HP’s latest ZBook Fury G1i laptops were announced on March 18 at HP’s Amplify conference in Nashville. Coming in both 16 and 18-inch variants, this desktop replacement workstation features desktop-class components for unrivaled power and a quick latch for easy repairs and upgrades.
The new ZBook Fury lineup isn't available to buy yet, but I got my hands on a pre-production model of the ZBook Fury 18 G1i, and it's blown past my initial expectations of just how powerful it could be. I’m not sure any workload I can create is enough to push this machine anywhere near its limits.
While this is far from a final verdict on the ZBook Fury, it does seem like a strong contender for our best workstations.
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Specs
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Pricing and configurations
The ZBook Fury 18 G1i’s starting configuration includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX processor with a 4.5GHz max turbo frequency for its 12 E-cores, a 5.2GHz max turbo frequency for its 8 P-cores, and 36MB L2 cache. The Core Ultra 7 255HX chipset includes an integrated Intel Graphics tile, and an Intel AI Boost NPU with up to 13 TOPS of processing power. The base configuration also features 512GB of M.2 storage, and an 18-inch, 2560 x 1600, anti-glare flat LCD display.
The Fury G1i can be upgraded to an Intel Core Ultra 7 265HX processor (4.6GHz max turbo frequency for the 12 E-cores, and 5.3GHz max turbo frequency for the 8 P-cores), or an Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor (4.6GHz max turbo frequency for the 16 E-cores, 5.5GHz max turbo frequency for the 8 P-cores, and a 40MB L2 cache).
The base ZBook Fury 18 configuration features integrated Intel graphics. Still, discrete GPU options will range from the Nvidia RTX Pro 1000 Blackwell Generation Laptop GPU with 8GB of DDR7 VRAM to the RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell Generation with 24GB of DDR7 VRAM.
The ZBook can be configured with up to 4TB of storage and up to 128GB of DDR5 ECC memory or 192GB of DDR5 non-ECC RAM.
HP has not announced pricing information for the ZBook Fury 18 G1i, likely due to the volatility of the US tech tariffs and the ZBook's status as a professional workstation laptop.
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Design
The Fury 18 G1i is an absolute beast of a laptop.
The ZBook Fury 18 G1i sports the classic HP ZBook look, with a minimalist, Nouvelle Silver chassis and an inset HP logo on the top cover. The keyboard deck is also clean, with a latticeless keyboard, large palm rests, and a massive touchpad with discrete buttons. It’s not the flashiest or sleekest design considering the sheer magnitude of the laptop, but it is perfectly suitable for a professional environment.
The Fury 18 G1i is an absolute beast of a laptop. With an 18-inch display and desktop-class components, it’s not a slim desktop replacement. The Fury is not a laptop designed for the daily commute, measuring 15.88 x 11.41 x 1.10 inches and weighing at least 7.78 pounds. It’s portable enough, so if you need to move desks or take it to a meeting, you can, but it’s not the kind of laptop you’ll want to bring on a plane or for working on your commute to and from the office.
The Fury 18 is the first HP workstation in the 18-inch class and it's also the first of it's size we’ve looked at here at Laptop Mag. We’ve traditionally opted for 16-inch workstation laptops for their increased portability. Making the ZBook Fury 18 G1i seem even less portable in comparison to other ZBook workstations like:
- HP ZBook Studio 16 G10: 14.02 x 9.54 x 0.76 inches, 4.2 pounds
- HP ZBook Studio 16 G11: 14.02 x 9.54 x 0.76 inches, 4.1 pounds
- HP ZBook Fury 16 G9: 14.3 x 9.8 x 1.09 inches, 5.38 pounds
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Ports
As a professional workstation laptop, the ZBook Fury 18 G1i comes with plenty of ports to connect to all your devices:
- 2x Thunderbolt 5 (with power delivery, DisplayPort 2.1, 8pGbps signaling rate)
- 1x Thunderbolt 4 with USB Type-C (with power delivery, DisplayPort 2.1, 40Gbps signaling rate)
- 1x USB Type-A (10Gbps signaling rate)
- HDMI 2.1
- 1x Power connector
- 1x Audio combo jack
- 1x RJ-45 Ethernet jack
- 1x Smart card reader
- 1x SD card reader
- 1x HP Tamper Lock slot
With multiple DisplayPort 2.1 connections, Thunderbolt 4 and 5 connectivity, and a USB Type-A port alongside a Smart card reader and an SD card reader, you’re unlikely to need more ports for the ZBook Fury. But if you need additional SD card slots or Thunderbolt ports, you may want to snag one of the best laptop docking stations or USB-C hubs.
