HP Victus Gaming Laptop Review

The new HP Victus line of gaming laptops enters the market every bit a more budget friendly alternative to the renown Omen line. With many configurations available for under $1,000, information technology's sure to be on the list of many prospective buyers. Let'south check it out and see how it stacks upwardly.

We received an HP Victus equipped with an Intel Core i5-11400H CPU, RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPU (4 GB), 8 GB DDR4 (two 10 4 GB), 256 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and 70 Watt-Hour battery. This configuration will set you back around $930 depending on sale prices. All Victus laptops currently share the same 16-inch chassis and they generally differ in internal configuration. The display is a sixteen.ane" IPS FHD console that comes in a 60Hz or 144Hz options (a mere $20 upgrade for the faster refresh charge per unit).

Blueprint and Features

The laptop comes with a plastic, matte gray finish. It's a basic pattern all around with the only major accent being an inset sleeky "5" on the rear of the 16.ane inch brandish. The laptop measures 14.5 10 10.2 x 0.93 inches and weighs in at 5.4lbs. This puts it on the heavier side of laptops in its class since many competitors come in closer to 5lbs. Below the screen hinge, nosotros can come across the rear exhaust ports for the two internal cooling fans.

The left edge of the Victus houses most of the I/O. Starting from the top nosotros have the charging port, a fold-out RJ45 jack, an HDMI port, a USB 3.0 Blazon A port, a USB 3.0 Type C port, a headset combo jack, and an SD card reader.

Except for the power jack, this is a fine array. I particularly similar those defended Ethernet ports and wish more laptops kept them. Dorsum to the ability though, I actually wish this was a USB-C port instead. It'due south well-nigh 2022 and bulky proprietary laptop charging bricks demand to become.

Standing our tour around the laptop, we find a mostly empty right edge aside for 2 USB 3.0 ports. The screen measures 0.3" which is a flake thicker than other laptops in this price range, but isn't something I'd worry about too much. I do appreciate the slight recess around the edge of the screen to give a dainty grip when opening the laptop.

The matte greyness end continues over the rest of the laptop as well. Screen bezels are prissy and narrow effectually 3 of the edges. The majority of the circuitry is housed at the bottom of the display. This has become adequately standard and the bottom bezel on the Victus measures slightly over an inch. At the top of the keyboard, only below the swivel, is a wide strip of mesh that covers the stereo speakers. I like the subtle "V" pattern here. Information technology's much less pronounced on the actual unit compared to the moving-picture show.

I was reasonably impressed with the Bang and Olufsen speakers on the Victus. They get loud and accept good stereo imaging, but as with all built-in laptop audio systems, they are nearly completely lacking in bass. The EQ is tuned to slightly lower the highs which helps them sound less tinny, but this also causes them to get quite muddied in the depression to mid range. The webcam on tiptop is merely 720p and becomes grainy in low light. I'd say it's fine for most spider web calls during the day, but quality noticeably drops at night. It'due south crazy how modern phones can pack their outstanding cameras in such a small form factor, only laptop webcams haven't advanced much in a decade.

The Hardware

Allow's talk some more than about mechanical design. The trackpad is overnice and big, but feels rather flimsy. The top edge is attached to the laptop body while bottom surface is free floating. This results in the whole keyboard shaking and rattling around when tapping to click. If I didn't know I had a brand new unit from the mill, I might take thought there was a loose spiral inside. It'south a cheap feeling and I would have expected much more than from a laptop that costs nearly $1,000.

Adjacent, onto the keyboard. The keys feel very sturdy and have a dainty actuation. They keyboard is internally braced quite well such that there isn't a lot of flex for even the heaviest of typists. Another feature of more than and more laptops that I appreciate is the increased resistance on the power button. It takes noticeably more force to printing than the other keys around it and besides has a slight actuation delay and then you don't accidentally turn off the laptop. The soft white backlight works really well, too. It'south compatible and hits all the marked areas without leaving whatsoever area over or under-illuminated.

