Probook or envy?

[GordonHanYZ]

I need help about what laptop to choose. I need a laptop with a bit of gaming as I will game a bit such as fortnite, and I will be mostly creating with microsoft office 365 or adobe video editor. I will open alot of tabs so i need alot of RAM. Then, the storage will be SSD,if not it will be slow as a tortoise. 

[Cheyenne4]

Get a ZBook.

[David_J_W]

Arguably the best product for your usage mix is the ZBook Studio x360 G5. This gives you a hex core processor, the option of a nVidia Quadro P1000 GPU (which is the Quadro version of a GeForce GTX 1050, pretty much), the x360 form factor with 10 point touch and a Wacom Active ES active pen, SSD storage and up to 32GB RAM. At the top end of the range, especially if you specify the 30 bit (actually it's 8+2 bit FRC on each channel) 100% Adobe RGB DreamColor screen, it is unfortunately an expensive piece of equipment.

[EddyK · Accepted solution]

@GordonHanYZ, If I can chip in some advice, you could also consider a gaming laptop since these machines also feature equally powerful hardware at prices that may often be favourable to the extremely high quality workstations.

What I do want to say however is that a mid ranged consumer device (HP Envy) or a mid ranged business laptop (HP Probook) will most likely be far less than sufficient to meet the needs you've just stated, especially on the graphics side since they usually only have integrated graphics.

I own a Spectre 13 with Intel integrated graphics UHD 620 and use a cooling pad when doing light gaming. (Yes, I know. I'm doing gaming on the world's second thinnest laptop.) Anyhow, when I run Fortnite, even though the system is not thermal throttling and all graphical enhancements are turned off and general graphics settings are at minimal, I can only get a tops of about 40fps in-game. 

The needs you have stated will only be met with a somewhat powerful device that can easily dissipate heat and provide powerful graphics. It would most likely be a bit pricey. BTW, don't worry about the SSD part as high end machines should not feature HDDs as primary storage. That'd be weird if it did.

Hope this helps,

Eddy

[David_J_W]

I agree with your comments, @EddyK. I faced the similar decision as the original poster recently. I needed a device that had:

1. convertible form factor
2. active pen support
3. support for single cable docking including support for an external 30 bit 4K monitor
4. built in screen suitable for colour critical work with minimum of 2K resolution, ideally 4K
5. device suitable for video editing and other demanding Adobe Creative Cloud use
6. device suitable for running several virtual machines at once
7. device suitable for digital audio workstation software
8. support for two SSDs, as foreseeable future DAW use requires two SSDs for storage bandwidth

1 and 2 mean I need what HP call an x360 device with an active pen digitiser - most but not all x360s have active pen support. 3 means I need a business class machine (HP do not have docking stations as official accessories on consumer ranges) with a workstation dedicated GPU (consumer GPUs and integrated GPUs do not support 30 bit displays). 4 means I need an IPS screen (or other technology where the colours don't shift as you move your head around the screen) with wide colour gamut. 5, 6 and 7 taken together means I need a powerful 4 or ideally 6 core processor, dedicated GPU and ideally 32GB RAM (16GB is a minimum for a primary notebook for me). 8 is self explanatory.

The only way to do all this in one device is a high specification example of the ZBook Studio x360 G5 with a Thunderbolt G2 dock (either the 230W or Combo cable versions). My ZBook is Configured To Order and is maximum specification other than storage, making it an extremely expensive machine. On this model HP force you to take the larger battery if you have the dGPU so the 2.5 inch bay is unavailable. However, you still have two M.2 bays with NVMe support, which is all I really wanted (I would not have used the 2.5 inch bay even if it was free). You can order the system with a 2TB NVMe SSD in both bays for a total of 4GB. I currently have a 1TB NVMe SSD in bay 1 and bay 2 is empty. In the fullness of time, I will likely replace the 1TB SSD with a 2TB NVMe SSD (perhaps even larger, if they are available by then) and move the 1TB SSD to bay 2.

The Radeon RX Vega M variant of the Spectre x360 is worth considering if your requirements are not as high end as mine. This gives a quad core processor with a fairly powerful GPU on the same chip, as opposed to the six core processor and separate nVidia Quadro P1000 GPU in most ZBook Studio x360 G5s. As a consumer range system, there is no official docking support on the Spectre, though a Thunderbolt dock will likely work other than features like the power button, MAC address passthrough and wake on LAN, all of which require BIOS support.

One consideration on my part was that the ZBook would have better cooling than the thinner Spectre, meaning thermal throttling should interfere less with my use of the computer. However, it makes for a bulkier and heavier system. The ZBook is remarkably compact and light for the specification, but it is no ultrabook! I have a secondary system for scenarios where portability matters: a Microsoft Surface Go, which is right at the opposite end of the trade-offs inherent in specifying any portable computer. Both the ZBook and Surface Go are perfect for their respective roles. HP make some excellent x2 devices though at the time I ordered, the Surface Go narrowly came out on top.

As @EddyK says, a gaming laptop is worth considering and would be a great choice if your priority is maximum CPU and GPU performance at minimum cost. HP do not make an x360 or active pen gaming laptop to my knowledge, also gaming laptop displays will likely prioritise refresh rate over other parameters. Even so, it is worth considering.