Best workstation laptops in 2023

The best workstation laptops are the only laptops that can handle crunching hordes of data or video-editing large files in 4K.

Of course, the best workstation laptops are targeted toward professional users who need to run graphics-intensive apps. The key difference between some of the best gaming laptops around and a workstation is its GPU, as it's primarily optimized for tasks such as design and 3D rendering instead of sheer gaming performance. And workstations generally have stronger CPUs as well, like an Intel Core i9 or Intel Xeon processor, instead of the typical Core i7 you'd find in most gaming laptops.

To speed up your workflow in apps like Adobe Premiere or Blender, your workstation needs a beastly processor (such as Intel's Xeon series); a vibrant, color-accurate display; and a powerful GPU. If you're looking for a beast with a 40-series GPU, you might want to hold off until the best gaming laptop deals come around.

However, if money is no object and you're looking for the latest and greatest in tech, we highly recommend waiting until the beginning of 2024, where all the big companies will likely unveil the latest CPUs and GPUs for upcoming workstations.

While the quest to procure the best workstation laptop is no feeble task, we will help you pick the best system for your needs and budget. Whether you need a huge, vibrant display or an affordable powerhouse, here are the best workstation laptops you can buy right now.

The quick list

Best overall

Is the HP ZBook Fury 17 G8 the best workstation on the market? I suppose that depends on your budget and configuration, but if your pockets are deep enough for an Intel Xeon processor and Nvidia RTX A5000 graphics (boy howdy!), this is about as future-proof as laptops get right now.

In terms of raw power, this notebook is tough to beat, and even if it runs out of battery when you’re on the go, it’s still heavy enough to fight crime with. Granted, the $6K configuration we tested is overkill for most laptop users; it’s nigh impossible for this kind of mobile muscle to fail too hard on our standard benchmarks. And that’s partially the point, in my opinion. The world of mobile tech continues to march forward at an exponential rate, and if you don’t have the right laptop for your respective career, opportunity might very well pass you by. 

But that’s hardly a concern with the ZBook Fury 17 G8 thanks to a stunning 17.3-inch touchscreen, intimidating specs under the hood, and plenty of ports to power your pertinent peripherals.

See our full HP ZBook Fury 17 G8 review.

Best value workstation laptop

Why pay more for an Nvidia 4090 GPU when the 4070 GPU exists? MSI seeks to answer that question with the excellent Katana 15. A laptop that kept pace with more powerful competitors without breaking a sweat. For those who prefer a more understated look, the Katana 15 exterior is done in all black aluminum chassis with the company’s logo engraved at the top of the lid. The interior’s a lot more colorful with its comfortable, 4-key customizable RGB keyboard. It’s on the heavier side at 8.8 pounds, so you’ll need a backpack with strong straps to tote this system around.

But let’s talk performance. Our reviewer reported the Katana 15 consistently gave between 50 and 55 fps on Elden Ring at 2K resolution. The Katana also dominated on the Borderlands 3 benchmark at 99 fps (1080p, high) as well as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (106 fps), Dirt 3 (103 fps), Far Cry 6 (94 fps) and Red Dead Redemption (72 fps). Long story short, the Katana gave a master class in gaming performance. The MSI kept up the pressure during the overall performance. The system’s Core i7 CPU hit 11,581 on Geekbench 5.5 test and smokey the competition on the Handbrake benchmark with a blistering time of 5 minutes and 4 seconds. 

But there are a few places where the Katana 15 could stand for improvement. The 2 hour 48 minute battery life is abysmal in this day and age. And we wish MSI could have found a better panel compared to the dim, lackluster display its stuck with. But coming in at $1,600, it’s a much better value than the RTX 4090 systems that cost upwards of $4,000. 

See our full MSI Katana 15 review.

Best long lasting workstation laptop

Billed as “the world’s smallest, thinnest, and most powerful 14-inch workstation,” the Dell Precision 5470 is a premium laptop that doubles as a casual gaming platform.

When we reviewed the 17-inch Dell Precision 5760 last year, we were pretty darn impressed by the colorful WLED 4K touchscreen, not to mention those beefy specs under the hood: an 11th-Gen Intel Core i7 CPU, Nvidia RTX A3000 GPU, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB SSD. The new Dell Precision 5470 shares similar specs as its bigger, older brother, but comes in a much-more-mobile 14-inch package. Plus, thanks to a 12th-Gen Intel Core i9-12900H CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, this middle child can certainly hold its own at the next family reunion.

