Lightweight workstation laptops the alternatives

Six more options for ultra-portable mobile workstations to take CAD and design visualisation on the road — all less than 20mm thick and most below 2kg

1 Dell Precision 5570

The 15.6-inch Dell Precision 5570 is the latest incarnation of one of our favourite workstation laptops. It’s very portable, considerably smaller than the 16-inch Lenovo ThinkPad P1 G5 and HP ZBook Studio G9. It’s a mere 7.7mm at the front, 11.64mm at the rear (although this is slightly misleading, as Dell doesn’t appear to include the display in this measurement). It starts at 1.84kg.

Despite its sleek aesthetic, it still includes perfectly good processors for CAD, including up to the Intel Core i9-12900HK CPU and Nvidia RTX A2000 (8 GB) GPU, which includes hardware ray-tracing to make your CAD models pop.

One trade off of the slender chassis is no USB Type A ports (only USB Type C / Thunderbolt 4), although it ships with a USB Type A and HDMi dongle.

2 Dell Precision 5770

17-inch mobile workstations used to be all about performance and expandability with high-end GPUs and loads of storage, but the Dell Precision 5770 is a far cry from these heavyweights of old. Trading off some GPU power for more portability, you get a stunning 17-inch UHD+ (3,840 x 2,400) InfinityEdge display for detailed design work in a 2.17kg, sub 20mm chassis.

The Nvidia RTX A3000 GPU might not be top notch, but it’s a step up from the 15.6-inch Precision 5570’s Nvidia RTX A2000 and has 12GB of GPU memory to raise the ceiling on the size of datasets it can handle.

It has four Thunderbolt 4 ports (USB Type C with DisplayPort) and relies on the included dongle for USB Type A and HDMi.

■ www.dell.com/precision

3 HP ZBook Studio G9

For the G9 edition of this slimline pro laptop, HP made the switch from a 15.6-inch to a 16-inch panel. This made it a tiny big bigger than the G8 edition, but with a 16:10 aspect ratio 4K (3,840 x 2,400) display (with Dreamcolor and OLED options) you get 11% more usable screen area than the previous 16:9. Memory has also been improved with 64 GB, double that of the G8, which was a little lacking. Compared to the beefier HP ZBook Fury G9, the HP ZBook Studio G9 offers slightly less powerful 12th Gen Intel Core H-Series processors with up to 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores. Graphics options are similar, up to the Nvidia RTX A5500 (16 GB), but with a lower power draw, expect slightly www.hp.com/zworkstations

4 HP ZBook Firefly G9

The HP ZBook Firefly G9 comes in two sizes - 14-inch and 16-inch. With a chassis depth of 19.9mm, the budget mobile workstation just about makes it into our sub 20mm roundup. Users get a choice of low power 12th Generation Intel Core i7 Processors. These should still deliver good performance in single threaded CAD-centric workflows, and some of the super power efficient 15W ‘U’ models will save you money. However, with fewer cores and a lower power budget, multi-threaded renders will take longer.

The GPU choices are limited, with only 4 GB options available. Both machines offer the Nvidia T550 GPU, while the 16-inch model can also be configured with the Nvidia RTX A500. However, despite having hardware enabled ray tracing, it’s still really just suited to mainstream CAD. ■ www.hp.com/zworkstations

5 Lenovo ThinkPad P1 G5

6 Lenovo ThinkPad P14s G3 (Intel and AMD editions)

The CAD-focused 14-inch ThinkPad P14s G3 comes in two variants - an ‘Intel’ edition with 28W 12th Generation P series Intel Core processors and an Nvidia T550 (4GB) GPU and an ‘AMD’ edition with AMD Ryzen 5 / 7 Pro 6000 U Series processors and integrated AMD Radeon 680M graphics with Pro APU driver.

Both share the same 17.9mm chassis, but by combining CPU and GPU onto a single chip the ‘AMD’ edition is slightly lighter, starting at 1.28kg. The ‘Intel’ edition has a slight edge in memory capacity (48 GB vs 32 GB).

The laptop stands out for its optional 4K IPS display, which is higher res than others, a FHD camera, HDMi, two USB Type A ports and two USB Type C. ■ www.lenovo.com/ workstations