HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 workstation review: MacBook Pro alternative for gamers

[Worgarthe]

No he is playing "Celeste" at 1080p with full effects for 9.5 hours!
Check his video at 34min (I can't post the link).

Ok, thank you for the info with the timestamp basically, I know the vid is long so that's helpful and I appreciate it. I will check in a moment.

You can, btw, post links, just delete the https part, so post like this pretty much: youtube.com/watch?v=yiHr8CQRZi4

Edit: So the game runs at 30 fps but the total system power is 7.6 to 8.4W which is completely insane and way too impressive 😳

[RobinLight]

I agree. You can still roughly calculate the speed (works for "dense" models like the LLama-70B):

Code Select Expand

tokens per second = bandwidth  / filesize
                  = 121177 MB/s / 39600 MB (Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf)
                  = 3.06

You can't use the AIDA memory benchmark result for this formula because it's just using a classic CPU related workload with it's own intrinsic bottlenecks. I am sure, the iGPU can achieve much more throughput near the theoretical limit of the memory bus.
And of course, this formula works only for a single user inferencing scenarios. I guess, local agent based systems are going to be more important in the future so there are multiple requests in parallel where the memory bandwidth is to some degree less important.

[tokens per second]

"Dual-Channel" seems wrong even on HP's datasheet and quickspecs.  Ignoring that LPDDR5 channels are 32bit, the Ryzen AI Max 256-bit memory bus should have 4 64bit channels ("Quad-channel").  AMD's specs do not list a channel number.  Memory channels are not mentioned on this site's review nor in Apple's specifications (though some sites say the MacBookPro M4 Max 128GB has 8 channels).  For accuracy maybe the channels should be omitted here as in the MacBookPro review.  (Or make it "multi-channel" if you need to contrast with "single-channel".)

Good point, it could be 8*32-bit, instead of 4*64-bit like in normal desktop systems or both. But it leads to the same following bandwidth speed calculation:

You can't use the AIDA memory benchmark result for this formula ..

Right, ty for making me looking it up again: Strix Halo is a 256-bit chip, so its theoretical bandwidth is:

Code Select Expand

= 8000 * 64 (bit per channel) * 4 (channels) (= the 256-bit memory bus width) / 8 (bit to Byte) / 1000 (MB to GB).
= 256 GB/sThe practical benchmark value is often 70-80% of the theoretical value, so 256 GB/s * 0.75 = ~192 GB/s.
Let's recalc:

Code Select Expand

tokens per second = 192 GB/s / 39.6 GB (Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf)
                  = 4.85


[Dont_Look_Up]

Edit: So the game runs at 30 fps but the total system power is 7.6 to 8.4W which is completely insane and way too impressive 😳

And if you think that the HP ZBook Ultra has larger battery than the Flow Z13 (74.5 vs 56 Watt-hours) while having the same internals, it gives a potential battery life while gaming around 12 hours for the ZBook with The Phawx's custom settings!

By the way, if you check the FPS while gaming Celeste in the video, it is 60 FPS or very close to it!

Simply amazing, and also shows how unoptimised are the default power profiles.

[Look_down_instead]

ZBook Ultra has larger battery than the Flow Z13 (74.5 vs 56 Watt-hours)

But it doesn't tho. Might be mixing up with the old flow z13 from the year or 2 before. The latest 2025 flow z13 with the same Ryzen AI max chip has a 70 Whr battery, which is almost the same roughly.

shows how unoptimised are the default power profiles.

+1 Agreed.

I would like to see more capped ingame benchmark tests (@30fps, 40-45, 60, 85-90, etc) in a variety of games (not just new but 5, 7, 10, 15, etc year old games) -- just to see how the power scales. The miracle of this chip isn't when running uncapped latest games it seems but seeing just how much can be squeezed within a limited power budget given a load that's not as demanding (older games and or at capped FPS).

[dmitriy-kirilovTix]

you were at that show? I thought we were only playing for a few local tweekers and the guys in the other bands. Come say hullo next time.

[sharath]

WOW!! what a disappointment. The whole idea was power with no compromise on battery life. This is worse than having a DGPU. Did AMD forget to implement power management in this? 7 hrs hours for wifi. the newer 50 series gaming laptops do better. what was even the point of this then?
   And that price tag, trying to get some suckers who still think this is like Apples m-series chips.
 
   Has to be the most disappointing chips of them all. Why would anyone buy this over a gaming laptop. you can get a RTX 4060 laptop for well under 1000$.

[Dont_Look_Up]

WOW!! what a disappointment... Why would anyone buy this over a gaming laptop. you can get a RTX 4060 laptop for well under 1000$.

You are missing the point completely.

1. Form factor: There is nothing with so powerful CPU and GPU (more powerful than the Nvidia 5090 in LLM AI models) in this small workstation form factor.
2. The price is because of the professional and quality levels of this HP series. Ye, you can get a plastic, bulky laptop with 4060 but is not for buiseness worksation users. Yu can also get the commercial Asus Flow Z13 with same internals for half the price.
3. Yes, the power profile is not optimised. See comments below. You can get at least 50% more battery life with an easy custom setting (See The Phawx review on Youtube)

Personally, I can't find anything better as a professional workstation user in this form factor and quality.

[Wholesome]

Did AMD forget to implement power management in this?

I think they did. AMD tend to be terrible at sorting out low power. Not sure if it's a skill or experience issue. The only APU that was done right on release was the steam deck's, most likely because valve themselves did the tweaking. It took 8-9 months after strix points release to finally fix the efficiency issues plaguing the platform on windows.

One thing that's funny / weird is they don't tend to have as good efficiency vs competitors under light CPU only loads but as soon as you start putting heavier loads or stressing the GPU driver they tend to be a lot more competitive.

Why would anyone buy this over a gaming laptop. you can get a RTX 4060 laptop for well under 1000$.

Because not everyone's living in the US. Sure in the US, there are better options out there. Even MacBooks are better priced. I would not be looking at the laptop if I was living in US with access to bestbuy or microcenter.

But for people living outside outside the states. There are regions in the world where this is a lot better priced than the US pricing or the global pricing of the flow z13 and MBPs. I'm kind of thankful for this as usually people living globally are told to bend over when it comes to pricing, so it's finally nice to have some relief here.

[RobinLight]

You are missing the point completely.

1. Form factor: There is nothing with so powerful CPU and GPU (more powerful than the Nvidia 5090 in LLM AI models) in this small workstation form factor.

What??? The only benefit of AMDs APU approach is having more V-Ram for larger models. But GPU performance and especially memory bandwidth are far less than dedicated GPUs like a 5090 have.
So even a medium sized 70b Q4 model would be slow as hell as estimated in earlier posts.

Don't make the mistake to repeat AMD's RTX 4090 comparison by let them  on purpose exceed its maximum video memory. As soon as the model fits in the VRAM of the RTX, Strix Halo doesn't stand a chance.

In the end, I would rather spend my money in a lightweight RTX 5090 notebook even though it has only 24gb of V-RAM... or alternatively in a better suited M4 Max with tons of high bandwidth memory.

By the way: here in Europe HP doesn't sell the 128GB version at all. And worse than that, Asus even doesn't sell 64GB versions of their model!

It's like an advertisement saying: Move on to Apple, there is nothing for you here...