Pound for pixelated pound, the Dell Precision 5470 may be the most portable, powerful workstation you’ll find on the market, and it’s the ultimate tool for on-the-go creatives, workaholics, and multimedia junkies alike.

See our full Dell Precision 5470 review.

Best dual-display workstation laptop

The Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 is a unique dual-screen laptop with a 15-inch, 4K OLED panel up top and a smaller OLED screen above the keyboard. Asus’s take on dual-screen laptops has evolved since the first iteration of the Asus ZenBook Duo (UX481), with improvements in build quality and ergonomics addressing some of the original problems. Has it grown enough to make Asus’s vision of a dual-screen laptop something consumers clamor for? In some regards, yes, but it still feels like a niche device for a subsection of content creators (who have large budgets).

The ZenBook Duo Pro 15 UX582L brings a lot to the table with powerful specs for those who need them, and a second screen not only adds a wow factor but functionality. Some may not be fond of the keyboard and touchpad location, and the price is a serious deterrent, but the ZenBook Duo Pro 15 should be considered by content creators who need more screen real estate while on the go. While it's not technically a workstation, its performance and utility has earned its way on our best workstation laptops page.

See our full Asus ZenBook Pro Duo (UX582L) review.

Best single-display workstation laptop

This year’s HP ZBook Studio G8 holds on to the award-winning G7 series styling but bumps up the power to help content creators with their creative projects either in the studio or in the field. The $4,727 system is gorgeous, powerful, MIL-SPEC tough, and is one of the best content creator laptops on the market. Oh, I forgot to mention, its OLED 4K touchscreen is bright, vivid and positively stunning.

This salacious attention grabber comes with an 11th Gen Intel Core i9 processor, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD storage, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU that will more than handle all your Adobe Creative Suite power-hungry needs and then some. It's easily one of the best workstation laptops that we've tested, even if it's priced at a whopping $4,727 as reviewed.

See our full HP ZBook Studio G8 review.

Best performance workstation laptop

I love playing with expensive toys, but who the heck is the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 really for? Not the budget-friendly professional nor up-and-coming businesses — it’s for the highly paid professional or Fortune 500 companies. So unless you can afford $4,663, look away now.

Okay, big spenders. The Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 will net you a beautiful 16-inch, 4K display, a comfortable keyboard, a great pair of speakers, and a powerful Core i9-12950HX vPro processor and Nvidia RTX A5500 GPU. However, despite its ridiculous price and boring design, it has a short battery life, so you’re going to have to stay plugged in the majority of the time.

This is one of the best workstations I’ve reviewed — I’m just a tad salty about the battery life.

See our full Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 review.

Best long-lasting power workstation laptop

HP continues to design lightweight, powerhouse workstations and I keep enjoying them. The HP ZBook Firefly G8 14-inch mobile workstation is another Zbook meant for those who push their mobile workstations to the limits. Do you need to write documents? No problem; Do you run graphics-heavy programs? Not an issue. Need to connect to a 5G network? The ZBook Firefly can do that too. 

You get all that and a gorgeous, color-accurate, 14-inch DreamColor display. We’re always eager to get our hands on a new laptop and for our lab to vigorously test it. Sometimes we’re thrilled with the results, and other times, our little laptop-loving hearts are broken. Despite that, it’s one of the best workstation laptops on the market.

See our full HP ZBook Firefly 14 G8 review.

Best 30-series workstation laptop

Alienware continues to raise the bar of what a gaming laptop can and should be. The latest addition to the family is the X17, a beautiful bruiser of a desktop replacement that’s only 0.8-inches thick. The ultra-premium system comes with all the fixings including an Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU and dual SSDs. Need more? How’s a 17.3-inch, 4K display, powerful speakers and a Cherry MX keyboard sound?

Of course, something this pretty and powerful is also seriously expensive at $3,679 ($2,199 starting), so it’s not for the faint of heart or small of bank account. But if you can afford it, the Alienware X17 is a hell of a powerhouse that easily makes its way onto our best workstation laptops page.

See our full Alienware X17 review.

Best gaming workstation laptop

MSI has always taken a kitchen sink approach to its flagship gaming laptops, and we’re not complaining when you get something as powerful as the MSI Titan GT77 HX. This is an exorbitantly priced system even for a top-tier gaming laptop. But for that arm, leg and vestigial organ you’re contemplating selling, you get an absolute powerhouse that shrugs off almost everything you can possibly throw at it. 

