HP ZBook Power G10A Review

Key Takeaways

• HP ZBook Power G10A offers a professional workstation-grade performance perfect for rendering animations and high-end computing.
• The ZBook Power features many configurable options and easy repair/upgrade capabilities, along with plenty of I/O ports for convenience.
• While not the lightest or most powerful, the ZBook Power provides great value for its price range, making it an ideal choice for various industries.

The HP Z series of both desktop workstations and mobile workstations are basically the computers designed for adults with real jobs. This class of desktop and laptop device is all about high-end computing for demanding industries such as media, entertainment, architecture, geospace, engineering, construction, life science, healthcare, and product development.

As a web design director, graphic designer, and environmental designer, the high end workstation computing power comes in very handy especially when it comes to rendering AfterEffects or Blender 3D animations. The HP ZBook Power is the least expensive ZBook model which should give you the most bang for your buck. The chassis is basically the same as the previous few generations, but there are some nice little improvements in the specs, plus we now have an AMD version.

Specs

The HP ZBook Power G10A is available with a wide range of specs and configurations. You can see all of the configuration options on the HP.com website.

For processors, you can choose from:

• AMD Ryzen™ 5 7640HS with Radeon™ Graphics (4.3 GHz base clock , up to 5.0 GHz max boost clock, 16 MB L3 cache, 6 cores, 12 threads)
• AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840HS with Radeon™ Graphics (3.8 GHz base clock, up to 5.1 GHz max boost clock, 16 MB L3 cache, 8 cores, 16 threads)
• AMD Ryzen™ 9 7940HS with Radeon™ Graphics (4.0 GHz base clock , up to 5.2 GHz max boost clock, 16 MB L3 cache, 8 cores, 16 threads)
• AMD Ryzen™ 5 Pro 7640HS with Radeon™ Graphics (4.3 GHz base clock, up to 5.0 GHz max boost clock, 16 MB L3 cache, 6 cores, 12 threads)
• AMD Ryzen™ 7 Pro 7840HS with Radeon™ Graphics (3.8 GHz base clock, up to 5.1 GHz max boost clock, 16 MB L3 cache, 8 cores, 16 threads)
• AMD Ryzen™ 9 Pro 7940HS with Radeon™ Graphics (4.0 GHz base clock, up to 5.2 GHz max boost clock, 16 MB L3 cache, 8 cores, 16 threads)

You can also choose a variety of displays:

• 15.6″ diagonal, FHD (1920 x 1080), touch, narrow bezel, anti-glare, 250 nits, 45% NTSC;
• 15.6″ diagonal, FHD (1920 x 1080), narrow bezel, anti-glare, 250 nits, 45% NTSC;
• 15.6″ diagonal, FHD (1920 x 1080), narrow bezel, anti-glare, Low Blue Light, 400 nits, low power, 100% sRGB;
• 15.6″ diagonal, QHD (2560 x 1440), narrow bezel, anti-glare,Low Blue Light, 300 nits, 100% sRGB
• 39.6 cm (15.6″) diagonal, FHD (1920 x 1080), touch, narrow bezel, anti-glare, 250 nits, 45% NTSC;
• 39.6 cm (15.6″) diagonal, FHD (1920 x 1080), narrow bezel, anti-glare,250 nits, 45% NTSC;
• 39.6 cm (15.6″) diagonal, FHD (1920 x 1080), narrow bezel, anti-glare, Low Blue Light, 400 nits, low power, 100% sRGB;
• 39.6 cm (15.6″) diagonal,QHD (2560 x 1440), narrow bezel, anti-glare, Low Blue Light, 300 nits, 100% sRGB

GPU options include:

• Integrated: AMD Radeon™ Graphics
• NVIDIA RTX™ 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU (8 GB GDDR6 dedicated)
• NVIDIA RTX™ A1000 Laptop GPU (6 GB GDDR6 dedicated)

Storage options include:

• 512 GB up to 2 x 4 TB PCIe® Gen4 NVMe™ M.2 SSD
• 512 GB up to 2 x 512 GB PCIe® Gen4 NVMe™ M.2 SED SSD

RAM options include 8 GB to 64 GB DDR4-4800 non-ECC SDRAM.

Hardware

On the right edge, there’s a 3.5 mm headset/microphone jack, a USB-A port, a faster thunderbolt USB-A port, a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port (which supports 8K displays), and a circular power/charging port along with a tiny LED charging indicator light. It’s so great to still have some USB-A ports on this laptop and barrel shaped power charging cables are so much better than USB-C charging since it can rotate to any angle and there’s no need for rotational orientation when plugging it in.

On the left side, there’s a lock port if you want to make the Zbook Power more difficult to steal. There’s also an actual Ethernet port with a spring-loaded door that opens up to fit the Ethernet jack. Then there’s another full-sized USB-A port and a full-sized HDMI port. Again, really great to have. Lastly, there’s also a smart card slot for secure log-ins.

On the back, we’ve got a ventilation grille in the middle, and two triangular strips of rubber to provide some elevation and grip on a table or desk. There are 5 screws on the back that will let you into the internals, but the ZBook Power also has a tamper lock feature that will show a BIOS warning on the next boot indicating that the bottom was recently removed.

