The most demanding, hardcore users need the most powerful laptops on the planet. You probably agree. You probably think we’re talking about gamers and gaming laptops.
Actually, though, we’re talking about work, not play: applications such as computer-aided design (CAD), architecture, engineering, video editing and post production, 3D rendering and animation, virtual reality, and oil and gas exploration. The machines that take these tasks to job sites or conference rooms are mobile workstations—laptops in the top echelon of both CPU and GPU power to crunch through huge datasets and accelerate ultra-complex graphics.
Mobile workstations proudly wear their own brands, such as HP’s ZBook and Dell’s Precision families. (Lenovo’s entries carry their own letter under the company’s larger ThinkPad brand—the ThinkPad P series.) They can be breathtakingly expensive, but they can pay for themselves quickly as their users value the time they save. They’re built for reliability, with components capable of running flat-out 24/7. And they’re massive overkill for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—mobile workstations are not about spreadsheet recalculations that would take most notebooks a couple of seconds, but CGI effects that would take most notebooks forever.
Table stakes for mobile workstation vendors are what are called “ISV certifications.” The acronym stands for “Independent Software Vendors”—specialized software companies such as Adobe, Autodesk, Avid, PTC, Siemens PLMS, and Dassault Systemes, who work with the PC makers to guarantee that a given workstation and its graphics adapter, drivers, and other components are optimized for their apps. If you use a particular program in your job, such as Dassault’s SolidWorks, look for the proper certification before buying a system.
Is a mobile workstation right for you? Frankly, for most laptop users, the answer is no. But if you work in one of the professional fields mentioned above—or if your job involves waiting for calculations or graphics processing that takes your current notebook many minutes or hours—you can justify the expense and join the elite.
Before we get to some general components and choices you’ll face as you shop for a mobile workstation, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of our top-rated mobile workstations for 2023.
The Best Mobile Workstation Deals This Week*
*Deals are selected by our commerce team
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1
Best Overall Mobile Workstation for Most Buyers
Bottom Line:
Its price will scare off all but the most demanding design and engineering professionals, but—on sheer muscle and usability—Lenovo’s ThinkPad P16 is a tough mobile workstation to top.
PROS
- Blazing fast performance
- Gorgeous high-resolution screen
- World-class keyboard
- Impeccable build quality
CONS
- Bulky and heavy
- No Ethernet port
- Quite expensive
MSI CreatorPro X17
Best Workstation Laptop for Cost-No-Object Power
Bottom Line:
MSI’s CreatorPro X17 workstation laptop packs unmatched, ISV-certified performance for the most demanding projects. It’s pricey and too big to be portable, but if you want unbridled power, this is it.
PROS
- Category-leading performance
- Delightful 17-inch 4K display
- Eye-catching RGB keyboard
- Huge port selection
CONS
- Massive design limits portability
- Expensive in every configuration
HP ZBook Power G8
Best Entry-Level Workstation Laptop
Bottom Line:
The ZBook Power G8 may be the humblest system in HP’s current laptop workstation line, but it has nothing to apologize for.
PROS
- Potent CPU choices and PCI Express Gen 4 SSD
- Comfy keyboard
- USB4/Thunderbolt 4 port
- Strong security and remote access software
- Tile support
CONS
- Gets expensive quickly
- Screen falls short of HP’s DreamColor panels
- No SD or microSD card slot
- No Xeon processor or ECC memory option
Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch (2023, M2 Max)
Best Mac Workstation Laptop
Bottom Line:
Apple’s 2023 flagship, the MacBook Pro 16-Inch marries a proven, immaculate design with a fireball M2 Max CPU for fierce power in media creation, gaming, and high-end professional tasks. (Plus, it lasted nearly 27 hours on our battery test.)
PROS
- Unmatched laptop power
- Exceptional battery life
- Top-class mini LED display
- Apple’s best laptop design
CONS
- Expensive across the board
- Camera notch still takes getting used to
Dell Precision 5470
Best 14-inch Workstation Laptop
Bottom Line:
Dell’s Precision 5470 is a 14-inch laptop workstation that packs a punch, but you’ll give up some performance to get its class-leading mobility and battery life.
