HP ZBook Ultra G1a Review: An AMD Strix Halo Based Portable Powerhouse

	HP ZBook Ultra G1a - Starts at $1,999, $4,049 as tested  HP's latest ZBook combines AMD's powerful Ryzen AI Max Strix Halo processors with an attractive lightweight design that's long on battery life.
	Thin And Light Good Performance, For The Form Factor OLED Display With Deep Blacks And Bold Colors Good Battery Life  Lots Of Memory For Local AI	Performance Trails ASUS System With Similar CPU Storage Slower Than Expected Maximum Display Brightness Should Be Higher Pre-Installed Security Suite Hampers Performance

AMD had most tech enthusiasts salivating from the moment that its powerful mobile CPU codenamed Strix Halo, now branded the Ryzen AI Max,  was first rumored. We've seen the Ryzen AI Max CPU family in action in the ASUS ROG Flow z13, and the red team delivered on the promise of high-performance graphics in a lower power envelope. Of course, ASUS isn't the only manufacturer building machines on this new architecture that includes a giant pool of fast memory offering high bandwidth. Enter HP's business-focused ZBook Ultra G1a -- an understated 14-inch notebook with a deceptive amount of Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 horsepower under the hood. Let's check it out...

HP ZBook Ultra G1a Specifications

Find The HP ZBook Ultra G1a @ Amazon

Of course, at the heart of the ZBook Ultra G1a is the Ryzen AI Max family of CPUs. In this case, it's the very top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395, specifically the PRO variant that includes a platform with business-focused management features. That's 16 cores of Zen 5 goodness with a maximum boost of 5 GHz and the 40-CU version of the RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 8060S iGPU. This is the exact same processor (minus the PRO designation) found in the ROG Flow z13, which will make for an interesting point of comparison. There's also a 50-TOPS neural processor, which gives the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 PRO a total of 126 TOPS of AI-enhancing goodness.

There's also a whopping 128 GB of LPDDR5x memory running at a speedy 8,533 MT/sec. That's 276 GB/sec of bandwidth, which can be split up just about any way you want. Like the vast majority of x86-64 PCs, but unlike most Arm64 systems (including the Mac Studio we reviewed a couple months back), it is statically partitioned. That means, you have to set how much memory is dedicated to the GPU, and that amount is only for tasks performed by the Radeon 8060S, unavailable to the CPU. There's also a 2 TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD riding a four-lane PCI Express 4.0 bus in our review unit for primary storage. 


Wireless capabilities are provided by MediaTek's MT7925, which gives us WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4. The antenna array is a 2x2 MIMO configuration, which is pretty standard. We're a little surprised and a mite disappointed to see a lack of WiFi 7 in a notebook in this price range, no matter how new the technology is, but it is what it is -- most fold don't have WiFi 7 access points anyway. If you want wired networking, you'll need to rely on a Thunderbolt or USB adapter to provide that connectivity, as there's no provision for it here. 

HP ZBook Ultra G1a Build

HP wrapped the ZBook Ultra G1a in a slick, subdued magnesium-alloy chassis with an attactive finish dubbed Meteor Silver, and the design language hasn't wandered much from other ZBooks over the years. It feels great to the touch, doesn't attract fingerprints, and is not overly reflective. There's a shiny HP logo etched into the lid. When you open it up, you're greeted by a 14-inch touch-enabled OLED panel with a 400-nit maximum brightness and 100% DCI-P3 coverage. Colors pop and have good saturation without being cartoony or unnatural. That maximum brightness is a tad on the low side for our tastes, and using the ZBook in direct sunlight by an open window was a bit of a challenge. We'd greatly prefer 500 nits sustained brightness and even more peak output for a true HDR experience when you're talking about a notebook that starts at two grand. On the other hand, having an OLED panel still gives access to rich colors and deep blacks, something the entry-level model's UWVA panel can't boast. 