See also: Thunderbolt 5 is set to change how you literally see your laptop display
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Battery life
For all that Intel’s Arrow Lake processors are designed to be more energy efficient, they’re still powerful chipsets. The Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor in our ZBook Fury 18 model operates at a base power of 55W (watts), with the Fury designed to take full advantage of its maximum turbo power of 160W. Combined with an Nvidia RTX Pro 3000 Blackwell Generation GPU rated for 60-140W of power, the ZBook Fury would never offer the battery life you want for a great on-the-go workstation.
I didn’t see a huge performance drop with the ZBook Fury operating on battery power
The Fury is a portable workstation designed to be used connected to AC power typically, so its battery life isn’t great. Rather than handle my usual daily workload, I instead tested out the ZBook Fury’s battery life by doing some vacation photo editing from a recent trip. I did some color and exposure correction and cropping on 20 photos for an hour, which cost me about 20% battery. While not awful, it’s certainly not indicative of benchmark-breaking battery life.
That said, I didn’t see a huge performance drop with the ZBook Fury operating on battery power, which is nice. Of course, that eats away at battery longevity, but it means you’re not sacrificing all of the discrete Nvidia Blackwell GPU’s power if you need to break out the Fury when in the field.
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Display
The ZBook Fury 18 G1i has only one flat LED panel option, a matte, 2560 x 1600, panel with a 165Hz refresh rate. But don’t let the lack of options fool you. The 18-inch 1600p display is a gorgeous, vibrant display.
The Fury’s matte LED display is calibrated to cover 100% of the DCI-P3 color space, and based on what my eyes can pick up, it’s almost certainly capable of hitting that threshold.
With a refresh rate of 165Hz, the Fury’s display is easy on the eyes, causing less strain due to screen flicker.
The Fury 18’s LED display showcased the striations of mineral deposits of the Kilaeua volcano crater in Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park. The display features enough contrast to capture the details inside Kilauea’s lava tubes, while still capturing the vibrant red of Mauna Kea’s cinder cones.
With a refresh rate of 165Hz, the Fury’s display is easy on the eyes, causing less strain due to screen flicker. It’s also ideal for video editing at framerates above 60fps (frames per second).
The ZBook Fury 18 G1i is powerful enough and has enough ports to handle multiple monitors. So if the onboard 18-inch panel isn’t enough for your needs, the Fury can power a 4K, 5K, or even 8K monitor if you need the extra pixels.
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Keyboard and touchpad
The ZBook Fury 18 G1i, like most of HP’s ZBook line, features an HP Z Keyboard with quietKey switches. The Fury 18 G1i opts for a latticeless, full-sized keyboard with a number pad. The Z Keyboard has a nice click activation and solid bounce, but it is quiet enough to fit into a professional environment without causing distractions, the way a louder, mechanical switch can.
The Z Keyboard has a nice click activation and solid bounce
On the 10fastfingers.com advanced typing test, I averaged 87 words per minute (wpm), which is just below my 88WPM average on the Apple MacBook Pro 14. That’s a pretty shallow learning curve considering the size difference between the MacBook’s smaller keyboard and the Fury’s massive deck.