PROS
- Thin and light 14-inch design
- All-day battery life
- Great-looking, high-res 16:10 touch screen
- Up to 4TB of storage
CONS
- Lackluster workstation performance
- Adapter required for common ports
HP ZBook Firefly 15 G8
Best Workstation Laptop for Balancing Size and Portability
Bottom Line:
HP’s slim ZBook Firefly 15 G8 is a compelling mobile workstation for professionals and creators with 2D and mild 3D needs.
PROS
- Sharp 4K screen
- Thin and light design
- Impressive battery life
- ISV certifications
- Top-notch input devices and speakers
- Available with 5G WWAN
CONS
- A bit expensive for the performance level
- Tops out with a quad-core processor
HP ZBook Studio G9
Best Thin-and-Light Workstation Laptop
Bottom Line:
HP’s 16-inch ZBook Studio G9 is shorter on power and features than its contemporaries but otherwise a fantastic mobile workstation.
PROS
- Potent processing and graphics power
- Stunning 4K DreamColor or OLED display
- Choice of Nvidia’s professional or gaming GPUs
CONS
- No HDMI or Ethernet ports
- Only 720p webcam
- Formidably expensive
Dell Precision 7560
Best Workstation Laptop for CAD and Rendering Power
Bottom Line:
Dell’s latest and finest 15.6-inch mobile workstation, the Precision 7560, is a massively powerful and configurable choice for complex designs and large datasets.
PROS
- Punchy performance for demanding ISV apps
- Handsome 4K display
- Scads of configuration options including epic memory and storage
- Plenty of ports
- Wi-Fi 6E and optional 5G LTE
CONS
- Expensive
- Slightly awkward keyboard layout
- No OLED screen option
HP ZBook Fury 15 G8
Best Workstation Laptop for Display Accuracy
Bottom Line:
HP’s premier laptop workstation, the ZBook Fury 15 G8 with DreamColor screen is a gorgeous choice for design pros who can afford it.
PROS
- Beautiful 4K DreamColor display
- Scorching Core i9 processor
- Up to 128GB of RAM and 8TB of storage
- Available ECC memory
- Great serviceability and security
CONS
- Sky-high price when fully loaded
- Ultra-expensive GPU fails to impress
- Wi-Fi 6, not 6E
MSI WS66
Best Workstation Laptop for Non-Visual Data Analysis and Engineering
Bottom Line:
MSI’s WS66 challenges the finest (and priciest) 15.6-inch mobile workstations, but a subpar screen makes it unfit for 3D design, CGI rendering, or video editing.
PROS
- Swift performance for most tasks
- Relatively thin and light
- Fast graphics and networking hardware
CONS
- Disappointing display
- Only one Thunderbolt 4 port
- Lower memory and storage ceilings than other mobile workstations
- Mediocre keyboard and audio
Buying Guide: The Best Mobile Workstations for 2023
Buying Basics: Mobile Workstations
CPU and RAM. The rule of thumb here is to buy all the processing power you can afford. In the pro mobile workstation market, workstation-grade CPUs are an all-Intel world, centered around its highest-end Core mobile chips and its mobile Xeon processors.
While plenty of good gaming laptops, as long as they have a fast graphics card, can make do with a Core i5, mobile workstation shoppers should head straight for a Core i7, a Core i9, or even a Xeon, with as many cores and threads as are available. Here, you’ll want to look at the specific software that you mean to run on the machine for recommendations on what grade of CPU the vendor deems ideal.
HP’s ZBook Firefly 15 G8 angle
(Credit: Molly Flores)
A few entry-level machines, meant more for showing finished renderings to clients (or the boss) rather than producing the renderings themselves, feature quad-core processors. But most mobile workstations rely on beefy six-core-or-more CPUs, teamed with plenty of memory—16GB is a minimum, with 32GB not uncommon and 64GB is a popular ceiling. Again, your software’s suggested requirements should be your guide, but erring on the side of “more” here, especially for demanding applications, is a safe mistake to make. Again, let the software makers’ recommendations be your guide.
How To Buy The Best Laptop
Some Xeon-based systems support server-style error correcting code (ECC) memory, which can detect and fix single-bit memory errors. ECC DRAM is a mainstay in applications such as financial or scientific computing, where even the slightest internal data corruption cannot be permitted. That said, a requirement for ECC RAM is outside the mainstream for most ISV apps.
