HP ZBook 15 review: This mobile workstation packs the features—and the pounds

When mobile productivity means using CAD software or other computationally intense applications, you need more than a desktop replacement—you need a workstation. HP’s ZBook 15 is fast and it includes all the latest technology, including Thunderbolt connectivity for bandwidth-hungry applications such as digital video editing. But one thing this mobile workstation is not is light.

The ZBook 15 is a handsome and substantial machine, with a magnesium frame, brushed-aluminum surfaces, and a dark gray and black paint scheme. But it’s a stocky 1.2-inches thick and it weighs 6.2 pounds—that’s a good pound heavier than most of the 17-inch desktop replacements we’ve seen. It feels rock solid at rest, and there’s a docking port on its bottom if you’re desk-bound more often than not. But when you do toss it and its two-pound AC adapter in your bag, your shoulder will get a workout.

The HP ZBook 15 is made for work, not play. It’s equipped with a high-end CPU, 16GB of memory, and a discrete workstation-glass GPU.

Buying the configuration we reviewed—HP’s model D5H42AV—will give your wallet a bit of workout, too. It’s currently selling at HP’s website for $3233, but a 20-percent eCoupon brings that down to $2586 (less-expensive, less-powerful configurations are also available). That buys a lot of horsepower, including a fourth-generation Intel Core i7-4800MQ processor (with Intel’s vPro management technology), 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory, and a discrete Nvidia Quadro K610M graphics card—with its own 1GB GDDR5 frame buffer—to supplement the Intel HD Graphics 4600 integrated into its CPU.

HP offers powerful connectivity options with the ZBook 15. Our eval unit was equipped with an HP hs3110 HSPA+ mobile broadband card and an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 wireless 802.11n-plus-Bluetooth adapter. (But if you order a ZBook 15, we’d strongly recommend upgrading to Intel’s Centrino Advanced-N 7260 adapter. It costs just $5 more, and it delivers 802.11ac speed as well as Bluetooth connectivity).

Toshiba’s Qosmio X75 desktop replacement laptop is a little faster than the HP’s ZBook 15, but that machine has a consumer-oriented CPU and GPU. 

Our eval unit came with a 500GB, 7200 rpm hard drive augmented by a 32GB mSATA SSD cache. Slide open a pair of friction locks and you can remove the ZBook 15’s bottom panel to access and upgrade it memory, storage, and wireless modules. The battery which is also removable, lasted 5 hours and 23 minutes in our run-down test. That’s a good long while considering all the silicon its powering.

Our test unit felt quick and responsive during our hands-on evaluation. High-resolution video looked smooth as silk on its 15.6-inch, 1920-by-1080 display, which has matte finish to eliminate reflections in bright environments. The Zbook 15’s speakers sound pretty good, too. There’s not a lot of bass, but they have a solid low-midrange that at least hints that a bass guitar and kick drum are in the mix.

The ZBook 15 turns the tables when it comes to battery life, keeping you productive twice as long while away from an electrical outlet.

Port-wise, the Zbook 15 has everything you could wish for: gigabit ethernet, VGA and full-sized DisplayPort (you’ll need an adapter for HDMI), three USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port, a headset jack, Thunderbolt, and a Kensington lock port. There’s also an impressive array of slots: ExpressCard, SmartCard, and the usual SDHC slot. A fingerprint reader, 720p Webcam, and a DVD burner round things out. The ZBook 15 covers all the bases, but HP gives you the option of deleting components you don’t need, saving you a little carry weight and cash.

The please-everyone philosophy is also in play with the input devices. Along with the aforementioned fingerprint reader comes a touchpad with two sets of buttons: one at the top and one at the bottom. It looks odd, but assures that one set is always within easy reach whether you’re typing or swiping. 

The ZBook 15 has a gorgeous 15.6-inch anti-glare display. 

The ZBook 15’s backlit island-style keyboard is nearly full sized, and there’s a keypad for number crunching. It types decently, although the flat keys make for insecure initial finger placement. If the trackpad doesn’t float your boat, there’s an eraser-head cursor controller amid the B, G and H keys. But I found its rigid plastic cover too slippery to be effective, despite its being concave and covered with bumps.

Our ZBook 15 shipped with the Windows 7 Professional operating system (you can order Windows 8 Pro as a no-cost option). Corporations are migrating to Windows 8 slower than they did to Vista, so this is an important option. A three-year warranty is standard with every ZBook 15, but there are four- and five-year next business-day, on-site plans available for $149 and $259 respectively. Accidental damage and post-warranty coverage is also available.

