HP’s entry-level mobile workstation gets «Tiger Lake-H»
The ZBook Power G8 is poised to be HP’s most affordable mobile workstation when it launches. (It’s expected to ship, and pricing should be announced, in June.) But you’d never know it from the pre-production unit the company sent us. Our preview configuration features a screaming eight-core Intel Core i9-11950H processor (one of Intel’s just-announced «Tiger Lake-H» top-end mobile CPUs), a 4K instead of 1080p resolution display, a hefty 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB solid-state drive. The only less-than-top-of-the-line thing about it is that its RTX A2000 is only the fourth-fastest of the Nvidia’s new professional GPUs. But HP had to save something for the new ZBook Studio G8 and ZBook Fury G8 models higher up the stack and released alongside the Power G8. A Workstation Workhorse The budget-conscious Power notebook joined the Fury (the max-expandability flagship) and Studio (the premium slimline) in HP’s May 11 announcement of three new eighth-generation laptop workstations. A fourth member of the family, the lightweight ZBook Firefly G8, debuted in 14- and 15.6-inch versions a few months ago. (See our review of the Firefly 15 G8.) As the lowest-priced ZBook, the 15.6-inch Power G8 targets engineering and STEM college and graduate students, architects and designers in small offices, and government workers. It’s meant more for 2D design than 3D CGI rendering or virtual-reality creation—the 4GB RTX A2000 is the top available GPU. (Nvidia’s professional graphics silicon has lost the Quadro label in its transition from the company’s «Turing» architecture to the «Ampere» generation first seen in the GeForce RTX 30 Series consumer products.) Similarly, the memory ceiling is 64GB rather than the 128GB of ZBook Fury models, and Xeon processors and error-correction-code (ECC) memory are not available. While you can choose a full-HD touch or non-touch or our unit’s 4K non-touch screen, HP’s billion-color DreamColor displays are reserved for more upscale ZBooks. So is the ZBook Power G8 a letdown, just a generic desktop replacement but with independent software vendor (ISV) certifications? Actually, it’s anything but. It jumps to the top of the affordable workstation ranks, and when equipped as lavishly as our preview unit goes well beyond entry level in features and performance. The Face Is Familiar The ZBook Power G8 has the same aluminum chassis as its G7 predecessor, measuring 0.
