HP Z1

The bazaar for all-in-one PCs has been ambrosial changeless over the accomplished year or so, with Apple’s iMac and Sony’s VAIOs at the top of the heap, a assembly of cheaper and beneath ambrosial machines below, and adored little innovation. HP’s Z1 changes all that, with one of the a lot of agitative anatomy designs we’ve seen.

Initially, it looks like any added all-in-one: it’s a awning on a angle with a computer clamped to the back. Press the blooming button on the hinge, however, and the Z1’s 27in IPS awning can be agee to a accumbent position. A quick tug on two tabs at the basal of the screen, and the affectation lifts up like a car bonnet, absolute the PC’s insides.

It’s the Z1’s affair section and it’s acutely impressive. The awning lifts up calmly on its own hydraulic butt – so the lid aswell closes acclaim – and the PC’s apparatus are laid bare, a lot of of them in proprietary caddies and enclosures.

On the left-hand ancillary is the ability supply, housed in a long, attenuated metal shroud, and it’s affiliated to the PC with a accepted 24-pin ATX ability plug. The cartoon agenda is a adaptable allotment army on a desktop-style agenda and affiliated to the lath via an MXM PCI Express x16 slot. Beside that is the harder disk, which is captivated in a artificial caddy that pivots in and out of the case, and aswell central is a disposable heatsink and optical drive.

Almost all the capital apparatus can be removed with a quick tug of a blooming tab; a Torx screwdriver will be bare to abolish the Intel Xeon processor and its heatsink. The motherboard itself is accessible, too: the DIMM sockets and SATA ports are simple to access, and the adaptable Wi-Fi dent sits in a mini-PCI Express x1 aperture with two added of these baby ports chargeless alongside it.

HP’s able architectonics extends added than the disposable components. There’s alone one 3.5in harder deejay enclosure, but it’s home to two accumulated SATA and ability connectors, with abutment for RAID0 and 1 included, so in access you could install a brace of 2.5in drives. Alas, there are no preinstalled fittings, so this access would crave DIY bodging. Elsewhere, two daughterboards are apprenticed into service: one for the USB sockets, agenda clairvoyant and audio access on the right-hand side, and addition for the four baby speakers at the foreground of the machine. There’s even a accessible diagram of the internals on the central of the lid.

It’s all put calm acutely well, with cables hidden and baffled amid components, and we can’t accountability the body quality: the huge angle and athletic asylum accomplish for a solid-feeling machine. Its arduous aggregate agency the act of affective the awning up and down requires a bit of muscle, though.

Don’t for one minute anticipate the centralized architectonics is the Z1’s alone ambrosial feature: the IPS console is a admirable section of work. It measures 27in from bend to corner, sports a resolution of 2560 x 1440, and detail is pin-sharp. There’s no assurance of backlight drain and we accept no issues if it comes to quality. The 473cd/m2 best accurateness makes for a console that’s ablaze after endangering your retinas, and the adverse arrangement of 637:1 is fine. Colour accurateness is accomplished acknowledgment to a Delta E of 2.1 – bigger than about aggregate abroad out there, and a accomplished antithesis for the analogously accomplished iMac.

HP has defined the Z1 accordingly. Our analysis sample is powered by an Intel Xeon E3-1280, which uses the 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture, boasts four Hyper-Threaded cores, and runs at 3.5GHz with a 3.9GHz Turbo Boost. That’s a almighty CPU, and its appliance criterion account of 1.02 is in band with the achievement we’ve apparent from top Ivy Bridge customer chips. It’s abundant to put paid to a lot of ambitious tasks, and is assisted by 8GB of RAM, a 1TB harder deejay and a DVD writer.

The Quadro 3000M is one of Nvidia’s beefiest laptop cartoon cards, with 240 beck processors and 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. We loaded up the workstation cartoon criterion SPECviewperf 11 and recorded an boilerplate anatomy amount of 26fps beyond its eight alone tests.

No amount what we threw at it, the HP kept its air-conditioned – absorbing accustomed the bound borders of its all-in-one chassis. The processor ailing at 81C – a little hot, but not alarming – and the cartoon card’s top temperature of 45C is altogether manageable. There are a brace of hot spots on the exterior, with a lot of calefaction artifice through vents at the top of the chassis, but we’re admiring that little babble escapes the Z1’s shell.