HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 Review

Both HP and AMD recently made a big fuss about the launch of the new ZBook. It strives to be an Ai-laden, ultraportable, workstation-grade, business-focused powerhouse for demanding professionals who need very high performance on the move. The recent launch event showed it doing everything everything from running a sim-racing rig to CAD design. It will certainly be overkill for most laptop users, but we were keen to put it through its paces and see which niche-buyers lists it should appear upon plus, how far up them should HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 go?

Table of Contents

• HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 Specs
• Features, Ergonomics and Design
  • Connectivity and Ports
  • Software
• Performance
  • General Computing & CPU Tests
  • Graphics & Gaming Performance
  • Gaming Benchmarks
  • Cooling
• Portability and Battery Life
• Price and Availability
• Conclusion: Should You Buy the HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14?
• Awards

HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 Specs

Features, Ergonomics and Design

The ‘Meteor Silver’ HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 looks like a regular, nondescript 14-inch ultraportable with a sober-looking grey keyboard. However, you only have to touch it to feel the difference – the aluminium chassis is incredibly stiff and robust, the hinges are high quality and there’s nothing rattly about the keyboard or trackpad. The HP moniker on the lid is glossy but that’s the only external design flourish as it’s otherwise understated and corporate – something that the target buyers will appreciate as they won’t want to draw attention to a laptop like this.

Opening it up reveals the 14-inch, 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, IPS screen. The modest resolution means you don’t have to squint at text on it and the matte finish ensures that reflections don’t mess with your eyes. It’s not the most colourful but its not dull either. When interacting with multimedia, I noticed that while contrast was generally good, and true-black approached being true black, it’s not HDR compatible and details could get lost in both highlights and shadows. Both gradients and transitions were rendered very smoothly though – whether black and white or in colour – which is unusual for a non-HDR screen.

It only has a standard 60Hz refresh rate and this marries with a sluggish pixel response time to make fast-moving objects appear blurry – but only fast-and-frantic gamers would object.

Above the screen is a 1,440p webcam which offers very good clarity and noise reduction, even in low-light. I’m disappointed to see HP’s Enhanced Lighting app get removed though – this superimposed a virtual ring light on the screen which could be adjusted for brightness and colour temperature. It’s an excellent practical way to enhance an image with real-world lighting.

Still, it’s been replaced with the Poly Camera Pro app which enhances the image in a similar way, but by using Ai. To be fair the effects are almost similar, but I prefer the genuine lighting. However, the Poly app also brings with it useful features like watermarking, a contact details overlay, upscaling to 2,160p (4K) resolution, image-layering effects and motion tracking. It’s all potentially very useful. There’s also the (nowadays) usual background and blur effects and the Ai (mostly) does a great job of making it look like where your background suggests you are.

The camera itself also has a special sensor that uses Ai to blur the screen if someone is peeking at your screen, or if you look away. It’s very impressive.

The dual-microphone array is capable of capturing very clear audio and is augmented further with (yet more) Ai noise cancellation.

The Ultra G1a’s speakers get very loud and mostly offer good fidelity – particularly at the high end. However, it’s worth noting that there’s a noticeable lack of bass.

The keyboard is a high-quality Scrabble-tile affair with well-weighted actuation and it’s comfortable and accurate to type upon for extended periods. That said, it’s got the worst kind of squished arrow keys on the market, with Page Up and Page Down keys squished-in together – a personal bugbear. The trackpad is smooth and accurate and has a very-well-weighted, high-quality, soft, quiet clicking action.

Ultimately, the market is laden with high-quality ultraportables with slightly better multimedia chops, but the ZBook Ultra G1a 14 is still very good to interact with, especially for professional tasks. In many instances this mobile workstation will be plugged into external monitors anyway, so the target market is unlikely to fret about any audio-visual niggles when streaming media on it.

Connectivity and Ports

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 7 and BlueTooth 5.4. That’s all the important ports covered and they’re the latest version too. Nice.

Software

HP implements its business-grade Wolf Security features on the ZBook which, for most users, adds more-robust malware protection and threat containment than Windows. It can use Ai to scan your laptop and detect unexpected suspicious activity. There are also secure-erase features and robust back-up options, plus anti-theft and location tracking features.

There’s also HP’s Ai companion which is a local, offline version of ChatGPT. Plus, it’s compatible with Microsoft’s useful CoPilot+ features.

