HP ZBook Fury 16 G10 - Review 2024

30 Mar 2024

PCMag Middle East

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One of Z fastest workstations you can buy

HP's ZBooks have been a fixture on our lists of mobile workstations for years, and with good reason. They're well-made laptops, packing powerful hardware, high-end designs, and several HP-specific features that pros love, such as HP DreamColor displays and comprehensive security tools. The HP ZBook Fury 16 G10 (starts at $1,269; $5,069 as tested) is the latest top model from the most recent ZBook iteration, and that competitive reputation rings true. The 16-inch Fury is a premium professional machine, but it's also one of the most powerful laptops on the market, making it worth the investment. In fact, it routinely outperformed one of our favorites, the Dell Precision 5680, making the HP ZBook Fury 16 G10 our new Editors' Choice award winner for high-end mobile workstations.

Configurations: Fine-Tuning the ZBook Fury 16 G10

The HP ZBook Fury 16 G10 is HP's top-of-the-line ZBook workstation laptop, but it comes in several configuration options that range from effective for certain tasks to massively powerful overall. At its lowest specifications, the ZBook Fury doesn't quite meet our minimum specs to consider it a workstation, with just an Intel Core i5-13500H or AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 7640HS processor, with 16GB of memory, 512GB of solid-state storage, and basic AMD Radeon graphics. In its most basic configuration, you can pick one up for $1,269.

If you want more serious power from a properly outfitted workstation, the ZBook Fury is made for exactly that. Processor options include top Intel Core i7 and Core i9 chips, graphics hardware features Nvidia's most potent enterprise-class Ada RTX GPUs, and memory and storage scale up to 128GB of RAM and 16TB of SSD space...if you're willing (and able) to pay for it. Regular configurations top out at 64GB memory and 2TB PCI Express 4.0 SSDs, but the hardware will support more, thanks to four RAM slots and a whopping four M.2 storage bays.

The top configuration we've found sold at press time is outfitted with an Intel Core i9-13950HX CPU, 64GB of RAM, an Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada GPU (with 16GB VRAM), and a 1TB SSD, selling for $5,069. This tracks pretty closely with our review unit's specs, but that model has a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel display instead of the 3,840-by-2,400-pixel panel I had in my test machine. You can also get the Fury 16 with a 2400p OLED touch screen.

Design: Fast and Furious, Sturdy and Stocky

Though much of the workstation world is moving towards thinner and lighter designs, as with every other category of laptops, the ZBook Fury 16 is unabashedly chunky. The design clearly prioritizes performance over portability, measuring 1.13 by 14.3 by 9.9 inches and weighing in at 5.3 pounds. That extra chassis space allows the ZBook Fury to have a pair of beefy cooling fans and a vapor chamber that enhances the heat transfer away from the CPU and GPU. The chassis is made with all aluminum, which further helps with heat management, but also makes for a rigid, rugged-feeling premium design.

The 16-inch IPS display is spacious enough for multitasking, and its 4K resolution is more than enough for everything from dense text in documents and spreadsheets to high-resolution media. The screen's 16:10 aspect ratio also provides extra screen height for reading documents and doing other productive work. Finally, this is an HP DreamColor display, which means an extra brightness boost and more vivid color than everyday IPS panels, with a 120Hz refresh rate.

Another positive: HP's keyboard here is on par with the excellent key spreads that rival Lenovo is known for. With a full-size set of keys and a numeric keypad, it's well-suited to everything from typing up emails to entering data. It also looks sharp, thanks to RGB backlighting and the Z Light Space app, which lets you customize the per-key backlight exactly how you want it. This helps highlight shortcut keys in often-used programs or tweak the color and light to your liking. Z Light Space even includes preloaded color maps for popular workstation apps, like Adobe Photoshop or Premiere, AutoCAD, or SolidWorks.

However, I do take issue with the arrow keys. Instead of a T-shaped cluster with full-size keys, HP uses half-size up-and-down keys, and those tiny up-and-down keys can be a real hassle when you're trying to navigate a spreadsheet or scroll up and down large documents.

The touchpad is large enough for comfort, providing ample room for tapping and gesture controls. Physical right and left mouse buttons are also a welcome addition—and an improvement over the step-down model, the HP ZBook Studio G10, which had no buttons. Most laptops have gone the buttonless route, but when you're working with visual, detail-oriented tasks, having the clarity of physical right, left, and center buttons is pretty helpful.

The ZBook Fury is also outfitted with a 5-megapixel camera complete with an IR sensor for Windows Hello facial logins. That's not only a step up from the 720p camera on the HP ZBook Studio, but it also comes with a handy privacy shutter, so you can always rest easy knowing that nobody's watching when your camera is not in use.

Using the HP ZBook Fury 16 G10: Well-Equipped With Ports, Security, and ISV Certifications

The ZBook Fury is also well-connected. On the right side, you'll find an RJ-45 LAN port, dual USB 5Gbps ports, and a combination headphone and microphone jack. Finally, the included Smart Card reader allows secure logins with easy access control.

On the left is a pair of Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports, a full-size HDMI output, a mini DisplayPort, and an SD card reader. Inside, the laptop runs on Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless connectivity.

