- Apple's Mac Studio set a high bar
for performance in a compact workstation.
But HP is here to say, no way, San Jose, or Cupertino.
Meet...
What, is it glued in?
The Z2 Mini G9.
According to HP,
it is the world's most powerful mini workstation.
But then, also according to HP,
that's a big load of horse poo.
So what exactly is it then?
Well, it's a sleek, mini workstation,
boasting up to a Core i9 12900K, and NVIDIA A2000 graphics,
and those are some very impressive specs.
I mean, clearly HP's bringing the heat.
The question is then, can they keep cool under the pressure?
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- HP has gotten a pretty rough ride on this channel,
and deservedly so.
Nearly every fascinating innovation they've brought to us
has been spoiled by poor pricing,
arbitrary hardware limitations
and antediluvian build quality.
Sometimes all three.
They just can't seem to point the gun away from their foot.
Maybe this time will be different, but maybe it won't.
Looking at the Z2 Mini G9's IO,
we're off to a reasonably good start here.
They offer a range of display, USB, Thunderbolt
and network connectivity,
and they provide both a PCIE 4.0 x 8 half height slot,
with GPU support, and a flex IO slot
that can accommodate anything from extra display outputs
or USB ports to serial ports,
though a likely use for it will be to remedy
the inexcusable, in my opinion,
absence of multi-gigabit networking in the base spec.
HP, this is a workstation product,
and even at my purchase volumes,
two and a half gig ethernet costs $4 per chip.
The case can lie flat or be vase amounted,
and if you wanna get really fancy,
you can pick up a vertical mount and flip the logo around.
Wow.
The front is all mesh for better airflow,
and HP helpfully points out that if you really wanted,
you could buy a whole gaggle of them
and put them on a rack mount shelf.
Neat.
First though, we need to drag race it
against the other most powerful mini workstation
and see if there's any reason to buy one of these things,
let alone seven of them.
As configured, our Z2 Mini G9 is nearly identically priced
to the M1 Ulta Mac Studio, spec for spec.
Let's begin.
In Apple's weakest category, gaming,
HP pulls out an easy, wait, what?
In "Shadow of the Tomb Raider",
the M1 Ultra beats it,
with the cheaper Max Tiered tying the HP workstation?
Boy, this is not a good start.
And this trend continues in "Total War: Warhammer",
where, again, HP is bested by the mighty Mac Ultra.
The story flips with "Counter-Strike",
but this is mostly due to "CS:GO"
running on open GL on Mac OS.
Now, obviously game compatibility isn't gonna favor the Mac,
but given that we're evaluating these machines
as workstations, our true objective in running games
is to find the performance potential of the hardware,
and it is clear that HP's tiny workstation
is limited by NVIDIA's A2000, a cute little GPU
that can be thought of as a 3050
but on a 70 watt power diet,
with a whopping 12 gigs of VRAM,
and certified drivers for professional applications
for high resolution video editing and 3D modeling.
A gaming GPU, it clearly ain't.
So let's move on to productivity,
where surely the story will stay exactly the same.
In PugetBench Premiere, HP loses to Apple again,
though in Photoshop, HP does score its second win,
though it should be noted that PugetBench relies on Rosetta
for Photoshop on Mac OS,
so it's not really apples to apples.
After Effects is another win for Apple,
given we couldn't get the benchmark to run
on our Z2 Mini G9, so we can just skip that, I guess.
And as for Blender, well, in CPU rendering,
it loses against the Ultra in our BMW test
and in Gooseberry,
which raises some very interesting questions
because we had a similarly configured test bench
in our Mac Studio review that did win with a Core i9.
Hmm.
In our GPU render testing,
rendering with optics wins every time,
but with CUDA, the Mac Ultra pulls ahead again.
As for synthetic productivity benchmarks,
in Cinebench, HP wins in single threaded performance
but then fumbles in multi threaded performance,
and the same goes for GeekBench,
signaling the existence of a clear trend here.
Core i9 12 900K plus heat, name a more iconic duo.
I'll wait.
Oh yeah, I guess the Wan hoodie and Wan sweatpants
from lttstore.com.
Now, it should be noted that our M1 Ultra Mac Studio
is decked out with 128 gigs of RAM,
but that's unlikely to heavily factor
into the tests that we ran today.
What that means
is that HP must have screwed something up in here.
To find out what,
we have to take a bit of a deeper dive inside.
