Intro
Hey guys and girls, hope everyone is safe and well? HP launched the ZBook Firefly G7 mobile workstation for professional business users wanting a balance of mobility and performance in a thin and light chassis. It’s the natural successor of the ZBook 15u G6 we reviewed back in April 2020. HP is marketing the ZBook Firefly G7 14 and 15 inch variants as a superior alternative to the 13 inch Apple MacBook Pro. Have they hit the bullseye? Let’s find out.
Design
If you ever come across a ZBook you know it’s going to be well put together. Typical ZBook with no flex on the chassis and very little on the display lid. It’s sturdy throughout and MIL-STD 810G tested for durability. However the Firefly dropped a point when my messenger bag shoulder buckle marked the paintwork off it.
If you compare the Firefly against the ZBook 15 G6, you instantly see the difference in size and weight. The HP engineers shaved off the weight of the Firefly to just 1.75kg or 3.86 pounds. One of the lightest workstations around.
The Firefly G7 is easy to get into the internals for upgrade options. Five screws and open up the bottom maintenance cover with a plastic spatula or a couple of suction pads. There are two available RAM slots, for up to 64GB DDR4 memory, a M.2 NVME SSD slot, an optional M.2 WWAN LTE slot and a removable battery.
Display
The 15.6 inch Full HD IPS anti-glare display panel is gorgeous with excellent contrast and creamy visuals. Colour accuracy is rated at 72% NTSC or 100% sRGB colour gamut. It shows when you fire up a visually stunning movie like James Cameron’s Avatar.
The display is excellent in sunlight too thanks to the bright 400 nits, allowing you to work from the garden if it’s a nice day.
Connectivity
On the left we have a Kensington Lock, USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A (with charging), a headphone/microphone combo and a smart card reader.
On the right we have a power connector, a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A, HDMI 1.4b, two USB Type-C™ (Thunderbolt™ 3) and an optional 4G sim slot.
Wi-Fi is taken care of by the Intel® Wi-Fi 6 AX201 (2×2) and Bluetooth® 5 combo card. Wireless speeds and coverage were excellent during testing and the Firefly worked happily with a bluetooth mouse and external speaker.
Keyboard & Touchpad
The Firefly has an excellent chiclet style keyboard that’s spill resistant with a drain hole. The keys are nicely spaced out with a full size enter key and separate numeric keypad for number crunching. The keyboard has two levels of backlighting and an option to customise some of the keys for launching a favourite application or website.
HP has included a pointstick with buttons, personally I would only use it for emergencies in cramped situations like a packed train or airplane. *Remember that! Fortunately the glass clickpad is excellent. It’s wide to accommodate the biggest banana fingers with multi-touch gesture support. Microsoft Precision Touchpad drivers ensure a precise and smooth pointing.
Audio & Webcam
The audio tuned by Bang & Olufsen gives a balanced and decent sound from the dual stereo speakers positioned above the keyboard deck. Whether you are watching Black Panther on Disney+ to listening to the Top 50 charts on Spotify.
The 720p HD webcam is surrounded by IR camera and sensor along with a dual array digital microphone. The video footage from the webcam is at best grainy, no surprise here. Good enough for Zoom or Teams if you haven’t died from video meeting overload.
Performance
This review model has Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake U-series processor in the form of the quad core i7-10510U running at a TDP of 15 watts. Clocking at a base clock of 1.8Ghz up to 4.9 Ghz with Intel Turbo Boost. Along with dual channel 16GB DDR4 memory and a fast 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ SSD, the Firefly is no slouch for most office tasks, web browsing and video streaming.
Working on Adobe Photoshop or illustrator is fine with the Firefly along with light editing on Adobe Premiere Pro, however 4K60 video encoding is slow even with the Quadro P520. As for CAD work, stick to 2D and 3D review of drawings only.
Benchmark scores show the Comet Lake processor is good for its class, not too far behind the i5-9300H and a touch ahead of the i7-1065G7. However AMD is still king of the castle with the Ryzen 7 4700U blowing the i7-10510U out of the water by up to 150% in CineBench results.
On battery mode, the performance drops significantly due to thermal management kicking in so keep it charged for heavy tasks. Talking of thermals, the ZBook Firefly stays cool the majority of the time and the single fan does a great job of keeping quiet. When the fan does come on during rare occasions, the fan noise is hardly audible.
Graphics
HP has partnered the integrated and antiquated Intel UHD Graphics 620 with the NVIDIA® Quadro® P520 with 4 GB GDDR5 dedicated memory. An entry level workstation GPU. The main benefit of the Quadro GPU is the certified drivers for Solidworks, Sketchup and Autodesk to name a few. Benchmark scores show that the P520 is nothing to write home about and it is mainly used for light 2D/3D viewing only. 3DMark Time Spy benchmark ran at very low and slow FPS during graphics testing.
