HP ZBook Power G11 A: What Real Users Think

Is it me or is this the 1st AMD laptop (or PC, for that matter) with actual honest to God onboard TB4?

Single core processor speed, and lots of RAM, is all that matters for SW. The top tier consumer class desktop Intel chips are usually on top.

It's for enterprise, not creation. Also USB adapters exist.

There have been AMD motherboards with TB4 for some years now, I have an 'old' AM4 board with TB4 (ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR)

ThinkPad P16V Gen 2's are the most direct comparison I can think of. The P1's can be specced a little higher.

My ThinkPad Z13 has it. Or maybe it's USB4/TB3? Whatever, it's 40Gb/s.

What's the keyboard like? I love Lenovo keyboards, both the old non-island style from my old T520 to the contemporary one on the Legion 5.

TB is a killer feature.

I suggest in addition to running these benchmarks, ask one of your designers for a real large assembly model and run a test opening it. They are sufficiently close yeah, but in longer opening times the difference might become more apparent.

So both cost about 3500 euros, so therefore I would go with the one that has better specs which is the HP.

With the HP you also get more SSD space and more ram.

Also with the HP you can swap the ram if it breaks. Personally I would go with the HP for the better specs.

The power series is entry level. You can buy a maxed out Studio for this price which will perform hundred times better. The cooling in the power series can't hold up under high load.

I can confirm that EnableCursorSuppression is set to 1 so that's likely it. Will try your suggestion and let you know.

That would be fine for SolidWorks as long as you don't have issues. If you end up needing to contact support the first thing they will ask is what graphics card you have and they won't help you troubleshoot with a non supported graphics card.

For anyone checking in on this later; it does in fact have a full-size SD card slot.

Yes. The battery is very very bad.

Is it normal that the power adapter is as big as an egg carton? It is incredibly over the top.

Yes it got hot. The computer required a lot of W at full throttle. So a big power brick came with it.

What I saw what seemed to be a monster laptop at a crazy price, even though I'd already ordered the other parts, I grabbed it knowing I'd return it.

If I were you I would go for a second hand Fury G10. You then get a much better price/quality ratio. Moreover, the Fury models are of a much higher class than the power models. This is reflected in build quality and cooling quality.

Don't forget the build quality difference between a Power and a Studio, the Dreamcolor 500nit display in the Studio (4K in Power just means a 400nit regular display) and the vapor chamber cooling system.

The Power model has 5MP camera. Plus, the HP ZBook Power numpad is a plus too for me... not a dealbreaker but definitely an advantage.

Changed it to 0 successfully but still no cursor, so I'm back to thinking it's a driver issue. I'll keep trying different drivers.

Figured this out, once I added the 'Intel Serial IO GPIO Host Controller - INTC1083' driver the cursor came back. So it was a driver issue after all.

Interesting, like you I've always resolved it with those IO drivers. I don't have your specific model to test. I'd recommend reaching out to HP support — I know they have a pretty impressive group of folks to help figure those things out.

I've had this issue for years. Whenever HP decides to change the mouse driver it is fun for me to fix it in winpe. What I've found over the years is that you can't have too many mouse drivers in the boot wim, the wrong one gets used and then it doesn't work.

Quite honestly, for these uses, a Power 16 is of no interest. It's just going to add price, weight and heat (and therefore cooling noise) for nothing. This machine is much more geared towards CAD professionals who need ISV certifications.

This laptop performs on par with a laptop having a mobile RTX 4070 GPU while functioning as a single system on chip with no dedicated GPU. For the non-tech person, it's pretty badass for mid tier stuff.

Thanks a ton for this info! I'm actually looking at a used zbook studio for myself to use for SolidWorks.

Zbook Firefly that I have is LITERALLY just the Elitebook of the same generation with a different BIOS on it.

Based on what you wrote, I'd go with whichever has the 400-nit 100% NTSC screen. Performance of the systems will be all but identical, but the improvement of the screen is MASSIVE.

I've always thought that the zBook is one category up (more premium) from EliteBook but now I am starting to feel they are on same level.

More like Dell Precision's than ThinkBooks, 'mobile workstation' seems to be the product category.

My local HP reseller says G11 power available at the end of May/beginning of June.

If you are paying annual maintenance, then you have a valid license. You just need to upgrade your license server to the 2025 version. It will still host licenses to your old versions and you can test 2025.

I added this driver for a 460 g11 and still can't get mouse cursor.

I can't send screenshots here but I had to apply a cursor fix for our PE as well, perhaps you have the same issue.

Have you looked at the HP Zbook Studio?

MicroSD rather than SD, no photographer/videographer will look at this thing twice.

slow chip, no battery life