Newest HP Pavilion 15 15.6" FHD Laptop, 13th Gen Intel Core i7-1355U,64GB RAM,1TB SSD,Intel Iris Xe Graphics,Backlit Keyboard ,Webcam, HDMI,Wifi 6 ,Bluetooth ,Windows 11 Home,Silver

[This review was collected as part of a promotion.] I have used HP's popular line of workstation desktops before and was excited to try this HP ZBook Studio G9. Knowing about HP's workstations gave me more confidence in this notebook. Mine had pretty good specs, including a 12th gen I7-12800H CPU with 14 cores consisting of 6 Performance cores and 8 Efficient cores, and totaling 20 threads. It also has 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and a high resolution 3840x2400 16” display. With the display's high resolution and high pixel density, I can see fine details in my work. It also has a high 120Hz refresh rate, resulting in very smooth scrolling and panning. I was fairly surprised with the display detail and smoothness. Compared to standard laptop displays, it's much better. To drive the display, it has a hybrid GPU setup with the Iris GPU and an RTX A2000 8GB GPU. Many modern video, 3D, and other professional software have GPU acceleration, making the GPU very important for performance in professional environments. I did a video encoding and 3D rendering for testing and was pretty impressed with the speed. The lid edge has no indentation, which makes it a little hard to open with one hand, but I don't mind it too much. At idle, the fan is audible but about right for a high performance laptop. At full load and at high temperatures, the fan woosh can be heard. It's a little more than I expected, but considering the high performance GPU and CPU, I think it needs to be like that in order to keep it cool. The bottom has a wide array of cooling holes, more than I've seen before. The ZBook has 3 USB-C ports, 1 USB-A port, a round power port, 3.5mm headphone jack, and a microSD card slot. I love that it still has a USB-A port because many of my peripherals are still USB-A. I also would like Ethernet, but maybe that's asking too much. USB-C ports require all sorts of adapters and dongles, but at least it has 3 of USB-C ports. The microSD card slot is useful for transferring photos without needing a separate adapter. It also has a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is handy for conference calls. In addition, it has stereo speakers on the sides of the keyboard. Below the keyboard is a large trackpad and a fingerprint reader. The keyboard itself feels ok and has RGB lighting. The laptop comes preinstalled with software to fully control the RGB lighting, like giving it different colors or patterns and animations. For a workstation laptop, it has pretty good performance and a good display.