HP’s compact Z2 Mini desktop workstations have long been favorites of ours. Though we found little wrong with the previous model, HP decided to redesign it anyway, and the subsequent Z2 Mini G9 (starts at $1,209; about $3,000 as tested) is the best yet. Intel's 12th Generation "Alder Lake" silicon brings vastly improved performance to this wee workstation, and the new model even finds room for an industry-standard replaceable graphics card. Naturally, a larger tower chassis will provide more expandability, but if saving space tops your list, so should the Z2 Mini G9. It easily takes Editors' Choice honors as a super-petite workstation.
Powerful Workstation Hardware, Now Byte-Sized
At 2.7 by 8.3 by 8.6 inches (HWD) and starting at 5.3 pounds, the Z2 Mini G9 lives up to its name. It's less than one-third the volume of a PlayStation 5, can be picked up one-handed, and fits in a shoulder bag.
Granted, the Mini G9's body doesn't hold everything; PCs this small inevitably resort to laptop-style external power bricks with no room for an internal power supply. The workstation comes with either a 180- or 280-watt adapter. Among mini PCs, the Intel NUC 12 Extreme Kit fits its power inside but is far larger (7.4 by 4.7 by 14 inches, about two and a half times the HP's volume) yet doesn't use a full-wattage CPU, sticking with 65-watt processors. The HP impressively scales to the 125-watt chips you'd find in full-size towers, such as the flagship Intel Core i9-12900K in our test unit.
An optional VESA mount allows the Z2 Mini G9 to sit under a desk or behind a monitor so it takes no desk space at all. For desk use, it can rest horizontally on its rubber feet or sit vertically in its included stand. Showing off HP's attention to detail, the Z logo on the front can be rotated to match the orientation. The power button is on the opposite side.
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Backplane connectivity includes three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two DisplayPort video outputs (for the Intel CPU's integrated graphics), and high-bandwidth 10Gbps Ethernet. The graphics card, a 12GB Nvidia RTX A2000 in our unit, offers four mini-DisplayPort video outputs. A Kensington lock slot and the power connector round it out.
The remaining ports are on the right side. A headset jack is common on all configurations, but you can tailor two of what HP calls "flex banks" with a variety of ports. Our unit's left bank has three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (one Type-C and two Type-A), all supporting power delivery.
Alternatively, the left bank can hold various other ports (serial, Ethernet, USB Type-A, or Thunderbolt) or video outputs (DisplayPort, HDMI, or VGA). The right flex bank is unpopulated here, but it can be configured with two more USB-A ports and a serial port. Depending on the ports you choose, the Z2 Mini G9 can support up to a remarkable eight monitors. The flex banks are removable and thus can be changed after purchase even if the system wasn't originally ordered with them. Overall, this little workstation’s I/O is impressive.
Upgrade to Your Heart’s Content
Getting inside the Z2 Mini G9's all-metal chassis takes seconds—just press a rear release tab and slide the top half of the chassis rearward. Security-minded owners can prevent access by using the Kensington lock slot. The system also has a tamper lock, which uses sensors to detect if the chassis is opened and automatically locks the BIOS.
Not a millimeter is wasted in the neatly organized interior. The eye-catching copper CPU heatsink uses a vapor chamber to improve effectiveness. Its cooling fan is generally well behaved, though the noise can be noticeable; you might get some looks in a quiet office while stressing this system to the max. In general use, however, the workstation makes little noise.
The left side of the chassis holds the HP's industry-standard graphics card. Now, you can't get too crazy; choices are limited to half-height, half-length cards powered by the PCI Express 5.0 slot, which limits the selection to 75-watt cards. The top choice is the 12GB RTX A2000 seen here. It's nevertheless impressive that a system this small accommodates GPU upgrades at all. (The previous Z2 Mini G5 did, but it used proprietary cards.)
Removing the graphics card reveals two M.2 2280 PCI Express Gen 4 slots. Our unit had a single 1TB solid-state drive (what HP calls a Z Turbo drive), a Micron 3400 that's essentially an OEM version of the Crucial P5 Plus. The SSD is properly covered by a heatsink. HP offers up to 8TB of storage (two 4TB drives).
To the right of the M.2 2280 slots is an M.2 2230 slot for the Intel AX211 wireless card, which supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. Thankfully, the card's antenna is built into the chassis, avoiding external protrusions. You can also see a heatsink covering the two DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM memory modules under the CPU fan, the latter lifting away after loosening two screws. The memory ceiling is 64GB (two 32GB modules).
All told, the Z2 Mini G9 is as serviceable as a mini PC could hope to be. Minus the tiny motherboard, nearly everything is standardized and user-upgradable. It almost goes unsaid that the HP's expansion possibilities are much more limited than those of even a small-form-factor or midtower, with just two M.2 storage drives and two RAM sockets. It's just something to accept with a system this size. You could at least alleviate its limited storage with an external Thunderbolt drive array or NAS.
For software, the Mini G9 has bloatware-free Windows 11 with just HP’s support apps installed. Remote workers can use HP's ZCentral Remote Boost to access the workstation from the road.