The touchpad is large and slightly offset on the keyboard deck due to the numpad, and features three discrete buttons. The glass touchpad has a silky feel for precise gestures, and the touchpad buttons offer a satisfying physical click. You can also use tap gestures to control the ZBook Fury, but for workstation users, having physical click buttons makes more sense, given how specific certain creative programs can be.
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Performance and heat
Because our ZBook Fury 18 G1i laptop is a pre-production sample, we couldn’t accurately benchmark it to get a good idea of its performance compared to other workstations. The Fury was running a Windows 11 Pro test build with early sample drivers for its Nvidia RTX Pro Blackwell Generation GPU, so any benchmark results may not have accurately represented the laptop’s performance once it's available on the market.
That said, I did run the laptop through SPECworkstation 4 and Blender Benchmark suites to see if I could push the Fury to its limits during any of the intense workloads since my vacation photo editing session was hardly enough to kick the fans on. It was only once the Fury had hit the HandBrake 8K and 4K tests during SPECworkstation 4 that the fans kicked on, and even then, they were barely noticeable over the general Laptop Mag office chatter.
Based on this first early glimpse at what the ZBook Fury is capable of with its powerful Intel Arrow Lake HX processor, the Fury can tackle complex workloads with robust single-thread and multithread performance.
And if my brief testing experience with the Fury 18 is a fair representation, it’ll even stay relatively cool while handling complex data science and 3d modeling workloads.
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: Graphics and gaming
After I saw the Fury 18 G1i at HP Amplify, I’d joked that I would need to learn how to animate in Blender to actually put this laptop to the test, and it looks like I was right.
While I do the occasional photo and video editing, my general needs don’t really require a beefy workstation-class GPU. And the Fury absolutely sped through the Blender benchmark and SPECworkstation 4 GPU tests with impressive results, though certain workloads did seem to put at least some stress on the Fury, like SPEC’s Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, CATIA, and Creo Parametric benchmarks.
The ZBook completed a run of the entire SPECWorkstation 4 suite in short order, with minimal fan noise across the entire suite. While the results of my brief benchmark testing aren’t likely to be completely accurate with the full production model of the Fury, the scores I did see were impressive.
In almost all of the industry vertical segments, the ZBook Fury met or exceeded the SPECworkstation 1.0 ratio, solidifying the ZBook Fury as HP’s premier powerhouse workstation.
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: AI features
With its Intel Arrow Lake chipset, the HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i does have a small Intel AI Boost NPU onboard. It also has a powerful Nvidia Blackwell Pro GPU, so you can run various AI workloads on all three hardware accelerators.
The ZBook Fury G1i only has a few pre-installed AI features, like the Microsoft Copilot assistant and Windows Studio Effects like automatic camera framing, eye contact correction, and background blur.
Since it has an Intel Arrow Lake processor, the ZBook Fury does not meet the Copilot+ requirements, meaning it misses out on some Copilot+ exclusive features like Live Captions, CoCreate, and Recall.
That said, as an Intel laptop with an AI PC chipset, the ZBook Fury can run Intel’s AI Playground software for additional AI features. This gives you access to Llama, OpenVino, Juggernaut, and DreamShaper 8 models upon installation, but you can also feed additional LLM models to Intel AI Playground, including DeepSeek and Microsoft Phi-4.
HP ZBook Fury 18 G1i: What's next?
if you need a mobile workstation with desktop-class power, the ZBook Fury looks like a winner.
This is still just an early look at what the ZBook Fury 18 G1i is capable of, based on the time I spent with a pre-production sample. So it’s not our definitive review of the laptop, but if you’re looking for an immensely powerful but still mobile workstation, the ZBook Fury is one to watch.
However, if you’d rather go for a more portable workstation, HP is expected to revamp the ZBook Studio line with the latest processors later this year. The company has also launched the HP ZBook Ultra 14 G1a, which features AMD’s innovative Ryzen AI Max processor. As an ultra-thin and lightweight 14-inch workstation, it’s a clear MacBook Pro competitor.
However, if you need a mobile workstation with desktop-class power, the ZBook Fury looks like a winner.