Gaming
On the gaming front, the long awaited Microsoft Flight Simulator runs OK at low frames when it doesn’t crash and Wasteland 3 runs slowly. No surprise a warning pops up stating the Firefly is underpowered for the game. In general most new games will not run, so stick to 4 or 5 year old games instead.
Security
Naturally with a ZBook you’ll find an excellent range of security tools and features. For starters there’s a fingerprint reader, IR sensor for Windows Hello authentication, a webcam privacy shutter, Smart card slot for secure login and a TPM security chip.
On the software side, we have HP Client Security Manager Gen6 to hand hold you in securing your data, HP Security Essentials to protect against Malware attacks and HP Sure Start Gen6 to detect, stop and recover from a BIOS attack or corruption.
Battery Life
The Firefly has a three cell, 56 Wh battery giving around 10 hours video playback. In general usage I managed to squeeze 7 to 8 hours battery life on 50% brightness and better battery mode. Not bad if you are a power office user. With heavy Adobe Premiere Pro usage on max. brightness and performance mode, expect 2 to 3 hours life.
The review model came with a 65 W USB Type-C™ power adapter. There is a traditional AC power port if you want to free up the USB Type-C port. Fast charge capability is a bonus, filling up the battery from dead to 50 % in around 30 mins.
Top 3 Pros and Cons before buying the HP ZBook Firefly 15 G7
Lovely Display – It’s taken a long time to slowly introduce a display panel worth its price tag. This review model has an excellent screen with wide viewing angles, vivid colours and the biggest plus, 400 nits of brightness. Tip, make sure you don’t go for the 250 nits, 45% NTSC or Sureview models, worth paying a little more for the superior 400 nits, 72% NTSC display.
Quiet – The Firefly 15 is silent most of the time thanks to the power efficient i7-10510U processor and thermal management. When the fan kicks in, it’s not noticeable, allowing you to concentrate on the task ahead.
Flotilla of Ports – Considering its lightweight dimensions, the Firefly has managed to cramp some useful ports. Two Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C ports, two USB Type-A ports, HDMI, a smart card reader and even a slot for a 4G LTE sim.
To Intel or not to Intel? – With AMD killing it against Intel, should HP have offered a Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U and Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U Firefly instead of the Intel i7-10510U in a mobile workstation? I would argue HP missed the mark with using Intel rather than AMD in the Firefly 15 or at least offered an AMD version to users.
Quadro P520, really? – HP have marketed the Firefly as a compact mobile workstation, so the P520 with its low power consumption was a natural choice or was it? I would argue the better choice would have been the Nvidia Quadro T2000 based on the superior and much more powerful Turing architecture.
No SD Card Reader – I know for some it doesn’t matter but for us content creators, I did miss having a SD card reader for Photoshop and Premiere Pro tasks using the Firefly.
Competition
There’s healthy competition in the slim mobile workstation category. What are the alternatives to the ZBook Firefly 15 G7? In no particular order here are some to consider.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15v Gen 1
Dell Precision 3551 15 inch 2020
Apple MacBook Pro 13 inch
LG Gram 15
Dell XPS 15
ASUS Zenbook Duo Blue 14”
Lenovo ThinkPad T15p
Summary
The HP ZBook Firefly 15 G7 has an identity crisis. On one hand it’s supremely well built, excellent battery life, compact dimensions for a mobile workstation, decent display panel, plethora of security tools and a good typing keyboard. On the other hand, it’s been hobbled by HP’s choice of 10th Gen Intel core Comet Lake processors and awful NVIDIA Quadro P520/P620 combination. The AMD Renoir processor offers nearly double the performance at a lower price point plus the security features found in the Comet Lake U processors.
Also where does it stand in HP’s range of business laptops? The long awaited EliteBook 850 G7 with the same Comet Lake CPU and NVIDIA MX250 has just launched. For similar money to the Firefly models, you can buy the ZBook Studio G5 with superior Coffee Lake H processor and Quadro P1000/P2000 GPU’s.
If you need more Oomph and have a bigger budget, the HP ZBook Create G7 and Studio G7 models with more powerful hardware have launched too.
In the end, the ZBook Firefly 15 G7 is really a premium office power user laptop in disguise rather than a mobile workstation for serious Adobe, programming or CAD type work.
What do you guys think? Leave your comments and discuss below.
Hope you guys enjoyed the review of the HP ZBook Firefly 15 G7 laptop?