First serious 14-inch workstation laptop thanks to Strix Halo: HP ZBook Ultra G1a review

[tigolebitties]

Notebookcheck's comment section is slowly getting more ghetto now that gsmarena refugees are coming...

[Psyduck]

Accept once and forever that ARM64 is the superior platform

Hard to get excited when Nvidia is blatantly refusing to serve the consumer market. People are practically begging for a true non apple alternative yet they're too busy milking AI.

[YrpUQQmk]

@ Benjamin Herzig

I had to return two HP ZBook Ultra 14 G1a units (390/64GB/OLED) due to repeated BSOD or restarts without warning.

Did you experience any of these issues during testing?

I am considering buying another unit – wondered if the issues were fixed.

[Benjamin Herzig]

BSODs no, but as detailed in the review, the ZBook restarted during the battery testing without warning. This was with the latest BIOS offered by HP installed.

[It's not ready]

I had random restarts or points where it would freeze also too. In addition to this, certain large downloads for me just kept ending up corrupted. For reference, this was on 385/32GB/FHD-IPS variant.

[Gabrielle]

However, with some newer titles, we had problems, as the games would not start due to insufficient VRAM.

wait..what? "insufficient VRAM"? its supposed to pull from 32GB system RAM to fit whatever memory need the process demand is my understanding. is hp implementation wrong or the game requires more memory than what the system can provide with 32GB pool?

[32 GB of 128 GB RAM? DOA]

Using the expensive Strix Halo, 256-bit, chip, but giving it only 32 GB RAM is major trolling. DOA.

AMD specifically advertises the Strix Halo, a 256-bit chip (4 * 64-bit, also known as quad-channel) for LLM self-hosting (see AMD's slides about it), but with only 32 GB RAM, instead of the up-to 128 GB RAM, that this 8000MT/s, quad-channel, chip supports, it's literally major wasting of silicon and hardware. At least 64 GB RAM would have been ok. Unbelievable.