The HP Z2 Mini G5 Workstation (starts at $1,289) delivers exactly what it says on the tin. This diminutive desktop offers all the power of a larger workstation, complete with the features and ports that professionals need for work. Our review model is configured way above the starting price (listed at $4,126 on HP’s site, but available for $2,174.40 at the time of writing), with an eight-core Intel Core i7-10700K processor, 32GB of memory, 1.5TB of solid-state storage, and an Nvidia Quadro T2000 GPU. The size (and the Core i7 rather than Core i9 or Xeon CPU) might lead you to assume the Z2 Mini lacks power compared with bigger systems, but it hangs with the rest for performance (and you can choose to configure the HP with one of those chips if desired). It’s expensive, but it’s also an uncommon proposition that does everything well.
Small Form Factor, Big Power
The latest rev of HP’s smallest workstation looks much like the last version we reviewed in 2018, the Z2 Mini G4. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to tell the two apart from their appearances, but you know what they say about not fixing what isn’t broken. We admired the small footprint and sleek design of the previous model, and the design is just as impressive here.
If you need to crunch the exact numbers on where you can fit this unit, it measures 2.28 by 8.5 by 8.5 inches. It takes up little more room than a desk lamp, making it a really nice pick for space-limited shoppers. It’s markedly more compact than even most small-form-factor PCs, though its bulky laptop-style power brick undermines this somewhat—the power adapter is about one-quarter the size of the whole PC. Vents at all four corners make up for the lack of internal airflow volume for cooling.
As with bigger workstations, there are many configuration options when ordering, though even the starting price is steep versus that of a family PC. The Z2 Mini G5 is aimed at professionals doing serious work; simpler workloads can get by with a more modest traditional tower or, if space is tight, one of our favorite mini PCs.
With an eight-core, 16-thread Core i7 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and two M.2 solid-state drives (a 512GB boot drive and a 1TB secondary drive), my test unit offers blistering performance, although its 4GB Quadro T2000 GPU rates only fifth among Nvidia’s mobile workstation solutions, lacking the ray-tracing capabilities of the Quadro RTX series. I suppose the most hardcore data-crunchers might prefer a Core i9 or Xeon processor, but we’ll withhold judgment for the testing section later.
The Apple-shaped elephant in the room is the new Apple Mac mini with the M1 chip, Cupertino’s new homegrown processor solution. If you’re already a Windows power user invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, you’re not likely to switch, so the Apple won’t be a consideration. If you are open to a macOS solution, you should run, not walk, to our Mac mini review, as the M1 CPU is extremely impressive. Unfortunately, it’s absent from our benchmark comparisons below, since we didn’t run most of the same tests and it wouldn’t be a useful point of comparison. Still, know that it stacks up well to Intel-based offerings and is worth a mention on its own merit.
Connections and Certifications
Almost as important as a workstation’s components are its ports, of which the Z2 Mini G5 has plenty. There are none on the front panel, where the power button is, nor on the right side, which is entirely blank. On the left flank, you’ll find one Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port, two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, and a headphone jack.
Around back, there are two more USB-A 3.1 ports, another Thunderbolt 3 port, an Ethernet jack, three DisplayPort connections, and a VGA port. The latter is a flex option you can choose while configuring; HP opted to send a unit with the old-school video output, but you can choose an HDMI port or another of any of the existing connections instead.
I wish our model had the HDMI port, but professional users with high-resolution monitors may only need DisplayPort connections. All in all, it’s a fine selection of ports, especially given the size of the box. If you’re peripheral-happy, you may find four USB-A ports too few, but combined with the two Type-C ports, they should be enough for most users. Our unit came with a basic USB mouse and simple USB keyboard, as well, but these are optional when ordering. As for wireless connections, the HP provides Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth support.
Alongside the ports and performance, the Z2 Mini G5 supports power users with crucial independent software vendor (ISV) certifications, cementing its status as a workstation rather than a standard PC. These certifications ensure optimized performance in key applications like the Adobe Creative Suite, computer-aided design (CAD) software, and more. This is essential for engineers, architects, and designers alike.
Finally, interior access is also incredibly simple: Flip a lock switch on the back, and you can pull the lid away from the base. The interior doesn’t give you much room to work with, of course, as the parts are engineered to fit just inside the small chassis, but it is accessible. The two cooling fans lift away from the motherboard via hinges, giving you an open lane to the SSDs. These are set in place with heatsinks over them, but they’re still the most easily removable parts for maintenance or upgrades. Everything else is screwed down and/or covered by the fan radiators, but IT workers can get to what they need with determination.
