I figured I would chime in and try to answer your questions.
The performance of the i7 is very good. The "feel" is quite acceptable, Windows 8.1 Pro doesn't lag or otherwise feel slower than say the mid range higher wattage quad core processors, even with a couple dozen tabs open in chrome (and a few in Firefox and IE as well, for good measure!) I also have to leave a Linux appliance running in a VM as well (just running either LAMP/Rails/Django depending on the job) and it doesn't effect performance or responsiveness either, although that probably has more to do with ram than anything. My friend does similar stuff using OSX on a Retina MBP 13" with the i5-3210m, and we have concluded that performance is pretty much exactly the same. Honestly the only time it really slowed down was when it was running windows updates in the background.
Photoshop runs very well on it. I am happy to report that as of the very latest driver posted 1/27/2014 (only available directly from AMD at this point) OpenCL is supported with Photoshop. I just installed this a couple of hours ago so I haven't quite run it through a full stability test but no problems so far. The driver is actually listed specifically for the Zbook 14 on AMD's site so I assume it has undergone some form of testing by AMD at least. Hopefully HP vets it here in a month or so.
The matte screen is very nice but I will point out that its very likely it will have light bleed at the bottom. This is only noticeable if the display is showing pure black with the backlight turned on, and it is not noticeable on dark greys, for instance the Photoshop work area. I can't comment on the color accuracy but the manufacturer claims it is a 72% NTSC panel so expect it to behave as other similar panels. It is very nice to have as an option in something this size and something I wish that I could have had years ago.
Adding your own ram and SSD sounds like a very good idea. Mine came with the 240GB Intel SSD Pro 1500 and I am cursing because I am already down to 100GB available. The self-encryption stuff doesn't interest me and I would be much happier with something like the 1TB Crucial or Samsung SSD's that are available. The M.2 slot can only house a 42mm SSD - in case you are thinking about using it. That means the best you can get is a 120GB Intel SSD or a cheap knockoff brand that I found on Amazon which looks like it might have reliability issues. As far as ram goes anything DDR3-1600 that is 1.35V should work fine.
Oh, I do not do any 3D work but I did run Cinebench 10 on it, results are here:
Code:
32-bit Render Single 4849
64-bit Render Single 6357
32-bit Render Multi 9078
64-bit Render Multi 11743
32-bit OpenGL 6658
64-bit OpenGL 6955
It also got a P1900 on 3dmark2011, all at the default settings. Hope this helps!
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
