Almost 44 years have passed since the first laptop appeared. It weighed 22 kilograms then, was not very mobile, but it worked completely autonomously from a battery. Much time has passed since then, and laptop computers have become much lighter, smaller and faster, becoming an integral part of solutions for business and creativity.
Now a separate class of powerful laptops is rapidly developing for creators of multimedia content, including complex animation and graphics, and other developers – such devices are capable of solving any professional tasks. The devices are equipped with leading graphics cards, combining high performance, fast memory and storage, while remaining light, thin and mobile. Recently came to our editorial office HP ZBook Studio G7 – one of the representatives of this category of laptops.
PACKAGING AND DELIVERY
A test prototype of the device came to us for review. The packaging of this sample is made of white thick cardboard. There are no inscriptions or printing, in fact, this is an ordinary placeholder. The box opens like a casket, and we are immediately greeted by a laptop packed in a transparent envelope. In a secret compartment, we found a power supply and a network cable.
APPEARANCE
The body is made of reinforced aluminum. The manufacturer says about 5 times wear resistance, but we could not check it. The edges of the laptop are in a chopped style, have a polished metal texture. It looks very nice and strict.
On the top cover in the middle there is a logo of the series in the form of the letter Z with a mirror texture. The case is not easily soiled. At the bottom of the laptop there is a large strip of perforation of the cooling system, as well as two woofers in the front corners. Also, along the front and back faces, there are plastic legs of different heights. At the back, the leg is slightly larger so that the laptop is slightly raised.
The key advantage of the HP ZBook Studio G7 is mobility and performance. The laptop is 1.75 cm thick, 35.4 cm long, and 23.5 cm wide.The device weighs 1.93 kg, which is a good indicator for a portable workstation that you can take anywhere and work comfortably in anywhere. By the way, despite the dimensions of the 200-watt power supply, here it together with the power cord weighs a little less than 600 grams, which is not heavy for its class.
The user will not have any problems with the connectors in this solution – here is a complete set. On the right side there are: a port for connecting a 200-watt power supply, two SuperSpeed USB Type-C outputs with a data transfer rate of 10 Gb / s, 1 Mini DisplayPort connector and a slot for reading SD 4.0 memory cards, into which a cap is installed to prevent ingress dust. On the left, you will find not only the hole for the cooling system, but also 1 USB 3.1 connector for charging, a 3.5 mm hybrid output for connecting a headset and one Kensington lock connector to protect the device from theft.
SCREEN
The laptop lid is effortlessly opened with one hand. The first thing that catches your eye is the thin bezels of the screen: the side frames are only 5 mm, the top frame is slightly larger due to the built-in camera, and its width here is 7 mm. By the way, the camera supports 720p resolution with noise reduction and is equipped with infrared sensors for Windows Hello – for conferences in ZOOM this is enough, and authorization via face scanning works flawlessly. The HP logo is located on the bottom frame.
The laptop received a screen with a diagonal of 15.5 inches from the Taiwanese manufacturer AU Optronic. 2019 Full HD (1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz) sensor delivers top-notch picture quality. There are no complaints at all about the colors and viewing angles of this IPS matrix: the NTSC color gamut is about 72%, and sRGB is ~ 100%. There is also an anti-reflective coating.
There are microscopic flares on the lower edge of the display, but they are not at all visible when watching movies or in dark moments in games.
The HP ZBook Studio G7 supports the HP Sure View privacy screen, which instantly hides information from prying eyes, while HP Sure Start and HP Sure Sense software solutions protect against malware and software attacks.
FILLING AND FUNCTIONALITY
The perforation of the tweeters is located under the screen on the base of the laptop. Judging by the inscription next to it, the speakers are tuned by experts from the Danish premium manufacturer Bang & Olufsen.
The majority of the base is taken up by the HP Premium Quiet backlit, spill-resistant, recessed keyboard unit. The brightness level of the backlight (2 levels – minimum and maximum) and its off can be controlled using the F9 button. There is no digital block.
The backlight in this solution offers a uniform cool white color and does not dazzle in the dark. The keyboard travel is very pleasant – with excellent elasticity and almost silent, unless, of course, you are not a fan of hammering on the keys with great effort, like on a typewriter. The only disadvantage is the power button. It sits on the keyboard block between the “prt scr” and “delete” buttons and also above the “backspace”, so if you miss the buttons, this is not a good solution. By the way, it is worth mentioning the “F12” button, which can be programmed for different actions (open a web page, an application, and so on) using the preinstalled HP Programmable Key application. Also, the combination with the “F12” key of the “Shift”, “Ctrl” and “Alt” keys is programmed.
