Keen readers of ours would know that I’ve long been on the hunt for a Windows alternative to the infamous Apple Macbook Pro; something creatives, workaholics and gamers can use on the road without compromise. Whether it was the Asus ProArt 16 or the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i, I’ve struggled to find one that balances power, portability, battery life and gaming. I’ve been testing the new HP ZBook Ultra G1a for a few weeks now, and every time I pick it up, I’m reminded that this isn’t your everyday ultrabook. It’s also not a gaming laptop but that doesn’t mean it won’t appeal to many of you gamers looking for a portable workhorse that won’t die on you after 3 hours like most gaming laptops.
Kicking off at around AU$3,000 for the base configuration, the Zbook Ultra comes with the newest AMD Ryzen AI Max processors with 50 TOPS of NPU power, integrated Radeon 8050s graphics, up to a whopping 128 GB of unified memory and 4TB storage. The model I got comes with the 12-core AMD Ryzen AI Max Pro 390, 64GB of RAM, 2 TB SSD and a 14-inch FHD 60Hz IPS display; all for the princely sum of $5855. That’s a lot of money but unlike gaming laptops, anyone buying the Zbook is definitely getting it for the kind of work that would very quickly recoup its price.
The Zbook Ultra G1 certainly impresses from the minute you lift it out of its box. At just over 1.5 kg, the 14-inch chassis feels like a precision tool forged from a single block of metal. It’s dense—the kind of heft that signals “serious hardware” before you even touch the power button and reminds me of the 14-inch Apple Macbook Pro. In a world where lightness is king, HP has doubled down on build quality, and that decision shapes every part of the experience for better or for worse. You definitely won’t throw this into a handbag like you would the Asus Zenbook S14.
Port selection is refreshingly comprehensive—two USB4 ports, an extra USB-C 3.2, a USB-A, HDMI 2.1, and a combo audio jack mean I never found myself digging through my bag for a dongle. Whether I’m plugging in an external monitor, charging my phone, or tossing a fast thumb drive into the side slot, everything just snaps in without fuss. Oddly missing for a laptop aimed at creators is an SD Card slot which comes in handy for quickly transfering files from cameras.
Open the lid and you’ll find a simple, professional aesthetic: narrow bezels, a matte silver finish, and a solid hinge that snaps the screen firmly into place anywhere. The keyboard deck barely flexes, and the whole thing withstands the kind of rough handling you might toss at a travel-worn workstation. That’s thanks to the MIL-STD 810H Military grade testing. It feels like something you could easily trust on location shoots or client sites, even if it does come at the expense of feeling more like a brick than a featherlite ultrabook.
That sense of sturdiness extends to the display, though the panel itself left me wanting more. HP opted for a Full HD IPS non-touch, 60Hz display, which delivers solid sRGB coverage and average Delta-E under 2. In plain terms, colours are accurate enough for mainstream photo and video editing—if your work lives primarily in sRGB. However, at this price I don’t think HP made the right choice with a Full HD IPS; the 2.8K, 120Hz OLED panel should be standard across the board.
The backlit keyboard has just the right amount of travel and a satisfying springiness that makes longform writing feel effortless. I’ve spent hours hammering out draft after draft without fatigue. But there’s a big gripe I have with this keyboard and that’s the annoyingly squished arrow keys that are flanked by the Page up and down keys.
I can’t tell you how many times I accidentaly hit one of those keys instead of the arrow keys. This is something I just couldn’t get used to even after weeks of use. Additionally, unlike many other laptops, the G1a doesn’t have a dedicated performance profile shortcut on the function row which I would have loved to be able to switch modes easily. As it is, you have to dig through HP’s software to do what should be a simple task.
The precision glass trackpad is responsive, but its built-in click mechanism demands more force than I’d expect, especially when navigating through timelines in Davinci Resolve or just dragging objects on the desktop. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it undercuts an otherwise refined input experience.
Audio, on the other hand, blew me away. Four top-firing speakers tuned by PolyStudio pump out clear mids and surprisingly punchy bass for a 14-incher. Whether I was grading a color-corrected sequence in DaVinci Resolve or cranking a Spotify playlist during breaks, the ZBook filled my office with distortion-free sound at volumes far above average laptop levels. Movies and games sound fantastic through these speakers and this is one of the few laptops where I’m happy to skip using headphones.
But ultimately, this is a workstation and so we need to talk about performance. AMD’s Ryzen AI Max Pro 390 APU which was launched during CES 2025 earlier this year is nothing short of impressive. With up to 5.0 GHz max boost clock, 64 MB L3 cache, 12 cores, 24 threads this processor is designed to chew threw workloads. It’s also got integrated Radeon 8050S graphics all sharing from the pool of unified memory making it surprisingly good for gaming.