The ZBook 15 is a solid piece of hardware in every sense of the word.

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Lenovo Vibe Z Smartphone Packs 5.5-inch Screen, LTE and Quad-Core CPU

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Review: Primordial's Medusa packs plenty of power but lacks polish

If you live in a world where you can afford to drop $9556 on an enormous, water-cooled gaming PC with four (four!) discrete graphics cards, I envy you. But if you’re thinking of taking the plunge with Primordial Computers’ latest gaming machine, the Medusa, I’d encourage you to look before you leap.

As befits its name, the Medusa is a monstrous computer, with clear tubing snaking through its interior carrying neon-green-tinted coolant. The CPU and each of the system’s four (four!) GPUs have corrosion-resistant nickel-plated water blocks bolted to them. Apart from the absence of a custom paint job, the Medusa is the epitome of excess, with a strip of LED lights festooned around the interior of its gargantuan Corsair Obsidian Series 900D Super Tower case.

ROBERT CARDINPrimordial erred in failing to create some kind of mechanism to support the four Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan video cards that endow the Medusa with the power to crush gaming benchmarks.

But before I dive any deeper into this review, allow me to explain why the Medusa lacks polish: Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titans are heavy in their own right. Add 10 pounds of nickel-plated cooling blocks distributed among the four, link them together for quad-SLI operation, and you end up with a behemoth. If one card sags, it pulls the other three along with it. And that’s just what happened as the Medusa sat in the PCWorld Labs: The video cards began to droop to such an alarming degree that we wedged a piece of Styrofoam beneath them to keep them from falling out of their PCIe slots. [Editor's note: Primordial Computers contacted us after this review was published to strongly disagree with our opinion that the Titan cards need additional support, and to point out that the machine is covered by a three-year warranty.]

Considering that the Medusa is a custom-built rig, Primordial should have come up with an attractive brace to support the cards and take the strain off of those slots. And that wasn’t the only thing to go south (pun intended) during my evaluation. The Velcro holding an LED light strip inside the case came unglued and fell off right before we packed the machine to send it back to Primordial.

The Series 900D case measures an impressive 25.6 inches tall by 27.2 inches deep. It will fit under a standard 30-inch-tall desk, but just barely. It has room inside for four 5.25-inch devices and up to six hard drives or solid-state drives. Our review unit featured two 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 for blazing-fast speed, supplemented by a 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive for practical storage. Primordial also put a Blu-ray burner inside. A massive radiator, with three large cooling fans, was mounted inside the top of the case, with four more large fans mounted at the bottom. All the wiring was neatly tied away and hidden as well as possible.

ROBERT CARDINPrimordial's Medusa is a true beast of a PC.

Primordial decided to stick with Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture, since that’s the company’s only CPU family with a hexacore processor (specifically, Intel’s Core i7-3930K stably overclocked to an impressive 4.5GHz and paired with 16GB of DDR3/1866 memory). But having more cores doesn’t automatically result in higher performance with every application.

The Medusa crushed the competition in the gaming-oriented portions of our testing suite, because those games and benchmarks could take full advantage of its plentiful CPU and GPU cores. With the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme benchmark set at a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, for instance, the Medusa racked up an impressive score of 12871. Compare that with the results we saw from the Haswell-powered Micro Express MicroFlex 47B, which came to us with just one Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 video card and scored 3393 on that same benchmark.

Switching to real-world game benchmarks, the Medusa delivered an impressive 125.9 frames per second in BioShock Infinite with visual quality set to Ultra and resolution at 2560 by 1600 pixels. The MicroFlex 47B was able to squeeze out just 46.9 frames per second at those settings. We were also able to set up a triple-head array of 30-inch displays to play Dirt Showdown—at resolution of 7680 by 1600 pixels, with maximum quality settings—at a stunning 46.6 frames per second.

Our reference desktop system, an Acer Aspire U all-in-one, was not capable of running BioShock Infinite at these settings. (Click to enlarge chart.)

But games are only one element of our benchmark suite. We include a host of other tests because we expect that you’ll also want to explore creative pursuits (such as editing digital photos and video, and transcoding audio and video files), surf the Web, and generally be productive with your new PC. After all, few people can afford to drop nearly $10K on a new computer just to play.

WorldBench 8.1, which considers performance with creative and productivity apps as well as games, demonstrates a quad-core Haswell can outperform a hexacore Sandy Bridge CPU.

