workstations. If you needed this type of juice, it was expected that you (or, more likely, your employer) would have to pay for it.
HP’s new ZBook 8 G1i checks all of those boxes, although it arrived with a curious twist: a significant discount of more than $2,500 off an asking price of more than $4,000, significantly bringing the machine’s price down to a level comparable to that of a traditional laptop. I listen.
Photography: Chris Null
Thick as a brick
Without the extra girth (27mm) and weight (3.8 pounds), this laptop would easily pass for any older 14-inch system. (It’s also available in a 16-inch version.) Otherwise, it’s anonymous and little attention has been paid to industrial design here. The standard HP branding is affixed to a metallic gray chassis made from partially recycled aluminum and plastic. The slightly rounded corners don’t hide the surprisingly wide bezels around the screen, and the keyboard and trackpad are perfectly functional despite being utilitarian in appearance. If you’d been handed this machine on your first day on the job in 2014, you’d probably be pretty excited.
Mobile workstations are all about specs, and to that end, the ZBook 8 is rather surprising. While the inclusion of 64GB of RAM is relevant, the choice of processor – an Intel Core Ultra 7 265H – is odd, falling roughly in the middle of the Core Ultra Series 2’s power spectrum. At the very least, it seems like an Ultra 9 would be in order. A 1 terabyte SSD was included in my test configuration. The screen size of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels is fine for a 14-inch device (without a touchscreen), but still far from anything I would consider dazzling.
Discrete graphics, common for a workstation, are present, but the system includes an Nvidia GeForce RTX 500 Ada Generation GPU, a niche processor I’ve never encountered in the wild. Nearly two years old, the 500 Ada is a stripped-down version of the GeForce RTX 4060. Benchmarks rate its performance about on par with the mobile GeForce GTX 1000 series. Again, it’s a curious choice for the machine.