There's a 1080p webcam mounted at the top of the display, and it's flanked by a pair of microphones in a stereo array. Those mics are not inherently noise canceling on their own, but when mated with Windows Studio AI effects, there's less of a need for hardware noise cancelation. Regardless of the environment, callers on a video chat could hear us just fine, and the quad speaker array by Poly Studio was clear and detailed. Traditionally, the best laptops speakers in this size class have been in Apple laptops over the last fifteen years or so, but HP actually gives Cupertino a run for its money. It's not a pair of 16-inch subs powered by a 900 W amp or anything, but audio quality is deceptively good. 


HP's professional notebook keyboards have always been pretty good, and the same is true here. Keys are only a touch smaller than a full-sized desktop keyboard, though that's out of necessity for its footprint. They feel solid under the hands and give good enough feedback to know they've been pressed. We used it for the duration of typing this review, among other things, and it was a sturdy workhorse. There's even a fingerprint sensor built into the power button. Below that, the trackpad size is very generous for the dimensions of the notebook, and it responds flawlessly as a pointer and works with all of Windows' multi-touch gestures. 


Once we get around to the sizes of the notebook we can get a gander at the ports available. On the left we find a Thunderbolt 4 port next to a USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps port, which both have Type-C connectors. This is honestly a little confusing if you're trying to plug things in without looking, and even now I have to refer back to photos to tell you that the Thunderbolt 4 port is towards the front and the USB 3.2 port is behind it. There's also an HDMI 2.1 port that can drive our 4K 144 Hz monitor at its full refresh rate and resolution with VRR, and there's also a nice analog headphone jack. They may have disappeared from phones, but having them on notebooks is still a must in our view. 


On the right side, there are fewer ports - a Thunderbolt 4 with Type-C and a Type-A port that also supports 10Gbps like the one on the left. That's pretty rare in notebooks with USB-A connectors, and definitely appreciated when it's needed. Helpfully, HP put charging LED indicators on both sides of the notebook next to both Thunderbolt ports. There's also a lock connector on the right towards the rear, if needed. 

HP ZBook Ultra G1a Software Experience

For the most part, HP chooses to get software out of the way on the ZBook Ultra G1a. Our review unit came with Windows 11 Pro 24H2, and after a round of downloads from Windows Update, we were good to go. The drivers for the Radeon 8060S were actually AMD's Pro drivers, rather than the standard Catalyst gaming variety. There's not much difference between the two other than certification for GPU-accelerated productivity apps, similar to NVIDIA's Studio program. And the control panel is blue. 

The one place where HP's software load out stood out was a negative, though. Wolf Security is always installed on HP pro machines, but in the end we chose to uninstall it for our testing. It had a negative performance impact in our productivity tests. We're of the opinion that if you're responsible on the Internet and don't fall for a bunch of scams that install malware, Windows Defender is sufficient. So, we paused Wolf for testing so we could get repeatable results. 

A Note About AI Performance

we need to talk about that 128 GB memory pool, that should be sufficient for many AI workloads, unless your goal is running big LLMs on the GPU. At least, the way we prefer to run them (which is AMD's recommended solution, for that matter) is via LM Studio. If you split the memory in half you can in theory run models as large as 64 GB in size. In practice, we were limited to loading models that were around 44 GB. That's because LM Studio loads the model to the main memory (which also holds all your other open programs as well as Windows 11), and then copies the model to graphics memory, just like it would with a discrete GPU. 

And frankly, 44 GB models are both still enormous and too demanding for the GPU. In terms of tokens per second generated by the Radeon 8060S, it's slower than we'd like to rely on. We're talking about less than 10 tokens per second, which means it takes a while to generate text (even if it is faster than I can type, personally). We're going to explore AI performance on the ZBook Ultra G1a, as well as discrete GPUs and that Mac Studio, in a future article. And don't worry, we'll also be testing the new Adrenaline preview driver that should allow us to cram more directly into the GPU partition. For our testing, we went with a 96 GB main memory and 32 GB graphics partition split. That's more than the vast majority of consumer GPUs and for most folks leaves more than enough for the rest of the system. 

Speaking of performance, let's take a look at how this system runs on the next page.