In addition to the standard business-friendly features you should expect on any workstation, such as Windows Hello logins, a fingerprint reader, a Smart Card reader, and a case lock slot, this ZBook also comes with a three-year license for HP Wolf Pro Security Edition. The security suite includes some excellent protections for your business, like HP Sure Click Pro, which sandboxes files, apps, and web pages in what HP calls "micro virtual machines," effectively isolating some of the most common vectors for viruses and malware. Then, if anything gets through, HP's Sure Sense Pro AI-powered antivirus can kick in; it protects against known threats as well as zero-day exploits and new attacks as they come up.

On top of this, the ZBook Fury's components are certified for compatibility by a slew of software vendors. Independent software vendor (ISV) certification is a core benchmark for workstation laptops to meet. ISV certification requires hardware to be compatible with the most important professional tools, as well as reliably error-free regardless of field.

Testing the HP ZBook Fury 16 G10: Peak Performance

Our test unit came armed with an Intel Core i9-13950HX processor and Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada GPU, and you won't find a lot of machines on the market that can match this particular ZBook Fury 16. The few that can compete are some of the best mobile workstations you can buy, like the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1, the Dell Precision 5680, and the MSI CreatorPro X17—all top performers and Editors' Choice award winners.

Lastly, I included one other member of the ZBook family, the relatively midrange HP ZBook Studio 16 G10, which is the less-expensive sibling to the ZBook Fury in this review. It's not quite as potent, or as feature-filled, but it's a capable machine in its own right and provides some context for where the ZBook Fury fits in the world of mobile workstations.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The ZBook Fury didn't always turn in the top scores in every test, but it sure didn't disappoint. The laptop went toe-to-toe with the most powerful machines we've reviewed and usually won. The PCMark 10 Productivity score matches our most highly rated systems, namely the Dell Precision 5680 and the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1. The baseline of 4,000 points that indicates basic productivity was left miles behind. Across every test, whether it was HandBrake, Cinebench, Geekbench, or Photoshop, the ZBook Fury's scores ranked among the most powerful machines we've seen.

Graphics Tests

We test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

To further measure GPUs, we also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

If pure graphics performance is what you need—and for workstation laptops, it definitely is—then the HP ZBook Fury is a no-brainer choice. With its high-octane Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada GPU, it blasted past even the top performers we compared it with.

Obviously, our baseline graphics tests of 3DMark and GFXBench aren't measuring the most demanding capability (we'll get to those tests shortly), but these are still some of the best graphics results we've seen. And while you can get similar pure-graphics horsepower for less in a gaming laptop, the combination of GPU potency and business-ready workstation features can't be matched by non-workstation models.

Workstation-Specific Tests

We run two additional programs to simulate workstation applications. The first, Blender, is an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system's CPU and one the GPU (lower times are better).

Our most important workstation test, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using view sets from popular ISV apps. We run the 1080p-resolution tests based on PTC's Creo CAD platform; Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games; and Dassault Systemes' SolidWorks 3D rendering package. The more frames per second, the better.

The most consequential findings in our testing were in our workstation-specific tests. In programs like Blender, Creo, Maya, and SolidWorks, the HP ZBook Fury topped pretty much everything. The only instance where the 16-inch Fury didn't have the best score was in the GPU portion of our Blender test, where it fell 12 seconds behind the MSI CreatorPro X17. In every other test, whether it was by a matter of seconds or a few points, the ZBook Fury edged ahead of the rest.

Compared with the most powerful Windows-based workstation laptops on the market, those leading scores are exceptionally impressive. This is the leading performance that this ZBook Fury sacrificed its portability for, laid out in this series of three charts.

Battery and Display Tests

We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The one area where the HP ZBook Fury genuinely disappointed was in battery testing. Now, from the outset, no one expects mobile workstations to promise extended use away from an outlet. (Well, except for MacBook Pros.) Workstations are about processing power, first and foremost, and battery life always takes a backseat to raw performance. But here, the ZBook Fury 16 lasted a bit more than three hours in our video rundown test. That's half what the similar HP ZBook Studio lasted for in the same test and only a quarter of the time posted by the impressive Dell Precision 5680.

The silver lining is that the Fury is capable of fast charging that will refill a battery to 50% after just 30 minutes of charging. (Of course, this would admittedly be more impressive with a longer-lasting battery.) Whatever you plan to do on the ZBook Fury, bring the charger along.

This ZBook's display quality was much better, at least. The HP DreamColor screen on the ZBook Fury showed excellent factory-calibrated color and decent brightness. Obviously, you should expect sharp detail from a 4K display, and the 120Hz panel will keep everything smooth and fluid, but the vivid and accurate color will make a difference to anyone doing extensive media work. Whether you're designing graphics, rendering animations, or professionally editing video, this display will meet the needs of the most demanding pros.

Verdict: Prizing Power, Punting Portability

The HP ZBook Fury 16 G10 is the latest in a long line of powerful, richly featured workstation laptops that are ideal for a certain class of users who need superb performance and impeccable display quality. Being a larger mobile workstation than most to make room for its boundary-straining, high-performance components, the Fury is easy to recommend to users who need a laptop that will mostly be used at a desk but has the option to move about. Yes, the design is bulky, and the battery life is disappointingly short, but workstation laptops pushing the boundaries of performance are rarely built for portability, and the ZBook Fury 16 G10 is one of the most powerful we've tested. Since it trounced the Dell Precision 5680 and Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 on everything but battery life, the HP ZBook Fury 16 G10 snatches the Editors' Choice title as our favorite high-end mobile workstation of the moment.