HP ZBook 14 Review: Mobile Workstation Meets Ultrabook
by Jarred Walton on June 20, 2014 2:30 AM ESTHP ZBook 14: Workstation Performance
Given this is a mobile workstation by virtue of the FirePro M4100 GPU, that's arguably going to be the biggest reason to consider forking out the money for the ZBook 14, so let's just jump straight to the results of our workstation benchmarks. For testing, I ran SPECviewperf 11 and 12, but 12 is so new that it's a bit finicky and routinely had individual tests that would hang (or at least not return a score), so I'm sticking with the older version – plus we have a few other mobile workstations that we've tested with SPECviewperf 11 in the past. I also ran the SPECapc Lightwave 9.6 test. For reference, I ran the same tests on a couple of recent (and one upcoming) consumer grade laptops: the Dell XPS 15 (GT 750M), MSI GE60 (GTX 860M), and MSI GT70 (GTX 880M). Considering the potential difference in normal graphics performance – the GTX 880M in particular should be far more powerful than the M4100 – the performance results in professional applications were still surprising.
It's been a while since we've reviewed any mobile workstations – the last one was almost 18 months ago, when Dustin reviewed HP's EliteBook 8570w – so we don't have a lot of recent offerings in our charts. However, workstation hardware tends to stick around a lot longer and if nothing else it will be interesting to see where the new M4100 rates compared to the older M4000 from the 8570w. Also included in the charts are a few desktop workstations (results are in red) and the consumer laptops (results in black).
There are clearly applications where having a workstation class GPU can make a tremendous difference; conversely, in some cases the GPU doesn't matter much at all and the CPU takes precedence. Given the ZBook 14 has to get by with a dual-core ULV processor, it can hope to compete with quad-core processors in the latter class of benchmark, but for those tests that rely on OpenGL acceleration it can often make a noticeable difference. I don't generally use any of these "professional" applications, so scores in Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks, Siemens Teamcenter and NX, etc. don't really matter to me. If you know enough to care about these scores, however, you can see that there are cases where the ZBook 14 is able to come close to the performance of even desktop workstations; not surprisingly, those are the same benchmarks where consumer level GPUs simply fail to impress, regardless of how fast they might be for other benchmarks (which we'll get to in a moment).
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Zoomer - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
Win 8 is actually a step back as the start screen forces your attention away from what you were doing.CharonPDX - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
Find me a large enterprise that spends $2000 on mobile workstations that has switched to Win 8.x. (Other than Microsoft.).
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Still looking? Yeah, that's why Windows 7.
retrospooty - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
Windows 8? This is marketed toward business users. No businesses use Win 8 and they wont until the UI is fixed.jabber - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
MS knew most businesses wouldn't switch to 8 anyway as it's not in the Corporate Refresh cycle set all the way back in 1999 by Y2K when most moved to lovely fresh NT4 machines.Windows 9/10 will fit in far better. However as general business computing requirements have dropped drastically over the past 8 years I can see a lot of corporates holding out till 10.
jeffkibuule - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
Let's also be honest here, businesses would still be installing machines with Windows XP if they could. Popular opinion != correct opinion.Zhongrui - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
To be frank I love Windows 7 much much better than Windows 8.1U1. If the LCD is not a touch screen, it is really not necessary to use Windows 8.1U1, which is totally ugly and puts too much junk on your HDD/SSD.edwpang - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
Totally opposite to your claim, Windows 8/8.1 can clear up windows update and software installations better than windows 7. It added more options to clean up the winSxS folder in the DISM.exe command. For example:***
Using the /ResetBase switch with the /StartComponentCleanup parameter of DISM.exe on a running version of Windows 8.1 removes all superseded versions of every component in the component store.
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Also with Win8.1U1, it has a new feature WIMBoot to save disk space further. Just google for WIMBoot to see for yourself.
peterfares - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
That /ResetBase option is AWESOME. It's also automatically run every month or two I believe.It has kept my Windows 8.1 install size only slightly larger than when I originally installed it. Windows 7 SP1 when first installed is pretty small but after applying all the updates (and there have been a LOT since SP1) it becomes pretty huge, much larger than Windows 8.1
extide - Saturday, June 21, 2014 - link
There is actually an identical tool for windows 7. It doesnt come with it, but you can find it, I believe it is called MS Deep Clean.edwpang - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
Windows 8.1 run the /StartComponentCleanup automatically without /ResetBase according to MS technet.