GPU and Display. As with gaming laptops, all but a handful of mobile workstations draw on the speed and strength of a dedicated or discrete graphics adapter rather than the integrated graphics built into the CPU. Nvidia’s professional mobile graphics chips have traditionally been found under its Quadro brand; AMD’s (seldom seen in mobile workstations these days) are called Radeon Pro (formerly FirePro). In 2021, Nvidia retired the Quadro name in favor of the A series and RTX A series, with chips like the lower-end Nvidia A2000 or high-end RTX A6000.
Though built to optimize different operations, mobile workstation GPUs give nothing away to consumer or gaming GPUs, like Nvidia’s GeForce line. In fact, Nvidia’s professional mobile flagship at this writing, the VR-ready RTX A6000, has more than double the display memory of the company’s elite GeForce RTX 3080 desktop gaming cards.
A couple of mobile workstations that emphasize light weight and portability have 14-inch screens, but most measure either 15.6 or 17.3 inches diagonally. Some vendors offer both full-size and thin-and-light 15.6-inch models, the latter trading expandability for easy transport. Full HD or 1080p (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution is a minimum, with 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) resolution a popular choice for graphics or animation work with room for onscreen toolbars and menus—or for 4K video editing.
(Credit: Molly Flores)
Color management—making sure that what you see on screen exactly matches a finished product—is often important for the kinds of tasks expected of a high-end mobile workstation. Screens such as HP’s factory-calibrated DreamColor displays come with software that lets you choose the Internet’s sRGB, print’s Adobe RGB, or cinema’s DCI-P3 palettes or color spaces.
Some Lenovo systems go further by having Pantone color calibrators on board: You select a white point (typically D65 for photography or D50 for prepress and graphic design) and gamma (tone response) value, then close the lid, which puts the screen against a palm-rest sensor. A few seconds later, an audible tone indicates that the calibrator has done its work.
Storage and Extras. Mobile workstation owners work with massive data files, so mobile workstations need ample storage. That typically means one or two M.2 solid-state drives teamed with one or two hard drives, totaling as much as 3TB or 4TB (at least for larger 17.3-inch models, which will have more room in the chassis for such a spread).
(Credit: Molly Flores)
For still more storage capacity, nowadays we don’t consider a workstation worthy of the name unless it has at least one Thunderbolt 4 port for high-speed connection to external drives and RAID arrays, as well as single or multiple high-resolution displays. If Thunderbolt’s daisy-chaining connectivity is too much of an investment for you, a growing number of desktop docking stations use the technology to provide one-plug access to ports aplenty.
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Finally, take note of the touch pad located in the palm rest south of the space bar. Many CAD and other workstation apps make use of three mouse buttons, so it’s worth checking to see whether a system has a middle button instead of only the usual two.
Who Are the Major Players in Workstation Laptops?
As we mentioned earlier on, HP, Dell, and Lenovo are the big dogs in the mobile workstation market. Don’t confuse the companies’ high-end business systems with workstations; although the term “workstation” has a generic meaning (a simple connotation of a “PC for work”), in the professional applications world it has a very specific meaning along the lines we’ve discussed: a high-end Core or Xeon CPU, a workstation-class Quadro, RTX A, or Radeon Pro graphics chipset, and ISV certification. As a result, you’ll want to look specifically at the three vendors’ ZBook (HP), Precision (Dell), and ThinkPad P (Lenovo) selections when comparison shopping. One other player, MSI, has also made modest inroads into mobile workstations with its MSI W and CreatorPro series of laptops; take a look at them as well.
Take note of an up-and-coming concept in the workstation world: a more generic GPU driver that is built around maximizing compatibility with creative apps. Nvidia is already doing this with its Nvidia Studio Driver(Opens in a new window), which works on both GeForce and Quadro GPUs. The driver doesn’t offer guaranteed compatibility like an ISV certification, but it’s tested against creative software from popular vendors. (A list of apps is published on the driver download page.) We’re seeing an emerging class of workstation-like Studio laptops hitting the market.
(Credit: Molly Flores)
Note that almost all workstation machines are traditional clamshells, but HP has experimented with workstation convertibles with its ZBook X2 (a detachable-screen model) and ZBook x360 (rotating 2-in-1) models, respectively. These are both worth checking out, as well, in the event that their unique-among-workstation designs mesh with what you do, but they’re mostly available just from third parties at this point. Clamshells rule this segment.
Don’t need quite as much power as these workstation beasts deliver? Also check out our roundup of the top business laptops and our overall roundup of the best laptops.
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