HP Z8 G5From real comments

Name: HP Z8 G5
Rating: 5 (8 reviews)

Verdict distilled from 8 mentions across 1 aspects in comments under product review videos.

Positive sentiment100%

PROS 100%

Rank based on 8 mentions across 1 aspects

View the verdict as

Buy this if...

You need professional-grade multi-GPU rendering or CFD/simulation power
You value HP's build quality and long-term reliability for years of continuous use
You work in VFX, broadcast graphics, or architecture and need serious workstation muscle

What users love

Exceptional rendering speedKey factor0 mentions

Strongly positive

Skip this if...

You're a gamer who doesn't need workstation-grade double precision or multi-GPU support
You're budget-conscious and can't justify a $7,000-13,000+ price tag
You don't want to pay extra for optional networking or Thunderbolt add-ons

What users complain about

No cons data available.

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Based on user comments

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HP Z8 G5

Exceptional rendering speed

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Exceptional rendering speed

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Premium included cables

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HP Z2 Tower

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Rendering performance
1. HP Z8arrow_upward10
2. Lenovo ThinkStation P620arrow_upward3

Overall Impression

Rendering performance is the headline strength of the Z8 G5. Multiple commenters, including professional Blender and VFX users, were stunned by how fast complex scenes rendered, sometimes in mere seconds. Data scientists and CFD engineers note the multi-GPU configuration with up to 192GB combined VRAM enables workloads far beyond typical desktops. Users who work with render farms and broadcast graphics say these speed gains compound significantly over long animation or production jobs, saving real hours of work time.

Build quality and cooling design earn near-universal praise. Commenters repeatedly highlight the proprietary cooling shrouds, GPU brackets, and overall chassis engineering as thoughtfully designed rather than 'slapped together,' with several IT techs vouching for durability during GPU swaps and servicing. Long-term owners of older Z-series machines report units running for 5-10+ years without failure, often repurposed as servers. Several praise HP's case design and serviceability compared to competitors like Dell.

The price tag is the machine's biggest sticking point. Commenters consistently note configurations costing $7,000 to over $13,000, with some optional features like 10G Ethernet and Thunderbolt costing extra on top. An architect and a data scientist both joke about being unable to afford the hardware despite wanting it for their work. Several commenters console themselves by planning to buy similar Z-series machines secondhand in several years once prices drop dramatically.

Outdated / Not-accurate data?

speedExceptional rendering speedKey factor

8 mentions

Strongly positive

Multiple Blender and VFX users were amazed at how quickly the Z8 G5 completed renders, with full path-traced scenes finishing in seconds. Professionals note that these speed gains add up substantially across animation and production workloads.

@NaughtMax

The main benefit of those renders being a few seconds faster than a normal workstation isn’t just that you can see it basically render quality in your window, but those faster render times add up over time, ie, rendering animations. So what would just be like 5-10 seconds faster adds up pretty quickly to minutes or hours of time saved. Tbh I’d love to see LTT cover more workstation and productivity builds and compare stuff with that in mind. Focusing on stability, longer renders, animations, user experience in these standard programs like Maya or blender, simulations, etc. I feel like it’s a little difficult when you just have bigger bench marking numbers vs, this system would take 3 hours for this animation where as this one would take 1.5 hours. Or we experienced more crashes when using X build than Y when working on these scenes.

smart_display

March 30, 2023

@tookon3d

Animation renders might be useful for these kinds of systems. I would love to see 250 frames being rendered to benchmark etc.

smart_display

March 9, 2023

@ncl3rdy2

I use Blender professionally, and my single 4090 renders classroom @5.93 seconds. Though with NV Link those 4 GPUs should scale much better for extremely large scenes where you need more than my 24gb of VRAM. Still though that is a fantastic machine. And I am pleased to see a workstation covered on LTT. Let alone starting the video with some Blender renders. But ultimately for a Blender user, we spend most of out time in the viewport modeling, simulating, sculpting, texture painting, creating shaders, animating, and more. And then a lot of the time in my own work, depending on the scope of the project we switch between Eevee or Cycles depending on the time constraints, and overall final output desired. And more often then not we also work with the compositor built into Blender so we can render out fully composited frames directly at render time instead of having to go to Nuke, AE, or Natron unless absolutely necessary. \n\nThanks for the representation though LTT for us that do more than gaming!

smart_display

March 8, 2023

@BillLambert

For comparison, I just ran the same Classroom blender scene in 13 seconds on an RTX 3090 FTW3 (haven't touched the clocks). Obviously those A6000s have twice the VRAM so they can better handle huge workloads, but it's neat how close you can get with a last-gen \"prosumer\" GPU. What I'd really like to see on the Xeon-W is code compilation benchmarks. I'm not ready to decom my Zen2 Threadripper just yet, but it's nice to see Intel giving the HEDT/workstation market some attention after a decade of total neglect.

smart_display

March 8, 2023

HP Z8 G5chat_bubble_outlineFrom real comments

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Who wins on what

Rendering performance

auto_awesomeOverall Impression

HP Z8 G5From real comments

Buy this if...

What users love

Skip this if...

What users complain about

Overall Impression