On several of those nongaming benchmarks, the Medusa’s performance was closer to the middle of the pack, because not every app can take full advantage of six CPU cores and four video cards. The Medusa scored very high in GPU-accelerated image editing—no surprise—but it was slightly slower than the MicroFlex 47B at audio editing, and it was only on a par with that machine in our video-editing test. So when all was said and done, the Medusa delivered an impressive Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 385—which means that it was 3.85 times faster than our reference desktop—but the MicroFlex 47B topped it with a Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 421.

If you’re looking for a pure gaming rig, the Medusa delivers what you need. We haven’t tested anything faster. But anyone spending this kind of money on a new PC should expect polish as well as power. And on that front, the Medusa leaves us stone cold.

Editor's note: This story was updated on July 17, 2013 to add the manufacturer's rebuttal to our opinion of the need for additional for the four video cards. We also added the resolution used to test gaming across three monitors, and we corrected the review to indicate that the LED light strip fell off because the adhesive backing on the Velcro attached to the enclosure failed.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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HP HPE Phoenix h9 Series: Small Tower Packs a Punch

Performance desktop PCs come in many different shapes, but they usually only come in one size: really, really big. You have to squeeze the liquid cooling array and the extra fans in there somehow, right? Well, HP's HPE Phoenix h9 Series is a performance machine--with the specs to back that claim up--in a nice little micro-tower designed to fit easily on your desk.

Our review model, priced at $2899, sports an Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor, a whopping 16GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive (along with a 160GB solid-state drive), and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card. HP is currently offering a similarly configured unit with a slightly larger Solid State Drive (256GB), and an AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card at the same price. The HPE Phoenix h9 also features an 802.11n Wi-Fi card, a Blu-ray disc player, some pretty red interior lights, and runs a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.

The slick black-and-gray HPE Phoenix h9 micro-tower measures approximately 16.2 inches long by 6.9 inches wide by just 16.3 inches high. But don't let its diminutive size fool you: In PCWorld's WorldBench 6 benchmarking tests, the HPE Phoenix h9 scored an impressive 186. While not the best score we've seen, it's still a very good mark in the highly competitive Performance Desktop PC category.

The machine also fared well on our graphics tests. On our Far Cry 2 graphics tests, the Phoenix managed a frame rate of 78 frames per second (at highest quality settings and 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution). By comparison, the AVADirect X79 Silent Gaming PC managed 80 fps on the same test.

The HPE Phoenix h9's case combines shades of gray and black on the front and top, with dark gray metal sides. The front of the tower has two optical drive bays (one filled and one empty). A shiny black plastic door slides down to reveal a multiformat card reader and four USB 2.0 ports. A medium-size plastic window on the right side panel gives you a look inside the chassis.

On top of the PC, you'll find basic a Beats Audio-enhanced headphone jack, a microphone jack, and two USB 3.0 ports. The back of the machine houses two USB 2.0 ports (bringing the PC's total to six), two USB 3.0 ports (for a total of four), optical audio-out, gigabit ethernet, and support for 7.1 surround sound. The Nvidia graphics card has two DVI ports and an HDMI-out.

The HPE Phoenix h9's small stature does leave less room for upgrading. Though the interior is surprisingly roomy, a lot of excess metal--starting with a large metal bar in the middle of the PC--obstructs access. Still, you'll find a couple of open PCIe slots (one x1 and one x16), an open 5.25-inch bay, and two open 3.5-inch bays. The wiring is all tied down, and fairly neat.

The HPE Phoenix h9 comes with a wired keyboard and a wired mouse. The keyboard has flat, regular-style keys, volume control buttons, and a special Function key (the 'b' key) for Beats Audio. The mouse is a standard two-button-and-scroll-wheel device.

Its price of $2899 puts the HP HPE Phoenix h9 in the same ballpark as our other top performance machines. HP couples the Phoenix's unlocked Extreme Edition processor with a liquid CPU cooler. That combination helps keep things quiet, and it also leaves room for intrepid users to coax a bit more out of their machine with overclocking.

The Phoenix's main drawbacks are its limited hard drive space (just 500GB), its offering of a Blu-ray player in lieu of a Blu-ray writer, and its lack of Bluetooth. Though HP invites you to upgrade to all of those features on the HP website (at a cost of $50 for a larger hard drive, $80 for the Blu-ray writer, and $20 for Blu-ray), I'd have expected these features to come standard on a nearly-$3000 machine.

If you're looking for a performance machine that won't break your back (but might break your bank account), the Phoenix h9 is worth a look.

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