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apple's mac studio set a high bar for performance in a compact workstation but

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hp is here to say no way san jose or cupertino neat

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what is it glued it the z2 mini g9

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according to hp it is the world's most

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powerful mini workstation but then

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also according to hp that's a big load of horse poo

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so what exactly is it then

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well it's a sleek mini workstation boasting up to a core i9 12900k

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and NVIDIA a2000 graphics and those are

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some very impressive specs i mean clearly hp is bringing the heat

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the question is then can they keep cool under the pressure

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like i keep cool when segwaying to our sponsor

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on an explorer 2000 bundle learn more below or at the end of the video hp has

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gotten a pretty rough ride on this channel and deservedly so nearly every

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fascinating innovation they've brought to us has been spoiled by poor pricing

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arbitrary hardware limitations and anti-diluvian build quality sometimes

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all three they just can't seem to point the gun away from their foot maybe this

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time will be different but maybe it won't looking at the z2 mini g9's i o

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we're off to a reasonably good start here they offer a range of display usb

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Thunderbolt and network connectivity and they provide both a PCIe 4.0 by 8 half

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height slot with GPU support and a flex

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i o slot that can accommodate anything from extra display outputs or usb ports

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to serial ports though a likely use for it will be to remedy the inexcusable in

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my opinion absence of multi-gigabit networking in the base spec hp this is a

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workstation product and even at my purchase volumes two and a half gig

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Ethernet costs four dollars per chip the case can lie flat or be vasa mounted and

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if you want to get really fancy you can pick up a vertical mount and flip the

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logo around wow the front is all mesh for better airflow

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and hp helpfully points out that if you really wanted you could buy a whole

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gaggle of them and put them on a rack mount shelf neat first though we need to

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drag race it against the other most powerful mini workstation and see

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if there's any reason to buy one of these things let alone seven of them as

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configured rz2 mini g9 is nearly identically priced to the m1 ultramax

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studio spec for spec

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let's begin in apple's weakest category

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gaming hp pulls out an easy way wait

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what in shadow of the tomb raider the m1

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ultra beats it with the cheaper max tier

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tying the hp workstation boy this is not

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a good start and this trend continues in

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total war warhammer where again hp is bested by the mighty mac ultra the story

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flips with counter strike but this is mostly due to cs go running on opengl on

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macOS now obviously game compatibility isn't

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going to favor the mac but given that we're evaluating these machines as

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workstations our true objective in running games is to find the performance

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potential of the hardware and it is clear that hp's tiny workstation is

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limited by NVIDIA's a2000 a cute little GPU that can be thought of as a 3050 but

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on a 70 watt power diet with a whopping 12 gigs of vram and certified drivers

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for professional applications for high resolution video editing and 3d modeling

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a gaming GPU it clearly ain't so let's

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move on to productivity where surely the story will stay exactly the same in

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puget bench premiere hp loses to apple

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again though in photoshop hp does score

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its second win though it should be noted that puget

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bench relies on rosetta for photoshop on macOS so it's not really apples to

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apples after effects is another win for apple given we couldn't get the

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benchmark to run on rz2 mini g9 so we can just skip that i guess

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and as for blender well in CPU rendering

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it loses against the ultra in our bmw test and in gooseberry which raises some

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very interesting questions because we had a similarly configured test bench

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in our mac studio review that did win

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with a core i9

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in our GPU render testing rendering with optics wins every time but with cuda the

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mac ultra pulls ahead again as for synthetic productivity benchmarks

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in cinebench hp wins in single threaded performance but then fumbles in

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multi-threaded performance and the same goes for geekbench signaling the

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existence of a clear trend here core i9 12900k

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plus heat name a more iconic duo i'll wait oh yeah

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i guess the wan hoodie and when sweatpants from lttstore.com

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now it should be noted that our m1 ultramax studio is decked out with

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128 gigs of RAM but that's unlikely to

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heavily factor into the tests that we ran today

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what that means is that hp must have screwed something up in here

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to find out what we have to take a bit of a deeper dive inside actually

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we won't even really need to do that because like you we did a double take