Taking a footstep back to talk near keyboard layout, this is another area where I think HP could take done much better. While information technology's very prissy to have the full-sized numpad, I don't similar the removal of the page up/downwardly and home/terminate keys. Why did HP not put page upwardly/down in the open gaps above the arrow keys? Why does the keyboard have dedicated "HP Omen Gaming Hub" and calculator buttons? Home and End keys would accept been much more useful in that location.

Opening up the bottom embrace to get a look inside is very difficult in the Victus. I've opened tons of laptops over the years and this one took me at least 10 minutes of prying. The 8 screws around the border were easy to remove, but then you're withal stuck with a bunch of those internal plastic retention clips every few inches. Even with a proper plastic spudger kit I managed to interruption off a few of these in the struggle. It shouldn't be that hard to get into a laptop.

HP did make up for this in my opinion by posting a wonderful teardown and repair guide. It's a 25 infinitesimal long official instructional video that walks the user through removing and replacing basically every component on the laptop. Huge credit to HP for this and I wish other brands would practise the same. Many of the parts inside even list what screw sizes they apply and product numbers for their replacement. Both Yard.2 and RAM sockets are hands attainable for upgrades.

While we can see the guts inside, let'south get over thermal performance. Overall I'd say the two heatpipes and blowers do a decently nice task of keeping Victus cool. I did detect the CPU starting time to throttle down from two.7GHz to between ii.2GHz - two.4GHz after nearly five minutes of full load.

I tested thermal performance in two locations: on a apartment surface with limited airflow such as a carpet, and and so on a more open surface like your leg or a laptop stand with better airflow. The CPU and GPU stabilized at 82C and 79C respectively in the first scenario with limited airflow. This is quite warm, but isn't a very common utilise case since the laptop will nearly probable exist used in a identify with better airflow. Letting the fans breathe more than lowered CPU temps to 68C and GPU temps to 66C. Those numbers are much ameliorate.

The fan noise is definitely noticeable when the system is heavily loaded, but it isn't obnoxious. The acoustics brand them sound more similar a low drone than a loftier pitched whine. I found the fan curves to be tuned very nicely. The fan gradually ramps up over several minutes when heavy usage starts and then is quick to repose downwardly in one case the load stops. Definitely easy on the ears that way.

Keyboard condolement during heavy load is most as expected for a gaming laptop. The middle of the keyboard gets uncomfortably hot during prolonged gaming sessions, but the outer edges and touchpad stay absurd enough to rest your hands on. This makes perfect sense since the two hot components are in the heart and the fans are about the edge.

Configurations

Our review unit arrived with basic specs including a Core i5-11400H and discrete RTX 3050 Ti laptop graphics. HP offers the Victus with up to an i7-11800H CPU, RTX 3060 GPU, 32GB of RAM, 144Hz brandish, and 1TB SSD. My configuration retails for $990 ($930 when on sale) and maxing information technology out will toll $1,600. There'southward also more than bones configurations on the same chassis that showtime at $799.99 with the same i5-11400H and a GTX 1650 laptop GPU.

We won't exist explicitly covering benchmarks for the HP Victus since we've reviewed the same components in detail before. Here are our reviews of the i5-11400H CPU and RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU. We similar the CPU a lot and in our testing it ranks among the best mobile chips Intel has produced in quite some fourth dimension for this segment. As for the 3050 Ti, it's far from a standout. Operation is average and is often limited by the 4GB of VRAM. However, because the Victus xvi just has a 1080p display, it won't be as big of an issue compared to 1440p configurations.

Looking at the rest of the system, I just don't think 256GB of storage is adequate anymore on a gaming laptop. Modern games tin easily reach into the l-100GB range which means you'll but be able to fit a few on the bulldoze once you business relationship for Windows. The base model should outset with at to the lowest degree 512GB. The Victus is bachelor from the manufacturing plant with a larger drive, merely you'd be better off merely buying your own and installing information technology into the spare M.two slot.

