We refer to big-screen, full-powered laptops as desktop replacements, but that’s far too mild a term for the HP ZBook Fury 16 G11 (starts at $1,558; $3,564 as tested). “Desktop destroyer” or “desktop annihilator,” maybe. Or just “desk”—picking up the Fury after a typical ultraportable, it seems to have two or three laptops’ worth of beefy base under its thin lid. This ZBook isn’t the very fastest mobile workstation we’ve tested, because our review unit has only Nvidia’s third-quickest professional GPU, but it easily earns an Editors’ Choice award as an ultra-expandable, cost-no-object choice for barreling through the biggest datasets and most demanding specialized applications.Configuration & Design: 11th Gen Workstation, 14th Gen CPU The 16-inch Fury G11 is a refresh of the ZBook Fury 16 G10 seen here in March 2024. The cheapest configuration is $1,558 with Intel’s Core i5-13600HX vPro processor, 16GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel display. With lowly Intel UHD integrated graphics instead of a discrete GPU, real workstations beat it up and take its lunch money.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Our $3,564 test model raises the ante considerably with Intel’s colossal Core i9-14900HX chip (eight Performance cores, 16 Efficient cores, 32 threads, max turbo 5.8GHz), 64GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, and Nvidia’s RTX 3500 Ada Generation graphics with 12GB of display memory and all the independent software vendor (ISV) certifications you could want. The non-touch IPS display is one of HP’s dazzling DreamColor panels with 3,840-by-2,400 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. An OLED touch screen with the same 4K resolution and a fraction less brightness is an option, as is a 1200p panel with HP’s SureView Reflect privacy filter to thwart snoopy seatmates on airplanes. The memory ceiling is 128GB, with error-correcting-code (ECC) DRAM available for to-the-penny precision, and a whopping four M.2 slots allow up to 16TB of solid-state storage if you don’t mind pushing the price to five figures.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
At 1.13 by 14.3 by 9.8 inches and 5.3 pounds, the Fury G11 occupies the heavyweight class of mobile workstations, as opposed to middleweights with lower memory and storage limits like the Dell Precision 5690 (4.46 pounds) and HP’s own ZBook Studio 16 G10 (3.81 pounds). The 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro splits the difference at 4.8 pounds. Unfashionably thick bezels surround the screen, which flexes a bit if you grasp the corners, but the keyboard deck resists even a strong press—the ZBook has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests for travel hazards such as shock, vibration, and extreme temperature and humidity. A fingerprint reader in the palm rest and IR face recognition in the webcam give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
A SmartCard slot on the right edge offers a third way. It’s joined by two 5Gbps USB 3.2 Type-A ports, an audio jack, an Ethernet port, and a nano security lock. The laptop’s left side has two USB4 Type-C ports, HDMI and mini DisplayPort monitor outputs, an SD card reader, and the AC adapter connector. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth are standard, with 4G or 5G mobile broadband available at ordering.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Features: An Ignominious Keyboard Tradition, But the Rest Rocks The Fury G11’s keyboard makes us downright angry. Knowing that computer-aided design (CAD) and other demanding ISV apps often make use of a middle mouse button, HP provided three cushy, precise buttons below a large, responsive touchpad. But then the company stuck to its laptops’ infamously awkward placement of the cursor arrow keys in a clumsy row instead of the correct inverted T, with half-height, hard-to-hit up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right. It’s ham-handed and aggravating. Otherwise, the keyboard scores points for a full numeric keypad and colorful RGB backlighting, with Z Light Space software that provides a literally dizzying array of animated effects. Typing feel is shallow and kind of rubbery, but comfortable for prolonged, rapid input. The system is new enough to have Microsoft’s Copilot key on board, though we noticed Windows Camera did not have the new AI-enhanced Studio Effects options such as auto framing and background blur.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
