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HP ZBook Studio G5 Mobile Workstation

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Hi all,

I have been planning to buy a mac machine and good specs Macbook Pro 16" costs around $3000 which is too much. I also have some experience of hackintosh and I know that nVidia GPU is not supported so I don't want to pay for a laptop which has an nVidia GPU. While searching for many options I came across this laptop from HP. It looks like it has all the ingredients but couldn't find any support till now. Can anybody guide if this is a good option to go with? Or is there a better option? I want to go high spec.


Thanks all.
 
If you want something that truly takes the place of a Macbook Pro 16", you need a discrete GPU. Almost nobody has tried them, so far, but there are now a few Intel laptops that use RX 540x, RX 550 or RX 550x. For example: Thinkbook 14s and Thinkpad E590.

I don't know why HP calls that a mobile workstation. Doesn't make sense without the dGPU.
 
No credible guides for these laptops as I am planning to buy one I need to be sure if I'm buying something really worth it. Any idea what is the best option to buy with working gpu?
 
You could pick one that has a guide you're comfortable with, and then budget some extra $ for something like a Sonnet Breakaway Puck. It really depends on what your use case is, and why you need a laptop over a desktop. Are you editing video? Audio work? Coding stuff and running lots of VMs? In the first case, then yeah, there are no widely-used hackintosh laptops with comparable GPU power built in, at the moment. But in many of the other cases, perhaps you will be fine with a recent i7 and lots of RAM.
 
The only good option in production right now is the Dell Precision 7740 with a Radeon Pro WX7100. We have one at work that I was able to borrow over a weekend and try out with Mojave. It is fully detected and useable with MacOS even without Whatevergreen. However power consumption is high so you would need to be willing to setup a dual config / do a reboot to switch between the WX7100 and HD630 (it has a MUX option in the bios) if you care about battery life. Since the WX7100 is an older Polaris 10 based chip (like the RX580) the power consumption is 2x as much 5500M, even though it performs about the same.

The nice thing about it is even with the WX7100 and an i9 and three year onsite warranty, it is the same price as the base model MBP16 right now!

If Dell happens to update the Precision with a new mobile W5700 card in the coming months then that could be a substantial boost in performance, surpassing any of the Polaris / Vega cards as well as the 5500M.
 
You could pick one that has a guide you're comfortable with, and then budget some extra $ for something like a Sonnet Breakaway Puck. It really depends on what your use case is, and why you need a laptop over a desktop. Are you editing video? Audio work? Coding stuff and running lots of VMs? In the first case, then yeah, there are no widely-used hackintosh laptops with comparable GPU power built in, at the moment. But in many of the other cases, perhaps you will be fine with a recent i7 and lots of RAM.

I prefer laptops because of the portability and yes I need it for mostly dev work. I need high end and gpu enabled system because IDEs and sometimes a VM alongside the IDE eats up everything in sight. But you're right, an i7 with lots of RAM should do.
 
The only good option in production right now is the Dell Precision 7740 with a Radeon Pro WX7100. We have one at work that I was able to borrow over a weekend and try out with Mojave. It is fully detected and useable with MacOS even without Whatevergreen. However power consumption is high so you would need to be willing to setup a dual config / do a reboot to switch between the WX7100 and HD630 (it has a MUX option in the bios) if you care about battery life. Since the WX7100 is an older Polaris 10 based chip (like the RX580) the power consumption is 2x as much 5500M, even though it performs about the same.

The nice thing about it is even with the WX7100 and an i9 and three year onsite warranty, it is the same price as the base model MBP16 right now!

If Dell happens to update the Precision with a new mobile W5700 card in the coming months then that could be a substantial boost in performance, surpassing any of the Polaris / Vega cards as well as the 5500M.

That's great. Just look into this machine and it does look amazing. Let me look for the support it has for hackintosh.
 
@fleaplus, that's good to know about the Dell.

Another possibility altogether, is to use Kaby Lake-G. I've read that it can be made to work, now. With a kext called Polaris22Fixup. The OP wants something less experimental, though.

The thing is, integrated graphics on the 10th gen Intel chips looks pretty good with the G4 and G7 parts. Mostly, we can't use it, yet (aptio issues on the i7). Wait, there are at least some G4 i5 laptops available. Has anyone tried that combo? I get nothing, when I search the forum for i5-1035G4. Hmmm..
 
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