A minor gripe is that the Ai Companion liked to activate itself independently and that one of the HP apps liked to wake the laptop up and update it even when Windows Update was disabled. This meant that, on a few occasions, I pulled a very (very) hot active laptop out of my laptop bag. As we were going to press, it decided to install a bunch of firmware updates it had sneakily downloaded and this may help the matter. It’s a minor issue, but I had to make sure it was shut down and not just sleeping when not in use. That’s a minor inconvenience and it’s not exclusive to HP laptops either.

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The most important facet of the ZBook Ultra G1a’s software is its certification with ISVs (Adobe, Microsoft, CAD platforms etc). This is a core distinction of being a workstation – it’s been extensively tested to be guaranteed to work with certain professional applications which is essential to those in the target market that can’t afford for there to be driver conflicts and software crashes.

Features, Ergonomics and Design Score: 4.6 / 5

Performance

Inside my review unit of HP’s ZBook Ultra G1a 14 was a new, 12-core AMD Ryzen AI MAX PRO 390 which operates between 3.2 and 5GHz across 24 threads. It’s also got a powerful integrated NPU (capable of 50 TOPS on its own) and integrated Radeon 8050S graphics. It also had 64GB of LP-DDR5x RAM which can be pushed to 128GB.

It’s also unified memory which can be manually divided between the CPU and GPU (in the BIOS) with up to 96GB being reserved for graphics. That’s twice as much as some high-end graphics cards. We couldn’t lock down the exact speed of the memory in our review unit, but HP says that its top-end SKUs (which are slightly beefier than our review unit) can hit 8,000 MT/s speeds using DDR5x-8533 RAM. It can’t match discreet GPU performance but that’s an extraordinary figure for integrated graphics and CAD and Ai professionals (who work with LLMs) should find this transformative. Our model also had a 1TB SSD.

General Computing & CPU Tests

In the general computing benchmark, PCMark 10, which tests all components of a laptop, the ZBook Ultra G1a scored 7,614 which is very impressive for a thin ultraportable. Score: 3.7 / 5

While we’ve been using UL Procyon Office Productivity test to test our laptops in 2025, Microsoft recently deprecated a video-merge component in the PowerPoint tests and now the scores are (UL tells us) some 5 per cent lower than before. As such, its score of 5,965 is currently presented for future reference. The G1a did successfully ran the multiplatform version of this test and scored, 213,000. That’s a little lower than a Lunar Lake laptop but there’s not much noticeable difference when it comes to office tasks.

In the Cinebench processor-based rendering benchmarks, the G1a scored 3,876 in the rapid R15 test and 24,409 in the longer R23 test. Again, these are very impressive scores for a thin ultraportable. Score: 3.8 / 5

In the UL Procyon Photo Editing test, which uses Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, the G1a scored a very impressive 7,923 which is better than many powerful gaming laptops can manage. Score: 4 / 5

In the Procyon Ai Computer Vision inference benchmark (Microsoft, CPU, Float 32 version) which makes use of the new NPU, the G1a scored 174. Frankly, I still don’t know exactly what that score means in the real world. What I can tell you is that it’s the best score we’ve ever seen in this test – and Ai-LLM engineers should like the sound of that. Score 5 / 5

General Computing & CPU Score: 4.2 / 5

Graphics & Gaming Performance

Graphics comes via the integrated AMD Radeon 8050S GPU which has 32 cores and operates at 2.8GHz – spicy for an ultraportable.

In the GPU version of the Procyon Ai Computer Vision benchmark, the G1a scored 517… which rivals (low-powered variants of the) Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU for the same test. Combined with the CPU and NPU, it seems HP is correct when it says the ZBook Ultra is ideal for working with LLMs and such like. These Ai scores are significantly better than the Lunar Lake equipped HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14. Score: 2.9 / 5

I also ran the GPU version of the UL Procyon Video Editing benchmark which uses Adobe Premiere to encode videos. It scored 20,560 which is bang on average for any form of computer and outstanding for a thin ultraportable (Note: it scored 6,924 when performing the test with the CPU). You won’t want to rely on it for daily feature film creation, but it’s a great mobile studio. Score: 2.5 / 5

Gaming Benchmarks

Starting with the difficult, 1,440p, 3DMark ray-tracing benchmarks, Speed Way and Port Royal (which are for powerful gaming PCs) the ZBook Ultra G1a scored 663 (average 6.6fps) and 2,589 (average 12fps) respectively. Most laptops without a discreet graphics chip, won’t even play it, so the unplayable, low scores here are arguably better than having no score. Performance is comparable to what Lunar Lake laptops achieve, here. Score: 1.4 / 5

