HP Z2 G9 Mini 2023

A shockingly small box with a shockingly big CPU, but the weak Quadro GPU holds it back. Buy it for the processor, not the graphics.

What surprised us most is how much raw CPU muscle HP stuffed into this little box. The i7-14700 sits in the 82nd percentile for its class, which means it's one of the best CPUs you can get in a mini workstation right now. Multithreaded tasks fly, and the 32GB of DDR5 RAM (83rd percentile) keeps everything snappy. But that GPU is a letdown. The Quadro T400 is dead average, landing right at the 50th percentile. It's fine for driving a few 4K displays, but it'll choke on anything beyond light CAD work. The 1TB NVMe SSD is solid and middle-of-the-pack, but we wish HP offered a Gen 5 drive at this price.

The elephant in the room is the Apple Mac Studio M4 Max. It's in a similar tiny box but absolutely demolishes the HP in GPU performance and efficiency. If your software runs on macOS, it's the better buy. On the Windows side, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is a traditional tower with way more GPU headroom and upgradeability, but it's huge in comparison. The Dell Tower Plus is another full-sized competitor that'll give you more expansion for less money. This HP only makes sense if you absolutely need a tiny Windows box with an ISV-certified Quadro card for niche professional apps.

We can't pin down an exact price since it's not listed, but we're seeing this config floating around from $1400 to $1946 across vendors. At the low end, that's a fair deal for a compact workstation with this much CPU power. At nearly two grand, you're getting into "just buy a Mac Studio" territory. If you can snag it closer to $1400, it's a solid buy. Just don't pay a premium for the Quadro GPU you'll probably outgrow.

The HP Z2 G9 Mini is a tiny powerhouse that punches way above its weight class for CPU-heavy work. You're getting a 20-core 14th Gen i7 and 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM crammed into a box you can literally hide behind a monitor. The one thing to know? This is a serious compact workstation for crunching numbers, compiling code, or running multiple VMs, not a gaming rig. The Quadro T400 GPU is the bottleneck here, so don't expect to do any real 3D rendering or AI work on this thing.

If you're looking for a machine to handle AI model training, heavy 3D rendering, or even gaming on the side, this isn't it. The GPU is a dealbreaker for those tasks. Go get a Lenovo Legion Tower or build a small form factor PC with an RTX 4070 instead. You'll get massively better graphics performance for a similar footprint and price.

Buy the HP Z2 G9 Mini if you need a ridiculously small Windows workstation for CPU-bound tasks and certified driver support. It's a fantastic little number cruncher. But if your workflow touches GPU rendering, AI, or even moderate 3D modeling, skip this config. The Quadro T400 is just too weak, and the compact size isn't worth the performance compromise. You'd be better off with a slightly larger SFF PC with a proper RTX card.