With all of that covered, the big question is: How does the Z2 Mini G5 perform? On to our tests.
Performance Testing: Punching Above Its Weight
Now that we’ve admired the Z2 Mini as a space-saving solution, we move to its speed. This is crucial for a workstation, and while you’re probably willing to concede some performance for such a small footprint, it remains vitally important for this product category. We’ve run our usual suite of benchmark tests on the Z2 Mini G5, pitting it against a mix of traditional towers, smaller builds, and all-in-one desktops. You can see their basic specs below.
Productivity and Storage Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests generate a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (Two of the systems failed to run the PCMark 8 storage test, thus the missing blue bars below, while the Apple iMac is absent from all our Windows-based tests.)
The Core i7-10700K does well enough in PCMark 10, but it’s not too surprising to see it trail the field here. The following CPU tests will push all of these processors further and give us a truer sense of their ceilings, but this is a glimpse of the gap.
Still, it goes without saying that the Z2 Mini G5 is ready for any everyday app or multitasking scenario you throw its way (even if the others are superior). Its SSD storage is also snappy, though not exceptional.
Media Processing and Creation Tests
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total execution time; lower times are better. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
I’ll get this out of the way first since it’s an impressive outlier: The Origin PC Chronos‘ AMD Ryzen 9 5950X chip, with its 16 cores and 32 threads, blows away the competition. That’s a top-of-the-line CPU in a pricey system, but anything goes in this high-powered category, and AMD’s modern edge in CPU-bound tasks is impressive.
With that said, let’s focus on the Z2 Mini G5. Despite its miniature size and Core i7 chip, the HP holds its own in these tests. In fact, it posted the second-best Photoshop time, and beat the Xeon processor in the Lenovo ThinkStation P520 in all three tests. It’s difficult to make things exactly equal given memory discrepancies (the HP has more) and thermals, but it’s still a positive outcome for the Z2 Mini. The 27-inch Apple iMac is the only consistently superior performer, aside from the Chronos.
Separate from how it stacks up in any head-to-head, the Z2 Mini G5 is a highly efficient workstation, even without considering its size. This performance is what you’re looking for in a desktop workstation, and shows that the use of a Core i7 chip doesn’t drag this system down to a tier below the rest. You’d expect a lot of power given the HP’s price tag, but part of its high cost is of course owed to shrinking this system down rather than going toward pure speed. If you aren’t strapped for space, you’ll find the other systems a better performance-per-dollar value, but presumably you’re interested in the compact size here.
Synthetic Graphics and Workstation Tests
UL’s 3DMark test suite measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the company’s eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.
3D performance isn’t necessary for all professionals, but many media creators and anyone who works with 3D models or animation will need power. The Z2 Mini’s Quadro GPU here isn’t as potent as the others included as it’s a mobile part, a fairly understandable casualty of the system’s petite size (no room for a full-size graphics card in this box). It delivers a moderate amount of power for raw 3D tasks like this, but the HP will be used less for these purposes (and presumably not for gaming) so let’s head to our workstation-specific tests.
The POV-Ray 3.7 benchmark uses ray tracing to render a three-dimensional image, though it’s worth noting that it doesn’t use the ray tracing features of Nvidia’s RTX-class GPUs—the test is purely CPU-focused.
Next is Cinebench R15’s OpenGL test, which taps the hardware rendering capabilities of the GPU.
The Z2 Mini G5 again performs well here, and somewhat surprisingly takes away the highest score in the Cinebench OpenGL test. A test like this is better optimized for a Quadro GPU, but even then, the ThinkStation also uses one, so credit to the tiny HP. These results again show that this system can be considered fully capable of workstation tasks despite its size, with only moderate performance drops as opposed to big speed compromises.
A Potent Space-Saver for Professionals
The HP Z2 Mini G5 impresses on all fronts, delivering true workstation performance in a small body. It’d be fair to assume some performance compromise, and there is a bit, but it’s not as big as you may expect. This system slugs it out with bigger machines, even those with Core i9 and Xeon chips.
Its non-discounted price tag may give you pause (though the Origin PC Chronos is just as expensive), but if you can match the sale price we saw, the cost is reasonable for what it offers. With the possible exception of a quibble about ports, there aren’t any obvious pitfalls for this system. Given that it succeeds at something uncommon with little room for complaint, it’s easy to recommend.
