The cheapest Xeon mobile workstation will rip through any video editing task

HP 15.6-inch ZBook 15v G5 - $1,649.00 at B&H
(roughly £1,300)
$1,649 at BHPhoto

HP 15.6-inch ZBook 15v G5 - $1,649.00 at B&H
(roughly £1,300)
This mobile workstation from HP is the most affordable on the market to feature a monstrous Intel Xeon processor. The ZBook 15v G5 will happily churn through any computer intensive task it's given. Plus, it comes with a free one-year subscription to Bitdefender Total Security 2020 (5 devices) worth $90.

At the time of writing, the HP 15.6-inch ZBook 15v G5 is the most affordable Intel Xeon mobile workstation on the market.

It's billed as a high-performance portable business laptop that excels at creative and number-crunching tasks and yet somehow manages to maintain a relatively affordable price tag.

The laptop features a 15.6" Anti-Glare UWVA IPS screen with 1920x1080 px resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio, LED-backlighting and a brightness of 220 cd/m^2. HP opted for a rather peculiar design, with the V-shaped bottom of the display perched on top of the hinge.

The ZBook 15v G5  is powered by an Intel Xeon E-2176M processor; a 6-core, 12-thread beast with 12MB cache and a base clock speed of 2.7GHz. This is paired with 16GB of DDR4 memory in one slot (with a second memory slot left free) and a 512GB PCIe SSD, plus a dedicated Nvidia Quadro P600 graphics chip with 4GB GDDR5 video memory.

Given its rather large footprint, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the ZBook features numerous I/O connectors as well. There are three Type-A USB ports, one Type-C/Thunderbolt 3 Alt DP, an HDMI 2.0, a Gigabit Ethernet connector, two audio ports, 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5.0.

In terms of drawbacks, the 52.5WHr battery is a little on the small side and we're rather disappointed there's no fingerprint reader for added security.

Bear in mind

  • Unfortunately, B&H only ships to the US, so international customers will need to use a specialist parcel forwarding service to take advantage of the deal.
  • Have you managed to get hold of a cheaper product with equivalent specifications, in stock and brand new? Let us know and we'll tip our hat to you.
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Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.