In my usual benchmark suite, the HP machine easily scored some of the highest scores I’ve seen from an APU. The Max Pro 390 easily outperforms the 370 HX that I loved in gaming laptops from last year. The same translates into real world use. I did the bulk of my testing on battery power because, this is supposed to be a mobile workstation, right? Everything from scrubbing through a complex 4K timeline in DaVinci Resolve to multitasking with Copilot and ChatGPT felt smooth and responsive. No stutters, freezes or crashing. Simpler tasks like MS Office, email, web browsing are trivial items for the Zbook which seems more interested in handling your Large language model or complex 3D models. Just give it all the models.
| Benchmark | Score |
| Cinebench R23 | 17540 |
| Speedway | 1021 |
| TimeSpy | 6757 |
| Firestrike | 15181 |
| Nightraid | 42323 |
| PCMARK 10 | 5533 |
| Geekbench | 1881, 12787 |
| Geekbench AI | 3226, 774, 5295 |
| Forza 5 | 107fps |
| Shadow of Tomb Raider | 97fps |
| Doom: The Dark Ages | 75-80fps |
| Assassins Creed Shadows | 81 |
Gaming on a workstation laptop usually arrives with caveats, but I found the Radeon 8050S surprisingly spry. The 8050s compares with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU. It’s sufficiently fast at rasterization but thanks to AMD Fidelity FX Super Resolution or FSR, I could easily hit a steady 50–60 fps in most games I tested including Doom: The Dark Ages, Forza Horizon 5, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows at medium to high settings. It won’t replace a dedicated gaming rig, but it’s more than powerful enough for quick sessions between meetings. The only let down would be the 60Hz display that doesn’t support adaptive sync nor has the best contrast. Again, a 120Hz OLED would be so much better here.
Thermals and acoustics strike a reasonable balance. Even during gaming, the dual-fan system never spools up into ear-piercing territory like your average gaming laptop, and surface temperatures peak around 40 °C without blistering your palms. It’s far from whisper-quiet, but in a typical open-office or home-studio environment, the hum is more background white noise than a distraction. HP’s vapor cooling solution works very well and I can’t complain.
Battery life unfortunately, didn’t live up to my expectations. In PCMark 10’s Modern Office test, the ZBook lasted for 13 hours and 8 minutes before tapping out. Not bad you might say but in real day-to-day mixed use—emails, a few Zoom calls, web browsing and scripting and light video editing in Davinci Resolve—I averaged closer to 4-5 hours. I had hoped that with the efficient Ryzen processor, we would get more but yeah.
So if you intend to use this as a workstation doing heavy rendering, video editing, animation or playing games, you’ll find yourself eying the charger quicker than I’d like. HP’s 100 W USB-C brick tops you back up quickly, hitting roughly 50 percent in 30 minutes but you can also use slower chargers which the laptop will complain about but still charge anyway.
In terms of software features, I was underwhelmed by HP’s AI toolkit. Yes, the on-chip NPU unlocks Copilot+ features, Live Captions, Recall, and app-level enhancements from AMD’s Camo Studio or Topaz Labs, but the interfaces felt tacked on and confusing. Then HP’s preloaded AI Companion app which is still in Beta, was just too convoluted for my liking and also too many sections were just empty. In time, I gues HP will populate it with more shortcuts and AI tools but for now, I just moved on and ignored it . Is it so hard to just have an AI assistant to
Additionally, my kind of daily workloads don’t rely much on the NPU that most of these CoPilot+ PC’s come with. Even in apps like Capcut that claim to use the NPU for AI tasks don’t which really makes me wonder what the whole point is. My desktop PC that has an older i5 13600K processor with no NPU works better than most of these laptops for AI tasks.
Verdict
Al of these pieces add up to a machine that will polarize: it’s a specialist’s instrument more than a Do-it-all consumer notebook. At over AU$5,500 you’re paying a hefty premium for uncompromising Windows-centric power in a 14-inch footprint. And you mostly get that though wiht a few caveats. The display isn’t the best that you’d expect and battery life doesn’t live up to the expectation. You could save over $1000 by getting an M4 Macbook Pro and get a better display, battery life and software experience.
But, if your workflow requires Microsoft Windows, CAD, 3D renders, Local language models or heavy video editing—and you have a good library of PC games—the ZBook Ultra G1a is hard to beat. Sure, you could also just get an AMD powered gaming laptop and have much of the same performance. However, you also loose a lot of that performance while running on battery while simultaneously draining the battery if you push it hard which kinda defeats the point.
That said, I’m still quite impressed by the Zbook Ultra G1a. I just wish it was cheaper with a better display and overall battery life. But, my search for a true Macbook Pro Windows replacement continues for now. I continue to watch this space of workstations to see who will finally dethrone the Macbook Pro.
HP Australia kindly provided the Zbook Ultra G1a to PowerUp for the purpose of this review.