That’s the worst thing we can say about the 5-megapixel webcam, which captures videos and images that are well-lit and vividly colorful at up to 2,560-by-1,440 (16:9 aspect ratio) or 2,560-by-1,920 (4:3 ratio) resolution. Details are crisp and there’s zero noise or static; you won’t get away with not shaving or washing your hair the day of a conference call. They still use IPS technology in an increasingly OLED age, but we haven’t changed our opinion of HP’s DreamColor workstation displays as the finest screens in the PC biz. The Fury’s is simply beautiful, with rich, vivid colors, faultless contrast, and ample brightness (though this one fell a fraction short of its rated 500 nits in our testing and never seemed too bright as some 600-nit-plus panels can). White backgrounds are pristine, and viewing angles are wide. High-res photos and videos—hell, even Sticky Notes—looked stunning. Stereo speakers at the bottom front pump out not particularly loud but nice and clean sound; there’s minimal bass, but highs and midtones are quite clear, and it’s easy to make out overlapping tracks. HP Audio Control software provides auto, music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer, as well as intelligent noise reduction for conference calls.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Fury also comes with HP’s Wolf Security suite, which leads the business laptop segment with features ranging from OS restoration to a sandboxed secure browser and hardware-enforced containment or isolation of malware apps detected by deep learning AI.Testing the HP ZBook Fury 16 G11: Fast? Yeah, We’re Thinkin’ It’s Fast Besides its predecessor the ZBook Fury 16 G10, we compared the G11’s benchmark numbers to those of another (if slightly dated) unlimited-class workstation, the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1, and a slimmer Editors’ Choice honoree, the Dell Precision 5690. The 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro and its mighty M3 Max processor round out our test set.
Productivity 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. Three other 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 5.5 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We also 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.
Apple’s M3 Max is a thermonuclear CPU, but the ZBook’s Intel Core i9-14900HX is no slouch either. The Fury 16 G11 squeaked to a win in PCMark 10 (though using any of these machines for Word and Excel is like using a Caterpillar bulldozer to pick up after your dog) and shone in our processing and Photoshop tests. Graphics Tests We test Windows PCs’ graphics 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). 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.
Seven hundred frames per second is a bit much even for the Fury’s 120Hz display. Little game excerpts like these are silly tests for workstations like these. It’s true that the G11 didn’t sweep the field, but upgrading from Nvidia’s RTX 3500 Ada to the top-of-the-line RTX 5000 would have likely fixed that (and added $1,849 to its cost). Workstation-Specific Tests Turning to more appropriate benchmarks, Blender 2.93 is a popular 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 photorealistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system’s CPU and one the GPU (lower times are better). BMW artist Mike Pan has said he considers the renders too brief for rigorous testing, but they’re a popular benchmark. Perhaps our most important workstation test, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets 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. Results are in frames per second.
The G11 won Blender’s CPU contest and trailed only the MacBook Pro in the GPU event (again, with Nvidia’s third best professional silicon), and was more than competitive in SPECviewperf. Massive overkill for everyday jobs, it’s an invaluable partner for the toughest engineering, design, and data science tasks. Battery and Display Tests We test laptops’ 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. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and 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 Fury G11 greatly improved on the poor battery life of the G10 model, but its runtime remained a rounding error of the Apple’s. No biggie; workstations are unplugged only for occasional showings of CAD or CGI renderings at a client’s office. The DreamColor screen delivered impeccable color and brightness.Verdict: When Only King Ghidorah Will Do We admire Dell’s Precision 5690 as a potent but relatively portable mobile workstation, but when even that machine’s extreme power isn’t enough, the ZBook Fury 16 G11 stands alone. If you need the raw horsepower, memory, and storage to justify its cost—or more likely, make its cost the smallest part of a project’s payables—it’s a simply awesome Editors’ Choice award winner.
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About Eric Grevstad
Contributing Editor
I was picked to write the “20 Most Influential PCs” feature for PCMag’s 40th Anniversary coverage because I remember them all—I started on a TRS-80 magazine in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine that promoted using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semiretirement in Bradenton, Florida, I can’t stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.
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