apple's mac studio set a high bar for performance in a compact workstation but
hp is here to say no way san jose or cupertino neat
what is it glued it the z2 mini g9
according to hp it is the world's most
powerful mini workstation but then
also according to hp that's a big load of horse poo
so what exactly is it then
well it's a sleek mini workstation boasting up to a core i9 12900k
and NVIDIA a2000 graphics and those are
some very impressive specs i mean clearly hp is bringing the heat
the question is then can they keep cool under the pressure
like i keep cool when segwaying to our sponsor
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gotten a pretty rough ride on this channel and deservedly so nearly every
fascinating innovation they've brought to us has been spoiled by poor pricing
arbitrary hardware limitations and anti-diluvian build quality sometimes
all three they just can't seem to point the gun away from their foot maybe this
time will be different but maybe it won't looking at the z2 mini g9's i o
we're off to a reasonably good start here they offer a range of display usb
Thunderbolt and network connectivity and they provide both a PCIe 4.0 by 8 half
height slot with GPU support and a flex
i o slot that can accommodate anything from extra display outputs or usb ports
to serial ports though a likely use for it will be to remedy the inexcusable in
my opinion absence of multi-gigabit networking in the base spec hp this is a
workstation product and even at my purchase volumes two and a half gig
Ethernet costs four dollars per chip the case can lie flat or be vasa mounted and
if you want to get really fancy you can pick up a vertical mount and flip the
logo around wow the front is all mesh for better airflow
and hp helpfully points out that if you really wanted you could buy a whole
gaggle of them and put them on a rack mount shelf neat first though we need to
drag race it against the other most powerful mini workstation and see
if there's any reason to buy one of these things let alone seven of them as
configured rz2 mini g9 is nearly identically priced to the m1 ultramax
studio spec for spec
let's begin in apple's weakest category
gaming hp pulls out an easy way wait
what in shadow of the tomb raider the m1
ultra beats it with the cheaper max tier
tying the hp workstation boy this is not
a good start and this trend continues in
total war warhammer where again hp is bested by the mighty mac ultra the story
flips with counter strike but this is mostly due to cs go running on opengl on
macOS now obviously game compatibility isn't
going to favor the mac but given that we're evaluating these machines as
workstations our true objective in running games is to find the performance
potential of the hardware and it is clear that hp's tiny workstation is
limited by NVIDIA's a2000 a cute little GPU that can be thought of as a 3050 but
on a 70 watt power diet with a whopping 12 gigs of vram and certified drivers
for professional applications for high resolution video editing and 3d modeling
a gaming GPU it clearly ain't so let's
move on to productivity where surely the story will stay exactly the same in
puget bench premiere hp loses to apple
again though in photoshop hp does score
its second win though it should be noted that puget
bench relies on rosetta for photoshop on macOS so it's not really apples to
apples after effects is another win for apple given we couldn't get the
benchmark to run on rz2 mini g9 so we can just skip that i guess
and as for blender well in CPU rendering
it loses against the ultra in our bmw test and in gooseberry which raises some
very interesting questions because we had a similarly configured test bench
in our mac studio review that did win
with a core i9
in our GPU render testing rendering with optics wins every time but with cuda the
mac ultra pulls ahead again as for synthetic productivity benchmarks
in cinebench hp wins in single threaded performance but then fumbles in
multi-threaded performance and the same goes for geekbench signaling the
existence of a clear trend here core i9 12900k
plus heat name a more iconic duo i'll wait oh yeah
i guess the wan hoodie and when sweatpants from lttstore.com
now it should be noted that our m1 ultramax studio is decked out with
128 gigs of RAM but that's unlikely to
heavily factor into the tests that we ran today
what that means is that hp must have screwed something up in here
to find out what we have to take a bit of a deeper dive inside actually
we won't even really need to do that because like you we did a double take
when we saw they were trying to pack a core i9 into this tiny three and a half
liter enclosure i mean the mighty nhd15 can barely handle this
CPU and it alone is four liters in
volume did hp engineer a magic 240 watt
cooling solution out of unicorn horns and leprechaun blood
nope they didn't even try in fact you can see it right here there's a sticker
on the cooler that says 125 watts so naturally the poor thing
throttled hard throughout our testing in cinebench the z2 performs a whopping 30
percent worse than the exact same chip on our test bench in blender our render
times increased between 20 and 50 percent over our test bench and premiere
pro we see 10 percent lower scores in puget bench with similar losses in
geekbench this performance hit even bleeds into gaming where we see 10
losses for the hp workstation in tomb raider warhammer and cs go
we also took forza horizon 5 for a spin and saw
again a 10 hit and even more damningly running the
benchmark for an extended period of time drops the z2 mini g9's result even
further why would that be you might ask surely the CPU is already thermally
throttled and you're right but as it turns out thanks to hp's
brilliant case design which provides next to no clearance for the GPU cooler
the GPU overheats too that's right even
our tiny little 70 watt GPU is
throttling to the point where longer GPU renders complete 25
faster on our bench compared to the hp
it's just sad even cranking the GPU fan to a hundred
percent which is well beyond the factory curve only delays the inevitable
throttling and as for the CPU well we tried some simple adjustments to their
cooling solution in an attempt to prevent hot air from recirculating
inside the case and we were able to marginally improve our scores but what
we really need is a way to adjust the fan curve something that hp
either through their performance advisor software or the BIOS shockingly does not
allow and it needs to be adjusted look at this we started up a benchmark this
thing is running full bore right now and
it's dead silent the fans didn't even spin up until after
the CPU had already thermally throttled
we tried every performance mode from quiet to high performance and they all
behaved basically the same the only
possible solution was to set the idle fan speed to 100 percent which
unfortunately locks it at maximum which unfortunately is 7 000 RPM on this model
which is loud as all hell and
adding insult to injury the machine still
throttles to demonstrate that this is a cooling
problem rather than a spec problem we actually swapped out our core i9 with a
core i7 12700k and in this exact system
that i7 actually beat the i9 in
rendering premiere and in cs go
even our less power hungry CPU though it
still throttled partially because hp's
cut tang power limiting made yet another
surprise appearance so sorry i gotta turn this off hp not only equips their
workstation with insufficient cooling their workstation class motherboard
can't even power the hardware anyway
i mean knowing that hp employs some incredibly talented engineers it's hard
for me to imagine what goes on behind the scenes for a train wreck like this
to make it to market unlike LMG where you can watch the train
wreck in slow motion behind the scenes on Floatplane.com rather than just
imagining it let's come back around to hp's claim though that the z2 mini g9 is
the fastest mini workstation in the world we called that horse plop before
we even knew that the machine throttled like an aging white dude on a harley why
because their qualification for that claim is that it is
based on hp's internal analysis of
non-gaming small form factor desktop workstations with between three to 20
leaders a minimum three isb certifications configurable professional
graphics and a dedicated workstation brand as of march 2022 good gravy i mean
by that kind of logic based on my analysis i have the most subscribers on
youtube of people with at least eight channels that make tech videos based in
surrey canada and we haven't even started on the price much like the mac
studio this thing is very expensive i mean i get it it's a business system so
there is a premium and you do get some benefits from it the parts have
undergone extra reliability testing it uses a workstation chipset ecc memory
isv certification you know the whole corporate kit in caboodle but charging
1100. for a 12 900k that is 500 over
retail for the privilege of running it throttled that's just insulting
hp this could have been a very sleek
capable workstation and for less powerful components it still could be an
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
hp's omen 45l pre-built it
also had problems