In the simpler, multiplatform, 1,440p, ray-tracing Solar Bay benchmark, which is designed for mobile computers, the G1a 14 scored 36,239 which is a very playable average of 137.2fps. The OmniBook managed 57fps. Score 2.4 / 5

In 3DMark Steel Nomad, which is a multiplatform test that apes modern, 4K-resolution games (without using ray-tracing), the ZBook Ultra managed 1,364 which is an average of just 13.7fps. So, unsurprisingly, it’s not really usable for 4K gaming. Score: 2.2 / 5

In the lesser, 1,440p “Light” version of the same benchmark, it scored 8,116fps which is a playable average of 60.1fps. The OmniBook managed 24.2fps. Score 2.9 / 5

I also ran the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 benchmark. At default settings (automatically chosen by the game), it averaged 170fps at its native resolution. The lowest one per cent of frames (1% Low score) only dropped to 122fps meaning this AAA-title is very playable. I also ran it using Minimum settings with a Full HD resolution (our standard test) and it scored the same. The Omnibook, for comparison, managed 54fps with a 1% Low score of 41fps. This AMD chip is hecking impressive.

For reference, I also ran our legacy 3DMark benchmarks (none of which use ray tracing):

At the end of the day, the HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 is indeed a powerful, ultraportable beast – especially for power-user and Ai workloads. It’s also got some gaming chops too, just don’t expect it to play the latest and greatest eye-candy rich games with full detail settings at high resolutions. Also, remember that the not-quick screen means it will perform much better when using an external monitor. Indeed, at the launch of this mobile workstation, we tested it using a full Sim-racing rig – having such a slight laptop powering an enormous gaming set-up like that was extraordinary.

Graphics & Gaming Performance Score: 2.3 / 5

Cooling

Many AMD-powered laptops that I’ve tested have had a penchant for getting hot when under load – really hot. The ZBook certainly could do this too, but only when it woke up and unexpectedly found itself in a well-padded laptop bag.

But kudos to HP with the cooling technology used here. The vapour chamber and dual fans only ramp up to a moderately robust whoosh (plus a minor high-pitched whine when it’s really straining) and yet the base of the laptop barely gets more-than warm. For the most part it’s silent and cool. That’s very impressive. On top of that, the longer I ran the Cinebench R23 test, the faster it got. There’s no thermal throttling here.

Portability and Battery Life

HP’s ZBook Ultra G1a 14 feels bombproof thanks to its aluminium chassis which should easily protect it on the road. It’s only 19mm thick and weighs just 1.55KG, so, it’s only marginally bigger than other 14-inch ultraportables like its relative, the OmniBook Ultra. The beefier power supply and cables are more hefty than rivals though and tip the scales at 523g.

Still, you won’t always need it as the G1a ran our PCMark 10 Modern Office benchmark for an impressive 15 hours 27 minutes which is essentially two days out of the office. It also ran the UL Procyon Office Productivity battery test for 15 hours 2 minutes. We’re used to seeing other 14-inchers blast past 20 hours nowadays, but those aren’t nearly as powerful. Note too that the G1a provides fast-charging.

Portability and Battery Life Score: 3.2 / 5

Price and Availability

There are multiple SKUs of HP’s ZBook Ultra G1a 14 – with higher and lower-spec processors and memory ranging from 32GB to 128GB – and none of them are cheap. This isn’t just a cutting-edge, technological advancement in the AiPC space, it’s a pro-spec workstation with all the additional testing and certifications that go with that.

It’s also so new that Australian pricing hasn’t been locked down yet and we only have a New Zealand equivalent to go on: an eye-watering $6,455.

For the target market, the price will be irrelevant as the laptop will be a game changer in terms of how power-users can work. But mere mortals should check out the likes of the Omnibook which costs half as much.

Value Score: 2.4 / 5

Conclusion: Should You Buy the HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14?

The HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 has already garnered significant attention across the interwebs, owing to pre-launch coverage of its line-leading technologies that has succeeded in making it something of an aspirational laptop equivalent of an Aston Martin.

Most consumer ultraportable laptop buyers would be better-off buying a Lunar Lake-based notebook with superior battery life and better on-board multimedia chops. It’s overkill for most business laptop buyers, too.

However, for the target, professional, power-user market, the ZBook Ultra G1a is something of a landmark laptop that represents a great feat of engineering for HP and AMD. Such users won’t care about the price and will likely find ways of making it pay for itself. As such, it wins High Performance Laptops’ Highly Recommended Business Laptop award.

Overall Score: 3.6 / 5

Awards

Last Updated on 14 September 2025 by Nick Ross