Brandish Functioning

The display is a 16.1" 1920x1080 IPS display running at 60Hz. There is no option to upgrade to 1440p, but for an extra $20 yous can upgrade to a 144Hz refresh rate. For the cost, I think the higher refresh rate is a no-brainer. The screen gets brilliant enough for most indoor use, but I wish it went a few levels higher. Outdoor viewing will exist tricky since the screen maxes out at 250nits and you may likewise take viewing bug in sunny rooms.

I tested color accuracy using Calman past Portrait Displays along with an X-Rite i1Display Pro meter. Initial measurements of the brandish showed boilerplate DeltaE values of iv.seven and a max value of 8.vii. That's poor and is evidently well in a higher place the 1.0 range for beingness considered "accurate".

Screen color accuracy before scale - Calman software courtesy of Portrait Displays

After running through the Calman scale session, the average DeltaE value dropped to 1.half dozen. I'd call this adequate, just non astonishing. If you own this laptop and want to apply the aforementioned calibration to your brandish, we've uploaded the profile here.

Screen color accurateness after scale. Calman software courtesy of Portrait Displays

Software Feel

Where to starting time... the included Windows 10 installation is one of the worst I've e'er seen on a laptop. It includes a McAfee anti-virus trial that bombards you with popups to buy the full version. Express VPN that warns you "Your IP Address is Public", a Booking.com app, Lastpass, Wild Tangent Games (often categorized by antivirus programs as a Potentially Unwanted Program), and at least eleven different HP utilities.

It's honestly embarrassing for HP that they call up it's OK to include this much bloatware on a system. If it bothers you like it bothers me, information technology should take about thirty minutes to wipe all the junk off the system. The just saving grace would be if HP was using the commissions they earn from these software vendors to beginning the price of the laptop.

Fifty-fifty with all that software pre-installed, the organization boots up from zero in 12 seconds. I'm quite happy with that value and never felt like I was waiting on the laptop to load.

As for battery life, I got virtually lx minutes while gaming (Culture VI) at medium settings with medium brightness. Information technology'southward hard to quantify gaming battery operation exactly since every game is different and it heavily depends on brightness. Lowering the settings should requite betwixt 70-lxxx minutes while cranking them to max will deplete the bombardment in 40-l minutes. The lxx Wh battery achieved 6 hours and fifteen minutes of runtime during standard employ with 1080p video playback, and ten hours and 49 minutes of idle screen on fourth dimension at 50% brightness. These are pretty decent numbers and aught spectacular. I would have liked to have seen a 75-80 Watt-60 minutes battery, but at to the lowest degree it'due south ameliorate than the 51 Watt-Hour batteries constitute on many other laptops of this class.

Bottom Line

Overall, the HP Victus is a decent laptop, but nothing stands out as specially wonderful. It looks great aesthetically and packs some decent hardware inside, simply build quality and other shortcomings fail to fix information technology apart.

Looking at the competition, Acer offers the Nitro 5 with the same CPU/GPU combo, merely adds 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for the same price. The Gigabyte G5 is also slightly less expensive than the Victus with the aforementioned configuration as the Nitro v. On the downside to the Gigabyte, its battery is significantly smaller, but that does reduce the weight considerably.

To HP's credit, the Victus looks much more professional and less "gamery" than the Gigabyte and Acer in my opinion.

Likewise the Windows bloatware which is salvageable, and the average trackpad, at that place'due south goose egg terribly wrong with the Victus. The kicker is that HP is marketing the Victus equally a more than budget oriented line of gaming laptops and while y'all practice get some nice hardware for the price, you lot may still be able to detect a better deal elsewhere.

With supply chain issues plaguing the electronics manufacture though, y'all never know when systems will go out of stock. If you lot can look past the bloatware and slightly flimsy structure, the Victus will go the chore washed on a upkeep.