Review: HP ZBook 8 Gli 14-Inch

The concept behind the portable workstation isn’t a new or particularly challenging one. Load up a laptop with top-tier specs to make it as powerful and future-proof as possible, and never mind if it adds a few ounces and inches to the load. Ostensibly, these machines are designed with heavy grind tasks in mind, such as video editing or CAD work. Money has historically been no object with the mobile workstation. If you needed this kind of juice, it was expected that you (or, more likely, your employer) would have to pay for it.

HP’s new ZBook 8 G1i checks off all those boxes, though it arrived with a curious twist: A deep discount of more than $2,500 off an over-$4,000 asking price, dramatically bringing the price of the machine down to something in line with a traditional laptop. I’m listening.

Photograph: Chris Null

Thick as a Brick

If it weren’t for the extra girth (27 mm) and weight (3.8 pounds), this laptop would easily pass for any old 14-inch system. (It’s also available in a 16-inch version.) It’s anonymous otherwise, and little thought has been given to industrial design here. Standard HP branding is affixed to a metallic gray chassis composed of partially recycled aluminum and plastic. Gently rounded corners do little to conceal the surprisingly wide bezels around the display, and the keyboard and trackpad are perfectly functional if utilitarian in appearance. If you’d been handed this machine on your first day of work in 2014, you’d probably be pretty jazzed.

Mobile workstations are all about the specs, and to that end, the ZBook 8 is rather surprising. While the inclusion of 64 GB of RAM is on point, the choice of CPU—an Intel Core Ultra 7 265H—is odd, landing just about in the middle of the Core Ultra Series 2 power spectrum. At the very least, it seems like an Ultra 9 would be in order. A 1-terabyte SSD was included in my test configuration. The screen size of 2560 x 1600 pixels is fine for a 14-inch (non-touchscreen) device, but shy of anything I’d consider dazzling.

Discrete graphics—common for a workstation—are present, but the system includes an Nvidia GeForce RTX 500 Ada Generation GPU, a niche processor I’ve never actually encountered in the wild. Nearly two years old, the 500 Ada is a stripped-down version of the GeForce RTX 4060. Benchmarks peg its performance as roughly on par with the mobile GeForce GTX 1000 series. Again, it’s a curious choice for the machine.

Photograph: Chris Null

Battery life of 9 hours, 21 minutes on a full-screen YouTube playback test was better than I expected, though perhaps the extra weight of the system has been overly geared toward beefing up the battery capacity.

Port selection is solid, including a full-size HDMI jack, one USB-A port, three USB-C ports (two with Thunderbolt 4 support), and full-size Ethernet. You’ll need to use one of those USB-C ports for the included 140-watt power adapter. The system will charge much more slowly via a lower-wattage adapter, but performance will be throttled to the tune of about 40 percent based on my tests.

Unimpressive Performance

The only reason anyone purchases a mobile workstation is for performance, so naturally I put the laptop through its paces. Given the surprisingly dialed-back specs, I wasn’t surprised by what I found. Benchmark scores were solid but not exemplary, with general and business apps scoring right around the numbers I got with the Asus ProArt P16, one of my favorite laptops of the year.

Graphics performance was another story. Compared to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090-powered ProArt, the G1i earned scores between half and a third of what the ProArt mustered. Similarly, on AI tasks, the G1i was no barnburner; it definitely bested machines with integrated graphics at these tasks, but it fell well behind anything with a more modern GPU. It’s particularly worth noting that the system isn’t powerful enough to qualify as a Copilot+ PC.

The overall performance picture is fine. The G1i doesn’t ever feel sluggish, and you can even play games and render video with perfectly reasonable results, but the experience never feels like anything that merits putting the “workstation” label on it.

Photograph: Chris Null

The remainder of the user experience lands roughly in the middle of the road. The keyboard has a nice feel and responsiveness, with half-height arrow keys that are at least well-positioned and easy to find without having to search for them. Also, I like the smaller trackpad, which is set into a slight depression and delineates its borders well, and the screen is bright without being blown out. Minimal effort seems to have been applied to the audio experience, though at least the speakers are loud enough to overpower the fairly noisy cooling fan.

All told, this is a fair enough system on most fronts, but let’s get back to that big sell around the price. At the promised price of $1,609, the G1i looks like a decent deal. The problem is that I could never actually find the system for sale with that price, as the link HP provided led not to my configured machine but rather to a 16-inch version of the laptop with absolutely stripped-down, not-workstationy-at-all specs (a Core Ultra 5, integrated graphics, and half the RAM and SSD size). Even the $1,609 sale price on that unit had jumped to $2,069 by the time I completed this review.

Eventually, I found my specific system, as configured by HP, available for $2,739. That’s not quite in the realm of the aforementioned $4,000 ProArt or a device like the $3,500 MacBook Pro M4 Pro, but the price is definitely getting close. Unfortunately, performance is not.