HP ZBook 17 G6 Has The Most Impressive Mobile Workstation Performance We've Seen Yet

The HP ZBook 17 G6 review sample shipped with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro for Workstations 64, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux and FreeDOS are among the available operating systems available. With my testing besides running some comparison benchmarks on Windows 10, I ran all of the usual Linux distribution suspects on the laptop.

When it came to the Linux distribution testing, the only issue encountered on some of the distributions was the Intel AX200 WiFi needing certain kernel/firmware configurations for WiFi. Not too surprising given the WiFi 6 Linux quirks we've been seeing on recent kernels, but aside from that it's been working nice which is good to see but not surprising really for Intel laptops generally having great Linux support even for the latest models.

Thanks to the laptop's larger size and HP engineering the ZBook 17 G6 for supreme workstation performance, the laptop's cooling is quite adequate and much better off than the likes of the Dell XPS where we can cause thermal throttling to happen fairly easily.

Over the course of dozens of different benchmarks spanning many hours, the Xeon E-2286M eight core / sixteen thread processor had an average load temperature of 69 degrees. There were times after extended load that it did peak and result in temporary thermal throttling, but much less than what we are used to seeing these days on modern laptops where throttling can be all too frequent. The idle temperature tended to be in the lower 40s during our other tests.

The NVIDIA Quadro RTX5000 graphics on this laptop also didn't run into much trouble and never peaked above the 60s during GPU workloads. The GPU temperature actually didn't spike during most graphics tests, the spike noted in that graph aligns with when running Blender's OptiX renderer that makes use of the ray-tracing cores.

For putting the HP ZBook 17 G6 performance into better perspective, on the following pages are tests showing its performance up against the Kubuntu Focus with its Core i7 9750H processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of NVMe SSD storage. Also included was the Dell XPS 7390 Ice Lake laptop given the popularity of Dell XPS laptops among Linux users thanks to Project Sputnik. That laptop had the Core i7 1065G7 Ice Lake CPU with 16GB of RAM, Iris Plus Graphics, and 512GB NVMe SSD. During this round of benchmarking, all three laptops were running Ubuntu 19.10 with the Linux 5.3 kernel. Comparison laptops were obviously based upon what I had available for delivering fresh benchmarks on.