Actually, we won't even really need to do that,
because like you, we did a double take
when we saw they were trying to pack a Core i9
into this tiny three and a half liter enclosure.
I mean, the mighty NHD 15 can barely handle the CPU,
and it alone is four liters in volume.
Did HP engineer a magic 240 watt cooling solution
out of unicorn horns and leprechaun blood?
Nope, they didn't even try.
In fact, you can see it right here.
There's a sticker on the cooler that says 125 watts.
So naturally, the poor thing throttled hard
throughout our testing.
In Cinebench, the Z2 performs a whopping 30% worse
than the exact same chip on our test bench.
In Blender, our render times increased between 20 and 50%
over our test bench.
And Premiere Pro, we see 10% power scores in PugetBench,
with similar losses in GeekBench.
This performance hit even bleeds into gaming,
where we see 10% losses for the HP Workstation
in "Tomb Raider", "Warhammer" and "CS:GO".
We also took "Forza Horizon 5" for a spin
and saw, again, a 10% hit.
And even more damningly,
running the benchmark for an extended period of time
drops the Z2 Mini G9's result even further.
Why would that be, you might ask.
Surely the CPU is already thermally throttled.
And you're right, but as it turns out,
thanks to HP's brilliant case design,
which provides next to no clearance for the GPU cooler,
the GPU overheats too.
That's right, even our tiny little 70 watt GPU
is throttling to the point where longer GPU renders
complete 25% faster on our bench compared to the HP.
It's just sad.
Even cranking the GPU fan to 100%,
which is well beyond the factory curve,
only delays the inevitable throttling.
And as for the CPU, well we tried some simple adjustments
to their cooling solution in an attempt to prevent hot air
from recirculating inside the case,
and we were able to marginally improve our scores.
But what we really need is a way to adjust the fan curve,
something that HP,
either through their performance advisor software
or the bios, shockingly does not allow.
And it needs to be adjusted.
Look at this!
We started at the benchmark.
This thing is running full border right now
and it's dead silent.
The fans didn't even spin up until after the CPU
had already thermally throttled.
We tried every performance mode,
from quiet to high performance,
and they all behaved basically the same.
The only possible solution was to set the idle fan speed
to 100%, which unfortunately locks it at maximum,
which unfortunately is 7000 RPM on this model,
which is loud as all hell.
And adding insult to injury, the machine still throttles.
To demonstrate that this is a cooling problem
rather than a spec problem, we actually swapped out
our Core i9 with a Core i7 12 700K,
and in this exact system, that i7 actually beat the i9
in rendering, Premiere and in "CS:GO".
Even our less power hungry CPU though, it still throttled,
partially because HP's got dang power limiting
made yet another surprise appearance.
So, sorry I gotta turn this off,
HP not only equips their workstation
with insufficient cooling,
their workstation class motherboard
can't even power the hardware anyway.
I mean, knowing that HP employs
some incredibly talented engineers,
it's hard for me to imagine what goes on behind the scenes
for a train wreck like this to make it to market.
Unlike LMG, where you can watch the train wreck
in slow motion behind the scenes on floatplane.com
rather than just imagining it.
Let's come back around to HP's claim though
that the Z2 Mini G9
is the fastest mini workstation in the world.
We called that horse plop before we even knew
that the machine throttled
like an aging white dude on a Harley.
Why?
Because their qualification for that claim
is that it is based on HP's internal analysis
of non-gaming small form factor desktop workstations
with between three to 20 liters,
a minimum three ISV certifications,
configurable professional graphics
and a dedicated workstation brand, as of March 2022.
Good gravy!
I mean, by that kind of logic, based on my analysis,
I have the most subscribers on YouTube,
of people with at least eight channels
that make tech videos based in Surrey, Canada.
And we haven't even started on the price.
Much like the Mac Studio, this thing is very expensive.
I mean, I get it.
It's a business system, so there is a premium
and you do get some benefits from it.
The parts have undergone extra reliability testing,
it uses a workstation chip set, ECC memory,
ISV certification.
The whole corporate kit and caboodle.
But charging $1100 for a 12 900K that is $500 over retail?
For the privilege of running it throttled?
That's just insulting.
HP, this could've been a very sleek, capable workstation,
and for less power components, it still could be
an excellent fit for your business.
But as configured, it simply shouldn't exist.
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- Thanks for watching.
HP, seriously, you guys need to get your stuff together.
Everyone else, if you enjoyed this bloodshed,
why not check out our video on HP's Omen 45L pre-built?
It also had problems.