The Titan’s Nvidia RTX 4090 with 16GB of VRAM cut through frame rates like a hot knife through ice cold butter, smoothly and immensely satisfying. With the exception of Metro Exodus, the Titan’s frame rates stayed in the triple digits at 1080p and at 4K. And with its Intel Core i9-13980HX CPU with 16GB of RAM, the notebook decimated our overall performance tests. Its dual SSDs in RAID 0 configuration posted a blistering 2,299.3 megabytes per second in our file transfer test.

The thorn in this mighty beast’s paw is the 3 hours and 24 minutes of battery life. Our reviewer also wasn’t a fan of the notebook’s design, calling it dated, and the webcam could be better.  But if you’re looking for the most powerful gaming laptop on the block, you’d be hard pressed to find one better. But if the MSI Titan GT77 HX isn’t your speed but you still want an MSI notebook, check out our Best MSI laptops page. 

See our full MSI Titan GT77 HX review.

How much does a workstation laptop cost?

Workstations start around $1,000, but many models at that price lack the discrete graphics card you'll need to take on tasks like video editing or 3D modeling. And it'll most likely have a 1080p display at that price range, so you might want to spring for a 4K model if your work involves editing high-res photos and videos.

You can get some work done with one of the top cheap gaming laptops, which has a GPU like an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti or greater, but they're not optimized specifically for media creation like Nvidia's Quadro GPU is. If you're looking to get some real work done, you'll need a workstation with a Quadro GPU and a colorful, high-resolution display, which will most definitely run you over $2,000. While it's not necessarily a workstation, the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo can handle rigorous tasks with multiple screens all for $2,999.

How to choose the best workstation laptops for you

Choosing the right workstation for you comes down to why you need it in the first place. You can pick up an affordable workstation to do some heavier work than your average laptop, but if you need a straight up tank to handle taxing programs, you’re going to pay a hefty price. If it’s the former, we recommend looking at something like the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 or Dell Precision 5540.

If money is no object, you can pick up some beastly workstations like the MSI WS65 9TM and the HP ZBook Studio x360 G5, which are incredibly powerful and durable machines that can withstand most tests that you’ll throw at them. The WS65 9TM is great if you want your display to be super colorful and bright, but the ZBook Studio x360 is better if you need a stylus to get into graphic designing or something else.

How we test the best workstation laptops

We put each laptop through extensive benchmark testing — both synthetic and real-world — before they end up in the hands of our reviewers. We evaluate each aspect of the laptop, including its performance, battery life, display, speakers and heat management.

In our benchmark testing, we use a Klein K10 colorimeter to detect the brightness and sRGB color gamut of the laptop's display. For performance testing, we run the laptop through a gauntlet of benchmarks, including Geekbench 4.3 and 5.0 and 3DMark professional graphics tests. 

To determine real-world performance, we task the laptop to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution and to duplicate a 4.97GB multimedia file. Our real-world graphics test is the Dirt 3 benchmark with medium settings at 1080p resolution.

We also run heat tests by playing a 15-minute full-screen video and measuring temperatures in different areas of the laptop. Last but not least, our battery test consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. For MacBooks and premium Windows 10 laptops, a runtime of over 9 hours is considered a good result whereas gaming laptops and workstations that can stay powered for longer than 5 hours deserve praise. 

These tests are complemented with extensive hands-on testing from our reviewers who critique everything from the laptop's materials to the feel of its touchpad.

Why Trust Laptop Mag

Laptop Mag reviews over a hundred different laptops every year, from paperweight ultralights to everyday workhorses to lumbering gaming notebooks that scorch the frame rates of even the hottest AAA games. We're not just experts in the laptop field, as we go one step further by meticulously testing smartphones, tablets, headphones, PC accessories, software, and even the latest in gaming. 

We are 100% independent and have decades of experience to help you buy with confidence. In fact, Laptop Mag has been testing and reviewing products for three decades, and we continue to deliver trustworthy reviews you can rely on. 

Our experienced team of writers and editors scour the available information about the laptop and put it through its paces to determine which is best for you. But before they start, the testing team subjects each system to a rigorous regimen of synthetic and real-world tests to see how a system handles the type of work and games you’re most likely to throw at it. 

Our editorial trustworthiness is enforced by one of the world's largest technology publishers, Future Publishing. As a company, we have unrivaled experience across every tech sector — and we're the group's specialist for all things mobile tech.