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when we saw they were trying to pack a core i9 into this tiny three and a half

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liter enclosure i mean the mighty nhd15 can barely handle this

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CPU and it alone is four liters in

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volume did hp engineer a magic 240 watt

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cooling solution out of unicorn horns and leprechaun blood

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nope they didn't even try in fact you can see it right here there's a sticker

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on the cooler that says 125 watts so naturally the poor thing

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throttled hard throughout our testing in cinebench the z2 performs a whopping 30

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percent worse than the exact same chip on our test bench in blender our render

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times increased between 20 and 50 percent over our test bench and premiere

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pro we see 10 percent lower scores in puget bench with similar losses in

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geekbench this performance hit even bleeds into gaming where we see 10

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losses for the hp workstation in tomb raider warhammer and cs go

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we also took forza horizon 5 for a spin and saw

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again a 10 hit and even more damningly running the

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benchmark for an extended period of time drops the z2 mini g9's result even

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further why would that be you might ask surely the CPU is already thermally

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throttled and you're right but as it turns out thanks to hp's

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brilliant case design which provides next to no clearance for the GPU cooler

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the GPU overheats too that's right even

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our tiny little 70 watt GPU is

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throttling to the point where longer GPU renders complete 25

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faster on our bench compared to the hp

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it's just sad even cranking the GPU fan to a hundred

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percent which is well beyond the factory curve only delays the inevitable

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throttling and as for the CPU well we tried some simple adjustments to their

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cooling solution in an attempt to prevent hot air from recirculating

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inside the case and we were able to marginally improve our scores but what

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we really need is a way to adjust the fan curve something that hp

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either through their performance advisor software or the BIOS shockingly does not

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allow and it needs to be adjusted look at this we started up a benchmark this

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thing is running full bore right now and

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it's dead silent the fans didn't even spin up until after

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the CPU had already thermally throttled

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we tried every performance mode from quiet to high performance and they all

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behaved basically the same the only

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possible solution was to set the idle fan speed to 100 percent which

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unfortunately locks it at maximum which unfortunately is 7 000 RPM on this model

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which is loud as all hell and

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adding insult to injury the machine still

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throttles to demonstrate that this is a cooling

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problem rather than a spec problem we actually swapped out our core i9 with a

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core i7 12700k and in this exact system

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that i7 actually beat the i9 in

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rendering premiere and in cs go

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even our less power hungry CPU though it

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still throttled partially because hp's

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cut tang power limiting made yet another

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surprise appearance so sorry i gotta turn this off hp not only equips their

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workstation with insufficient cooling their workstation class motherboard

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can't even power the hardware anyway

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i mean knowing that hp employs some incredibly talented engineers it's hard

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for me to imagine what goes on behind the scenes for a train wreck like this

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to make it to market unlike LMG where you can watch the train

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wreck in slow motion behind the scenes on Floatplane.com rather than just

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imagining it let's come back around to hp's claim though that the z2 mini g9 is

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the fastest mini workstation in the world we called that horse plop before

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we even knew that the machine throttled like an aging white dude on a harley why

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because their qualification for that claim is that it is

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based on hp's internal analysis of

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non-gaming small form factor desktop workstations with between three to 20

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leaders a minimum three isb certifications configurable professional

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graphics and a dedicated workstation brand as of march 2022 good gravy i mean

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by that kind of logic based on my analysis i have the most subscribers on

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youtube of people with at least eight channels that make tech videos based in

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surrey canada and we haven't even started on the price much like the mac

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studio this thing is very expensive i mean i get it it's a business system so

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there is a premium and you do get some benefits from it the parts have

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undergone extra reliability testing it uses a workstation chipset ecc memory

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isv certification you know the whole corporate kit in caboodle but charging

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1100. for a 12 900k that is 500 over

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retail for the privilege of running it throttled that's just insulting

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hp this could have been a very sleek

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capable workstation and for less powerful components it still could be an

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excellent fit for your business but as configured it simply shouldn't exist

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guys need to get your stuff together everyone else if you enjoyed this bloodshed why not check out our video on

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hp's omen 45l pre-built it

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also had problems