Mini But Mighty: Benchmarking the Z2 Mini G9
Our Z2 Mini G9 had a 16-core (eight Performance, eight Efficiency), 3.2GHz (5.2GHz turbo) Intel Core i9-12900K processor, a 12GB Nvidia RTX A2000 graphics card, 64GB of DDR5-4800 memory, a 1TB PCI Express Gen 4 solid-state drive, and Windows 11 Pro. It carries a three-year warranty and should cost about $3,000 when the system is available for custom order. For reference, a Core i7-12700K configuration with 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD goes for $2,469.
This configuration is topped out in all but storage, with the maximum CPU, graphics card, and memory options. The Z2 Mini G9 can be had for less with Nvidia T-class graphics cards, starting with the 2GB T400, or even just integrated graphics; you can add a graphics card later. CPU options start with the Core i3.
Buyers upgrading from older workstations should note that there are no Xeon CPU options; Intel has discontinued Xeons for entry-level workstations like the Z2 Mini G9 along with mobile workstations. Entry Xeons differed from Core processors only by their error-correcting code (ECC) memory support, now a moot point since many "Alder Lake" Core chips (including all K series) support ECC memory. A compatible Intel W680 motherboard is still required in order to use ECC memory, but the Z2 Mini G9 checks that box. (HP told me it has already started shipping Mini G9 ECC configurations.) An upside of no Xeons is that you don't need Windows for Workstations, reducing cost.
The Z2 Mini G9’s only real competition comes from Dell's Precision 3260 Compact. (See our review of the previous Precision 3240 Compact.) The Dell is even smaller, about three-quarters of the HP's volume, but is limited to 65-watt CPUs and therefore won't match its rival in sheer performance. It's still a viable competitor, though, especially if the Z2 Mini G9 is ordered with a 65-watt chip.
The system's niche nature meant I had to include some not-so-comparable systems in our benchmark charts. The much larger HP Z2 G8 Tower is the only other workstation to complete our new benchmark suite; the Dell OptiPlex 5490 All-in-One is a business-grade system, and the Maingear Turbo and the NZXT H1 Mini Plus are gaming rigs that are at least more compact than regular towers. The Z2 Mini G9 should excel just about everywhere against these systems except in 3D performance, where it's likely to outpace only the Dell.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The Z2 Mini G9 topped the charts in the storage test and did very well in the main test, where we look for at least 4,000 points for everyday office productivity. It almost matched the G8 Tower and the Maingear despite using a much slower graphics card.
Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The other tests are where the Z2 Mini G9’s Core i9-12900K shows its strength, even besting the Maingear's 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in Geekbench. Its high-bandwidth DDR5 memory and PCI Express Gen 4 storage also help, especially in Photoshop, where it dominated. (Be sure to read our Core i9-12900K review for the run-down on Intel's new hybrid architecture.)
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for desktops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
The Z2 Mini G9 unsurprisingly topped only the OptiPlex 5490, which uses low-power integrated graphics. Its Nvidia RTX A2000 is similar to the NZXT's GeForce RTX 3060, though with a much lower power ceiling. It's not up for arduous VR or CGI rendering but suitable for mild 3D tasks and GPU acceleration, and its 12GB frame buffer makes it a practical choice for video editing.
Workstation Tests
We measure workstation graphics performance using SPECviewperf 2020, which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets from popular independent software vendor (ISV) applications. We run the 1080p resolution tests based on PTC's Creo CAD platform; Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games; and Dassault Systemes' SolidWorks 3D rendering package. Results are listed in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better.
We also run Puget Systems’ PudgetBench for Premiere Pro, based on Adobe's popular video editing app. It performs live playback and file export with several codecs at 4K and 8K resolutions, as well as special-effects sequences that stress the CPU and GPU beyond normal Premiere Pro operations. We report the test's standard overall score.
Our last workstation test is Blender, an open-source 3D content creation suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for Blender's built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system's CPU and one the GPU. Lower times are better. BMW artist Mike Pan has said he considers the scenes too fast for rigorous testing, but they're a popular benchmark.
The Z2 Mini G9 did at least as well as the Z2 G8 Tower in Premiere, a good sign its graphics card doesn't hold it back there. It was second only to the Maingear in the Blender CPU test and won the Blender GPU test, where its RTX A2000's optimized drivers gave it an advantage over the GeForce cards in the Maingear and NZXT towers. Of the SPECviewperf tests, only the Creo viewset takes clear advantage of professional GPUs.
Speaking of professional applications, the Z2 Mini G9 carries many independent software vendor (ISV) certifications and is guaranteed to work with applications such as Adobe products. (HP maintains a list here.)
Workstation Downsizing Done Right
Miniaturized products often lose something in the transition, but the Z2 Mini G9's compromises are, well, minimal. Its redesigned chassis has the best serviceability we've seen from a desktop this small, most impressively including an industry-standard graphics card.
It also reaches new performance highs, thanks to its support for desktop-class (125-watt) Intel 12th Gen processors, DDR5 memory (and ECC if you like), and PCI Express Gen 4 storage. It has excellent connectivity, too. Expansion is its natural weakness, with just two SSD and two RAM slots, but if neither of those limitations gets in your way, the little HP proves that saving space is a great idea.
HP's redesigned G9 version of its Z2 Mini workstation punches well above its weight, with desktop-class CPUs, replaceable graphics, and excellent connectivity.
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