Worth the Weight

The ZBook 15 G5 abandons the two-tone design of last year’s model for a monochromatic silver, CNC-machined aluminum chassis. The company’s stylized four-slash logo decorates the lid, while diagonally cut (HP calls them dog-eared) rear corners add a touch of flair.

The sturdy system has passed a slew of MIL-STD 810G tests against shock, vibration, temperature extremes, and other abuse; if you’re looking for flex in the screen or keyboard deck, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

The G5 is no ultraportable—for a moment when taking it out of the box, I actually mistook it for a 17-inch laptop. It measures 1 by 14.8 by 10.4 inches. At 5.8 pounds, it’s an anvil compared to the Dell or Apple (4.4 or 4.1 pounds, respectively).

But anvils aren’t usually this configurable. The base model features a quad-core Core i5-8300H processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB PCI Express solid-state drive, a 1080p IPS display, and Nvidia Quadro P1000 graphics.

Steps up to a six-core, 2.6GHz (4.3GHz turbo) Core i7-8850H chip, 32GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe SSD, HP’s 1080p Sure View touch screen with built-in privacy filter, and Nvidia’s step-up Quadro P2000 GPU.

Four SO-DIMM sockets and two M.2 slots, plus a 2.5-inch drive bay, accommodate up to 64GB of RAM and 6TB of storage. CPU choices include an upgrade to one of two Xeons, with ECC memory an option if you insist on absolute data integrity.

The peak screen pick is HP’s 4K-resolution, 600-nit, billion-color DreamColor panel with a color-calibration sensor in the touchpad to set the system to 100 percent of the Adobe RGB gamut before each workflow.

Left-side ports include two USB 3.0 Type-A (one for charging handheld devices), Ethernet, an SD card reader, and a security lock. On the right side, you’ll find a third USB 3.0 port, a SmartCard reader, an audio jack, an HDMI video output, and two Thunderbolt 3 ports with USB-C and DisplayPort functionality, along with the connector for the AC adapter.

Superbly Simple Access

The HP makes upgrades easy, even without a screwdriver in sight: Merely sliding a latch on the laptop’s bottom lets you remove a panel and reveal the hard drive bay, two M.2 slots, and the third and fourth memory sockets (the first two are under the keyboard), as well as the battery.

The ZBook supports password-free Windows Hello sign-ins via both a fingerprint reader and face-recognition webcam.

The camera captured fairly detailed but noisy images in my office on an overcast day; turning on a couple of lamps made the image washed out.

The Bang & Olufsen speakers above the keyboard are startlingly loud (anything over 70 or 75 percent volume gets rough and raucous) but impressively rich, with punchy bass and clear highs.

The spill-resistant, backlit keyboard follows HP’s ungainly row-style rather than inverted-T layout for the cursor-arrow keys—half-size up and down arrows sandwiched between full-size left and right—but is otherwise pleasing.

There’s adequate travel and a crisp typing feel; the numeric keypad not found on the Precision 5530 or MacBook Pro; and your choice of an embedded pointing stick or somewhat slippery touchpad for cursor control, both with three good-size, soft-touch buttons. The keyboard also has the “collaboration keys” found on HP’s EliteBook business laptops, shortcuts for making a presentation or answering or hanging up on a Skype call.

Another feature borrowed from the EliteBooks is the test unit’s 15.6-inch, full HD (1,920 by 1,080) touch screen with built-in Sure View privacy filter.

The latter, activated by pressing the F2 key, narrows the display’s legibility to the user seated directly in front of it, so someone next to you on a plane or train can’t sneak a peek and see your confidential information.

It’s a great idea that’s disappointing in practice, because making the screen invisible to prying eyes.