HP ZBook 15 G2 Mobile Workstation review: Fast and robust, with a high-res display

Mobile workstations are specialised and expensive computers designed to provide high-end functionality in a relatively compact format. HP introduced the ZBook last year to take over from its popular ProBook and EliteBook series. This year's CES show in Las Vegas saw the introduction of a 14-inch ultrabook-format ZBook. While we wait for that to come through, we're looking at the 15-inch HP ZBook 15 G2 Mobile Workstation, which sells for between £1,313 and £2,854 (ex. VAT) in the UK depending on the configuration.

This notebook's chassis construction is near-faultless -- solid, tough and resilient. It's made from aluminium alloy that's thick enough to ensure almost no flex at all in the lid section, which is a rarity on most notebooks. The hinges feel robust, and the screen pushes back all the way to 180 degrees if needed.

The other side of the solid-build coin is a starting weight of 2.82kg, which means you won't be tossing the ZBook 15 G2 into a carry bag very often. The power supply is a sizeable brick that will add even more to the weight. It's a large notebook too, with a footprint of 38.1cm wide by 25.7cm deep and measuring 3cm thick. The base section tapers markedly at the front in an attempt to given the system a less chunky appearance, but this is unlikely to fool you for long.

HP has given some thought to aesthetics, and the ZBook 15 G2 Mobile Workstation has some visual appeal. The lid section has a two-part construction that helps break up its expanse and serves the dual purpose of placing slightly a slightly rubberised finish on the outer edges -- presumably to help with grip if you need to lift up the system. The colour scheme inside is slate-grey and black.

On the underside, the 8-cell 83Wh battery is released by a single catch, while a second catch releases a large plate that gives tool-free access to key components for maintenance and upgrades. There's a SIM slot underneath the battery for the integrated mobile broadband (HSPA+ or LTE) module.

There are various display options on offer: an LED-backlit eDP screen with anti-glare coating at 1,920 by 1,080 pixels; an LED-backlit IPS eDP with anti-glare and PSR (panel self-refresh) at 1,920 by 1,080; and, as provided on our review unit, an LED-backlit IPS eDP with anti-glare at 3,200 by 1,800.

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Viewing angles were quite good on the matte-finish IPS panel, and the high resolution is good for seeing a lot of information on-screen at once and working on fine detail. Inevitably there are likely to be some issues with the 3,200-by-1,800-pixel (235ppi) resolution. For example scaling up text in a Word document to make it more readable does not also scale up icons and menus: to do that, you'll have to alter the desktop scaling in the control panel's Display dialogue: the default setting is 125 percent.

Our review sample came with the top-end GPU option, Nvidia's Quadro K2100M with 2GB of dedicated GDDR5 video RAM. Other options are the Quadro K610M with 1GB, Quadro K1100M with 2GB and AMD's FirePro W5170M with 2GB.

Audio is delivered via integrated stereo speakers sitting above the keyboard. Volume is loud enough for multimedia presentations delivered to small groups, although the sound quality is nothing to get excited about.

The backlit keyboard, which has a separate number pad, exhibits a small amount of flex, but not enough to worry about. Key travel is minimal, though, and we found the keyboard a bit too light-touch for our liking. The backlight has two intensity settings that you can vary via a Fn key combination.

The touchpad is large and equipped with no fewer than six chunky physical buttons. The three at the top are for use with the pointing stick that sits between the G, H and B keys. The touchpad supports scroll and zoom gestures and is easily disabled by a double tap in the top left corner; when it's not operational a small orange light in that corner reminds you of the fact.

The ZBook 15 G2 has plenty of ports and connectors, although there are still some notable absences. On the back you'll find a USB 3.0 port and an RJ-45 Ethernet connector, along with the power input. The right edge houses the optical drive, a VGA port at the back on this edge, plus a second USB 3.0 port, an audio jack and an SD card slot.

The fan vent occupies about a third of the space on the left-hand side. Behind it is a USB 2.0 port, while in front of the vent is a Thunderbolt 2 port, a DisplayPort 1.2 connector, a third USB 3.0 port (with charging), a smartcard reader and an ExpressCard slot. Those notable absences include eSATA and HDMI.

There is a webcam above the screen, flanked by a pair of microphones. The WLAN and WWAN antennae (two of each) are built into the chassis above the screen.

The status lights are on the tapering front of the chassis and, like all the lights on this notebook, are small and subtle. They're also impossible to see properly unless you lean back to examine them -- we had to lift the notebook up to see the legends to discover what they refer to. Not very user friendly.

Our review sample was delivered with Windows 7 Professional installed. Windows 8.1 is also an option, but there are no touchscreen variants of the ZBook 15 G2.

As you'd expect from a workstation-class notebook, there are high-end processor options on offer. These include four Core i7 variations and one Core i5 choice. In fact, HP offers no fewer than 22 bespoke configurations on its UK website, although our review sample's combination of high-resolution screen and 2.9-3.9GHz Intel Core i7 4910MQ, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SanDisk SSD was not among them.

Storage options include SSDs from 128GB to 512GB and SATA hard drives from 500GB to 1TB.

The Windows Experience Index (WEI) for Windows 7 rates the CPU, memory, graphics and storage subsystems out of 7.9. The ZBook 15 G2 achieved excellent scores across the board, with the 256GB SSD achieving a perfect 7.9:

Processor (calculations per second) 7.7
Memory (RAM) (Memory operations per second) 7.8
Graphics (desktop performance for Windows Aero) 7.1
Gaming Graphics (3D business and gaming graphics performance) 7.1
Primary hard disk (Disk data transfer rate) 7.9

To get a second opinion on CPU and graphics performance, we ran Cinebench R15, which delivered the following scores:

To put these in perspective, the fastest notebook-format system we've tested to date, Eurocom's Panther 5SE, delivered a CPU score of 1,524 and an OpenGL score of 91.67fps (this server-class 12-core Xeon-based system did cost over £5,000 though).

For another look at the storage subsystem, we ran the Atto Disk Benchmark, with the following results:

Transfer rates of 578MB/s write and 757.9MB/s read are very fast indeed, backing up the 'perfect 7.9' recorded by the WEI benchmark.

As far as battery life is concerned, don't get your hopes up. Even just sitting on our desk for a morning doing little more than idling, the 8-cell 83Wh battery ran down from 100 percent to 80 percent. When we followed up with power consumption measurements, we got battery life estimates ranging from just under 6 hours (idling with screen at 25% brightness) to just under 1 hour (running Cinebench with 100% screen brightness). A midpoint between these extremes gives you about 2.5 hours, which isn't awful, as you should expect a notebook like this to be deskbound much of the time. But if you need to travel with the ZBook 15 G2, its brick of an AC adapter will probably have to come too.

Conclusion

HP's ZBook 15 G2 is an impressive mobile workstation, with plenty of available configuration options you can fine-tune to your requirements. The ease of internal access will please IT departments, and the robust build is a real plus point, even if it does make for a heavy notebook. If you do more typing than mouse-work, you might want to try the shallow keyboard first, and it would have been nice to see HDMI and eSATA ports onboard.

Battery life isn't great, but overall this is a well-built system that delivers very good performance for the price.