HP ZBook 14u G6
A brilliant mobile workstation in many ways,w but you should wait for its G7 refresh before you buyb y
SCORE
PRICE £1,119 (£1,343 inc VAT) from store.hp.com
If you think of mobile workstations as huge desktop replacement laptops with bulky chassis and arrays of noisy fans, HP’s ZBook 14u G6 might come as a shock. It looks like a 14in ultraportable. Yes, it’s thicker than your average MacBook clone at 17mm, yet it still contains a Core i7 processor and one of AMD’s professional workstation GPUs.
It’s all encased in a rock-solid aluminium chassis, which HP claims has been tested against military standards for drop and shock-proofing along with harsh environments, and the whole thing weighs in at under 1.5kg. Despite its diminutive size, it still has a full complement of connections, with a single USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port on the left-hand side, plus Gigabit Ethernet, a further USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, HDMI and Thunderbolt 3 on the right. right There’s also a proprietary proprieta connector for HP’s own docking stations and a microSD card slot.
For a compact laptop, the keyboard is excellent, with an effective layout that keeps the Shift, Backspace and Enter keys nice and big and the th navigation keys in a column on the right-hand side. The action is light without feeling lightweight, and it’s easy to reach a decent typing speed in no time. The trackpad isn’t quite so brilliant. It’s comparatively small to cram in two wide buttons at the top, although accuracy is very good. HP has also included a ThinkPad-style “nub” between the G, H and B keys, which is fine if you like that kind of thing.
HP gets extra credit on the security front. Not only do we get a fingerprint sensor beneath the keyboard, but also infrared cameras for Windows Hello face recognition; this worked flawlessly during testing, often before we got a chance to sit down. Throw in HP’s SureStart BIOS protection and baked-in hardware security measures, and this is a mobile workstation you can trust with corporate data.
HP doesn’t make a huge song and dance about the ZBook 14u G6’s screen, but actually it’s great. We measured the maximum brightness at 459cd/m2 and sRGB coverage at 100%. The figures for Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 weren’t far behind, at 99.7% and 98.2%, 8.2%, while the average erage Delta E of 0.5 is extremely xtremely impressive. While the OLED panels on the Gigabyte and Razer laptops have more zing and punch when playing HDR video, the HP is arguably guably better for colour-critical ur-critical work. What’s more, the built-in audio is deeper and richer than the average, meaning some après- work entertainment isn’t out of the question if you’re travelling around.
However, this isn’t HP’s newest workstation laptop, with HP slowly rolling out a new line over the next few months. This is reflected in some of the components. For example, wireless networking is limited to the older 802.11ac standard, so you won’t get the fastest network connection if your home or office is rocking Wi-Fi 6. More importantly, the processor is an eighthgeneration Core i7-8565U, while the GPU is AMD’s Radeon Pro WX3200, which uses the same Polaris 12 chip as the old consumer-level Radeon RX 550.
Does working with yesterday’s technology matter? Not always, but in this case, yes. The systems on test running six-core, 12-thread Core i7 9750H CPUs don’t really suffer from the lack of tenth-generation Intel architecture, but the Core i7-8565U is a four-core, eight-thread part. More seriously, it’s a low-power chip designed for lightweight portable devices, even if its 4.6GHz maximum frequency makes it a better bet than the limited Core i7-1065G7 in the Surface Book 3 ( see overleaf). All the same, the HP is the slowest laptop in this month’s test across our standard benchmarks, our 3D rendering and video-editing benchmarks and our specialist workstation tests – though it doesn’t help that some of these are built around Nvidia’s CUDA GPU compute technology rather than AMD’s favoured OpenCL.
As we said, HP is in the process of refreshing its workstation laptops, and with different hardware inside, a ZBook 14u G7 or equivalent could really fly. We hope that HP doesn’t change too much, however, because, with its excellent screen and superb usability, this is exactly the kind of portable workstation we would be happy to use every day.