A fingerprint scanner is located under the keyboard on the right, which does an excellent job and quickly unlocks the system. The error rate is less than 10%. The touch panel is quite large here, and the working surface is 115 x 64 mm. The surface of the touchpad is made of glass and supports multi-finger gesture control.
The time from pressing the power on and until Windows 10 is fully loaded for this solution takes about 15 seconds, which is quite standard for a system on an NVME M.2 disk. As for the noise indicators, the laptop is not audible at all in normal mode at a room noise level of 25-35 dB. Under heavy loads, powerful cooling starts to work and the device not only gets hot (especially in the keyboard area), but also noisy. Average noise level under load is 45-48 db.
WORK AND TESTS
This laptop comes with a 6-cell Li-ion polymer battery with a capacity of approximately 83,000 mWh. A full charge will last for 10-12 hours of normal use: surfing the Internet, working with documents, watching videos and listening to music. When solving time-consuming tasks, the laptop will last about 2-2.5 hours.
The computer itself is built on the basis of an Intel Core i9-10880HK processor operating at a clock frequency of 2300 MHz. The processor is 8-core, operating in 16 threads, and the maximum frequency is 5100 MHz.
The laptop uses a 32GB dual channel DDR4 SDRAM soldered to the motherboard, clocked at 1600 MHz (with a maximum frequency of 2667 MHz). Our sample uses a KXG60ZNV256G KIOXIA (formerly Toshiba Memory) 256 GB PCI-E 3.0 x4 NVMe M.2 bracket as a drive. The built-in Intel (R) Wi-Fi 6 AX201 160MHz network adapter is responsible for the wireless connection in the laptop. Video adapters here: the Intel UHD Graphics accelerator built into the CPU with 1 GB of video memory and a discrete NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 card in the Max-Q design with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. Intel Comet Point PCH – cAVS and NVIDIA TU106 are used as a sound adapter.
In standard mode, NWinFO64 displays the following temperatures:
- CPU – 50 ° C
- CPU Graphics Cores – 49 ° C
- NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 – 0 ° C
- KXG60ZNV256G KIOXIA – 38 ° C
CrystalDisk Info tests indicate an average solid state drive temperature of 40 ° C. The disk speed in Crystal Disk Mark was 3032 MB / s for reading and 1685 MB / s for writing. The AS SDD test shows more modest speed results – 2485 MB / s for reading and 1470 MB / s for writing.
In graphics tests, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 shows itself ambiguously:
- In the Unigine Superposition Benchmark in Full HD at extreme settings, the system showed from 17 to 26 frames.
- Final Fantasy XV Benchmark showed 5387 points in FULL HD at high settings and Fairly High.
- In the Boundary Ray Tracing benchmark at maximum settings in FHD, the device showed a modest 28 frames per second.
- In the extended Cinebench 20 test, the device’s processor was able to score 2636 points.
- In gaming tests, the ZBook was able to show quite playable results by the standards of consoles in Full HD. So, in the Gears 5 test on the ultra-configuration, the device was able to produce an average frame rate around 35. In Forza Horizon 4, also on the “ultra” with 60 frames locked, the device was able to reach 59 FPS.
- And finally, Shadow of the Tomb Raider showed an average of 37 frames per second on “ultra” with beams and DLSS on.
The hardware of this laptop may well be enough to play at medium-high settings in Full HD, but at maximum load in the tests, the laptop’s CPU heats up to 90-100 degrees, which is not very good, although for the 10th series of processors from Intel this is a normal situation … The GPU was heated to a maximum of 75.
I would also like to mention the sound. As mentioned above, this device uses a sound system of two woofers and two tweeters from Danish acoustic professionals Bang & Olufsen. Honestly, I did not expect such a sound from laptop speakers. I really liked their clear and loud sound, as well as quite good bass. Of course, by the standards of acoustics in the segment. On it, you can safely not only listen to music, watch movies or play with surround sound, but also edit content or set up clear sound.
RESULTS
The HP ZBook Studio G7 is a very powerful horse that attracts at first glance with its sophisticated design and attention to detail. Such a laptop will become an indispensable work tool for a professional, which will always be at hand and will help in the implementation of innovative projects. For gamers, this is an excellent alternative to standard gaming solutions, in a laconic case and with a productive filling. The cost of the device is also very powerful – about 270,000 rubles Is the average market price for a specialized device of this level. The target audience of the product is users and experts who are involved in design, graphics creation, video content production, VR development, 3D modeling and other fields.
Author: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs)
A photo: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs) and Alexey Olkin…
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