HP Z Fall Announcements

Today, HP announced its new and updated line of Z products, ranging from the tiny Z2 Mini G5 to the ZCentral 4R, a very powerful 1U system designed to be a turn-key remote workstation solution. There’s a lot of products to get through, but the overarching theme is a real focus on remote setups and being able to work from home with emphasis on HP’s own ZCentral Remote Boost. There’s also a good emphasis on creating one of the industry’s most sustainable portfolios, with a lot of attention paid to packaging, material use, and utilizing ocean-bound plastic (that is, plastic that would have otherwise ended up in waterways). They are also previewing an enhanced Wacom tablet experience to allow inking input remotely.

Today, HP announced its new and updated line of Z products, ranging from the tiny Z2 Mini G5 to the ZCentral 4R, a very powerful 1U system designed to a turn-key remote workstation solution. There’s a lot of products to get through, but the overarching theme is a real focus on remote setups and being able to work from home with emphasis on HP’s own ZCentral Remote Boost. There’s also a good emphasis on creating one of the industry’s most sustainable portfolios, with a lot of attention paid to packaging, material use, and utilizing ocean-bound plastic (that is, plastic that would have otherwise ended up in waterways). They are also previewing an enhanced Wacom tablet experience to allow inking input remotely.

Let’s start with the desktop workstations in the Z2 G5 line. The Z2 Tower G5 comes with up to an NVIDIA RTX 6000 and up to a 10-core Intel Xeon. Specs are sparse, but it does come with a 700W power supply as default making it, in HP’s words, the most expandable entry-level workstation on the market. They also note multiple M.2 slots for expandable storage, and PCIe slots for anything else. The Z2 Small Form Factor G5 has impressive specs for its size, offering up to a 10-core Intel Xeon, up to an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000, and lots of I/O options, making it incredibly customizable. Both towers are expecting availability at the end of September on the 28th.

The most impressive of this announcement is the new Z2 Mini G5, a truly no-compromises mini workstation. With a 10-core Intel available, as well as up to an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 in a custom MXM card, this tiny PC really packs a punch. That’s small form-factor specs in a machine you can mount on the back of a monitor. They also offer 9 different flex modules to add things like Thunderbolt 3, Serial, additional video outputs, and more depending on the requirements of your workflow. Connectivity is also not an issue with this device, as it will come with Intel WiFi 6 and a purpose-built antenna inside the machine. Surprisingly, HP even mentioned that this is a quite capable gaming machine when paired with a dedicated GPU, noting that 34% of people use their work computers for gaming. The Mini will be available on September 1st.

Moving on to the mobile workstations, HP improved its affordable laptop line, with the ZBook Power G7, touting up to an NVIDIA Quadro T2000 GPU, your choice of Intel Xeon or Core-i9, up to 64GBs of RAM, and up to two 2TB M.2 SSDs all in a chassis smaller and lighter than the previous gen. The ZBook Fury G7 line offers some serious mobile performance for those who need it, with an emphasis on mobility, even if you’re still working from home. The 15-inch model has up to an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 which was previously reserved for the 17-inch model. Both models, however, do have an optional HP DreamColor screen that is Pantone Certified and has 100% DCI-P3 coverage and is VESA HDR-400 certified. ZBook Power availability should start October 5th, and the Fury line should be available September 14th.

Finally, the HP ZCentral R4 is a turn-key system for use with HP’s ZCentral Remote Boost remote desktop software. This is a very powerful 1U rack-mount system and, according to HP, the world’s most powerful 1U rack workstation. Offering up to an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 and up to an 18-core Intel Xeon-W, I believe them. This system was designed to be used in a server closet somewhere and its form-factor is conducive to having tons of them in a rack to facilitate powerful remote workstations for entire teams of creative professionals. The ZCentral Remote Boost is available now and has been for some time. The server itself has planned availability on October 19th.

HP ZCentral 4R

HP Z2 G5 Workstation

HP Z2 Mini G5 Workstation

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