HP ZBook Studio G8 Review

What do you get when you cross a mobile workstation with a gaming laptop? The HP ZBook Studio G8 (starts at $1,894; $4,488 as tested) is often ordered with one of Nvidia's formerly-known-as-Quadro professional GPUs, but is also available with Nvidia gaming graphics like our test unit's GeForce RTX 3070, and its keyboard has RGB rainbow backlighting that would look at home on a deluxe gaming rig. High-frame-rate gamers won't like our Studio's 15.6-inch OLED display, which is stunning but limited to a vanilla 60Hz refresh rate, but the system adds up to a prize platform for 4K video editors or other digital content creators.

A Unique Part of the Lineup

We've reviewed most of HP's ZBook laptop workstations, from the heavyweight flagship ZBook Fury 15 G8 to the ZBook Power G8 that targets engineering students and other budget-minded users. Last year's ZBook Studios had only Nvidia Quadro GPUs, with the GeForce version dubbed ZBook Create G7; the eighth generation applies the Studio name to both.

At 3.96 pounds, the ZBook Studio G8 is almost as thin and light as the 3.74-pound ZBook Firefly 15 G8, which is billed as HP's trimmest mobile workstation, but considerably more powerful. The $1,894 base model has an Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a 1080p IPS screen backed by Nvidia T1200 graphics.

For $4,488, our review unit raises the stakes. It's got an eight-core, 2.6GHz (5.0GHz turbo) Core i9-11950H processor, 32GB of memory, a 2TB NVMe SSD, the 8GB GeForce RTX 3070, and an OLED touch screen with 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) resolution. Another screen choice is the non-touch 4K DreamColor display we raved about in our Fury G8 review, whose 120Hz refresh rate makes it the best pick for gamers.

The aluminum-clad HP measures 0.69 by 13.9 by 9.2 inches (HWD), making it minutely bigger but a bit lighter than the Dell Precision 5560 (0.73 by 13.6 by 9.1 inches, 4.3 pounds). The top and side screen bezels are thin but there's no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck; the system has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests for travel hazards such as shock and vibration. A fingerprint reader in the palm rest and a face-recognition webcam give you two ways to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello, though the webcam has no privacy shutter.

Next to the power connector on the Studio's right side are two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 functionality, an SD card slot, and a mini DisplayPort video output (units with professional GPUs have HDMI instead). The left edge has one USB 3.1 Type-A port, an audio jack, and a security lock slot.

Take a Good Look

The 4K OLED touch display is a real highlight, with sky-high contrast, inky blacks, and pristine white backgrounds. Fine details are ultra-sharp, with no trace of pixelation around the edges of letters, and colors are rich and well saturated. Viewing angles are wide and brightness is ample (though I was never tempted to turn it down as I am by the very sunniest screens). Reflections on the touch glass are minimal.

The same Omen Gaming Hub software preinstalled on HP's gaming rigs controls the RGB-backlit keyboard, offering static lighting (just the WASD keys, say) or multicolor animations and special effects. The keyboard commits the HP cardinal sin of cursor arrow keys arranged in a row instead of inverted T, with half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-sized left and right, but is otherwise impressive, with dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys and a snappy, responsive typing feel.

Buttonless touchpads aren't ideal for workstations because many computer-aided design (CAD) and other professional apps make heavy use of right and middle buttons, but the ZBook's large pad glides and taps smoothly and takes just the right amount of pressure for a quiet click.

Bang & Olufsen-tuned speakers above the keyboard pump out loud and vivid sound, with just a hint of echo at top volume. Bass is surprisingly punchy and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. HP Audio Control software offers music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer plus speaker and microphone noise cancellation.

HP piles on the specialized software, with the Windows 10 Pro preload (I was offered the upgrade to Win 11 during testing) bolstered by everything from HP Easy Clean (temporarily freezing the keyboard and touchpad for a rubdown with a disinfecting wipe) to HP QuickDrop for sharing files with a smartphone. Security is a priority, with BIOS protection, support for the Tile Bluetooth location service to find a missing laptop, and HP's sandboxed Sure Click Secure Browser. HP ZCentral Remote Boost lets a distant system use the ZBook's powerful CPU and GPU server-style.

Performance Testing: A Workstation/Creative Clash

Since the ZBook Studio G8 straddles the workstation and creative pros' worlds, I chose two of each for our benchmark comparisons. The HP ZBook Fury 15 G8 and Dell Precision 5560 are our Editors' Choice titleholders for full-bore and lightweight mobile workstations respectively, while the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 and Acer ConceptD 5 are 16-inch desktop replacements for image, video, and multimedia specialists. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three 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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro 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).

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, 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.

The ThinkPad X1 Extreme narrowly won our PCMark productivity race, a fine showing for a Core i7 going up against Core i9s, but it was basically a four-way tie, with the Dell almost making it a five-way tie—and all five laptops smashing the 4,000-point mark that indicates superb performance for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. The HP predictably excelled in our CPU tests and placed in the middle of a very fast pack in Photoshop.

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The ZBook Studio's gaming GPU carried the day in our most demanding gaming simulations (3DMark Time Spy and the two GFXBench tests), with the ZBook Fury close behind. The GeForce RTX 3070 will be a little stressed if you try gaming at 4K resolution, but provides out-of-this-world performance at 1080p (though again, it deserves a faster-than-60Hz display).

We run two additional programs to simulate workstation applications, as well as Adobe Premiere Pro for which we don't have enough results to mention. We changed the lineup because the Acer ConceptD 5 isn't here. 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).

Perhaps 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 resolution 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.

Since the Acer ConceptD 5 didn't complete our workstation tests, we inserted results from another 15.6-inch flagship, the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2. The ThinkPad X1 Extreme was an upset winner in the Blender renders while the P15 prevailed in SPECviewperf, but the ZBook Studio performed brilliantly as a lightweight alternative to the ZBook Fury.

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).

Workstations and creative desktop replacements spend more time plugged in than ultraportable laptops for frequent fliers, so these machines' battery life is adequate if not impressive. Competing in a very elite group, the Studio's OLED screen delivered dazzling color fidelity and satisfying if not exceptional brightness (the Precision's and Fury's panels shone even brighter).

A Creative Sensation

The HP ZBook Studio G8 comes close to unseating the Dell Precision 5560 for our Editors' Choice award among lightweight mobile workstations, but the Dell retains the title for offering double the HP's maximum 32GB of memory and 2TB of storage. If you're content with those amounts, however, the ZBook Studio is a fantastic weight-saving alternative to the formidable ZBook Fury.

And if you're into digital content instead of professional CGI rendering, engineering, or data science, the Studio's stellar performance and gorgeous OLED screen make it an easy Editors' Choice pick as a creative desktop replacement. The display's 60Hz refresh will disappoint avid gamers, but you can't have everything.

HP's ZBook Studio G8 outshines the ZBook Firefly and challenges the ZBook Fury as the top all-rounder in the company's workstation lineup.

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