Those screws on the back let you replace or upgrade parts as you see fit. You can watch the above video from HP to see how to do it. The repair and upgrade capabilities here are so much better than things like Apple Macbooks where everything is soldered together.

The HP ZBook Power G10A keyboard is pretty great. It’s not flimsy and super flat like MacBook keyboards. There’s a good amount of travel, but I still hope that future versions bring back a little convex/concave keycap shaping to improve the ergonomics even more as this keyboard design hasn’t changed for years.

The keyboard is wide enough to include a numeric keypad on the right. I love having the number grid, home/end, and page up/down keys right there for easy access without holding down function keys. These extra keys are very important for math/science applications as well as for keyboard shortcuts in 3D animation and design programs. I know Mac users who hate not having a number pad since that means they can’t create InDesign-style keyboard shortcuts.

The trackpad is great too with NFC built in. The edges are a bit smoother now on the G9 versus the G8 version though there’s still some tactile feel to the edges, so you can tell when you’re at the end.

The ZBook Power nicely still has a fingerprint scanner in the keyboard palm rest on the right. I wish the fingerprint scanner was integrated with the power button though as that has been an excellent feature available on other laptops these days.

The video conferencing camera has a tiny shutter slider switch just above it that will cover the lens for guaranteed physical camera privacy. Also, with the ZBook Power G10, we now have a Windows Hello compatible IR camera option. That means you can enable face recognition log-ins instead of having to use the fingerprint scanner or password.

Software

The HP ZBook Power G10A comes with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed, but you can choose FreeDOS for $217 less. All ZBooks are compatible with Linux, but the ZBook Power is not “certified” compatible like some other ZBooks. See this Linux Hardware Matrix document for more information.

Personally, I really dislike Windows 11 due to all the features that were removed, the reduced usability and reduced interaction efficiency, but with the latest updates that allow showing labels in the taskbar again are starting to make it tolerable.

HP’s Support Assistant pre-installed program is very useful. It does have a lot of tips for diagnosing problems, but the big thing is that it gets updates from HP. They’re often different from what arrives through Windows Update, so it’s always good to check this periodically, especially for BIOS and firmware updates.

There’s a hardware diagnostics program that lets you scan all of your hardware components for possible issues that might arise.

Another utility lets you program the F12 key to have whatever functions you want.

The HP Power Manager utility lets you change some battery charging settings and check the battery health.

The HP ZBooks include HP’s Wolf Security antivirus, anti-malware, software & hardware endpoint security software. It doesn’t have nagging pop-ups like some other security software that often gets bundled on new computers. Nor does it seem to interfere with the system performance too much.

Part of HP’s Wolf Security software includes a modified Chromium browser that has increased security features as well as the uBlock Origin plug-in by default.

Privacy and data collection settings are nice to have too.

Professional software

You’re not buying an HP ZBook mobile workstation for the software that it comes with though. You’re buying it to run some serious professional grade software, so let’s see how it handles that.

The Blender benchmark run on the NVIDIA RTX A2000 is very fast.

And real life Blender usability is very fast as well.

Working in Adobe AfterEffects is very smooth as well, though sometimes audio playback is very slow. This was also an issue with the ZBook Power G8, but is not an issue with the Zbook Studio with the same project. AfterEffects isn’t really the right program for dealing with audio though, so we can forgive that. There are some things to try to fix it though.

Premiere Pro has no problems whatsoever and is great to work with on the ZBook Power.

Personally, I process thousands of RAW photos frequently after photo shoots, and the ZBook Power is pretty great at handling this. However, it does much better if you manually set Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge to use the NVIDIA GPU to its full extent. Not all programs are set to take full advantage of the discrete GPU by default, so this is something to keep an eye on.

Of course, Photoshop is pretty flawless on the ZBook Power, as well.

Using the ZBook Power to design and program websites is pretty great as well. I like to use Lunacy for design and Visual Studio Code for the development.

Battery Life

The 83Whr Li-ion battery can keep the ZBook Power going for about 8 hours with light usage. When doing real work like processing thousands of photos, editing 4K videos, 3D/2D animation, and other graphics work, the battery life is going to be a lot lower… more like 4 hours.

Pricing and Availability

The HP ZBook Power is available in a wide range of configurations that you can find on the HP website. Configuration pricing varies from about $1,000 to a maxed-out $9,520 though pricing and availability will probably vary depending on when you’re looking at the HP store. Occasionally there are sales that might reduce the price of the most high-end configuration by like $5,000.

Conclusion

The HP ZBook Power G10A is not the fanciest, thinnest, lightest, or most powerful in the ZBook series, but this is certainly the Z-series mobile workstation model that gives you the most bang for your buck. It allows for a large range of powerful components in a “more affordable than the others” chassis. With the tenth generation and AMD processors, the price range covers an even higher range than before.

You can now choose configurations between about $900 up to $9500. That’s a 10x price range variation. That’s plenty of space to find a ZBook Power that fits your budget and your hardware specification needs. With the right internal hardware options, the HP ZBook Power G10A an extremely capable and reliable mobile workstation and that’s what many in the higher-end visual arts and engineering fields are going to need.