The HP Victus 16 is an affordable gaming laptop positioned below the HP Omen series—the company says its V logo is the bottom half of the Omen diamond—with prices starting at $649.99 and climbing to $1,249.99 as tested. Replacing the Pavilion Gaming models in HP's lineup, the Victus features a 16.1-inch screen instead of the more common 15.6-inch size and delivers brisk 1080p gameplay, though its all-plastic design and lack of luxuries keep it from toppling Editors' Choice honorees like the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE.
Both Intel and AMD Available
Also known by the more pompous moniker "Victus by HP," different configurations of the new gamer are divided between HP.com and other retailers, with the cheapest carrying an AMD Ryzen 5 processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics, and a dim 250-nit display. An $859.99 Best Buy model pairs the Ryzen CPU with Radeon RX 5500M graphics.
Our $1,249.99 model 16-d0097nr (selling for $50 off at press time) boasts an eight-core, 2.3GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Intel Core i7-11800H processor and 6GB GeForce RTX 3060 GPU. It comes with 16GB of memory and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive bolstered by 32GB of Intel Optane cache, and its 300-nit IPS screen offers 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate.
Clad in a blackish hue called Mica Silver, or for $10 extra Performance Blue (HP also lists a Ceramic White, but it doesn't seem to be available online), the Victus measures 0.93 by 14.6 by 10.2 inches, bulkier than the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (0.75 by 14 by 9.7 inches), let alone 15.6-inch gamers like the XPG Xenia 15 KC (0.8 by 14 by 9.2 inches). At 5.44 pounds, it's a full pound heavier than the Dell and 1.2 pounds heavier than the XPG or the MSI Delta 15, though lighter than the 5.9-pound Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5.
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The 1080p screen has fairly slim top and side bezels—HP claims an 84% screen-to-body ratio—but a tall bottom bezel. An optional 165Hz display has 2,560-by-1,440-pixel resolution. The Victus 16's plastic build does not inspire confidence; there's not much give if you press the keyboard deck but a ton of flex if you grasp the screen corners. The screen hinge feels downright flimsy, wobbling wildly if tapped and vibrating if you type with a heavy hand.
The only ports on the system's right side are two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, while a third USB-A port (powered to charge handheld devices) joins a USB Type-C port, HDMI video output, Ethernet port, audio jack, SD card slot, and the power connector on the crowded left edge. We look for a Thunderbolt port on an over-$1,000 laptop, but the Victus has none. Something else we look for nowadays are biometric logins for Windows Hello, but the HP has neither a fingerprint reader nor face recognition webcam.
Over-Caffeinate Yourself, 'Undervolt' Your CPU
A special key in the top row launches Omen Gaming Hub software that combines tacky gaming promotions—for HP's Oasis online hub, the Fanatical game store, Rogue Energy drinks—with a system monitor, network traffic optimizer, and quiet, default, and performance cooling modes. (We used the last, which increases fan noise, for our benchmarks.) There's also the opposite of overclocking—an "undervolting" tab that claims to reduce the CPU core voltage for lower power consumption and heat, warning it may lead to system instability or damage. Since it seems it'd also hurt performance without boosting battery life, we have no idea why HP would include it.
The rest of the keyboard is fair, though limited to all-white backlighting instead of the per-key RGB customization of costlier gaming rigs. To our amazement, it arranges the cursor arrow keys in the proper inverted T instead of other HP laptops' eternally cursed, clumsy row, and it has a numeric keypad that, with Num Lock off, gives you real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. The typing feel is tolerably snappy. Unfortunately, the buttonless touchpad is no fun—its surface feels slightly rough or dusty, and tapping or clicking causes a hollow thunk that makes the whole laptop feel cheap.
The webcam has no privacy shutter and the usual soft-focus 720p resolution. It captures reasonably colorful, slightly dim images with a lot of noise or static. The speakers above the keyboard don't get very loud but aren't tinny or distorted even at max volume; there's zero bass but you can hear overlapping tracks. B&O Audio Control software offers microphone noise cancellation; music, movie, and voice presets that make no discernible difference; and an equalizer.
The non-touch screen offers ample brightness and good contrast for spotting enemies in shadowed areas, with nicely white instead of grayish backgrounds for productivity apps. Viewing angles are wide, though with some reflections of room lights off center, and fine details are reasonably sharp. Colors are clear and well saturated, if slightly pale.
Performance Testing: Hail to the Victus
We're still building up our database of test results with our updated benchmarks, so we compared the Victus 16 to a variety of 15.6-inch gaming laptops. The Dell G3 15 comes in below the HP's price while the XPG Xenia 15 KC almost doubles it. The Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 and MSI Delta 15 are in the $1,700 neighborhood. You can see the contenders' basic specs in the table below.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
All these laptops make short work of apps like Word and Excel. Even the relatively humble Core i5-based Dell cleared the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity in PCMark 10, while the others scored far higher. The HP, MSI, and Alienware all shone in our CPU tests and the Xenia edged the Victus for the win in Photoshop.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
Our next three tests involve real games—specifically, the built-in 1080p benchmarks from an AAA title (Assassin's Creed Valhalla), a fast-paced esports shooter (Rainbow Six Siege), and a sports racing sim (F1 2021). We run each benchmark twice, using different image quality presets for Valhalla and Rainbow and trying F1 with and without the Nvidia DLSS technology that can squeeze out some extra frames per second.
The XPG's GeForce RTX 3070 is the strongest GPU here and the Dell's GeForce GTX 1650 Ti much the weakest. Our graphics speed tests were mostly predictable, although the above twosome switched places as the Xenia underperformed badly in F1 2021. The Victus made the most of its 144Hz display in real-world gaming, actually far outstripping it in Rainbow Six Siege. Its RTX 3060 strikes a great balance of price and performance for 1080p play.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Victus was next to last in battery stamina, but its seven-hour runtime is by no means bad for a gaming notebook. The $1,000-plus units' displays all showed good if not great color fidelity, with the Dell's cheap screen falling short, and both the HP and Alienware were impressively bright, the former far exceeding its rated 300 nits.
Solid Performance, Not-So-Solid Construction
The Victus 16 is a good-looking notebook with an appealing screen size and a wide range of configuration options and prices, from very low to not too high. Both its eight-core CPU and GeForce GPU are fine performers.
But it lacks biometrics and a Thunderbolt port, and its display hinge and touchpad are low-quality. Frankly, we liked HP's outgoing Pavilion Gaming laptops better. For now, you're better off sticking with a competing 15.6-inch gaming laptop like the Predator Triton 300 SE.
HP's new Victus 16 is a good budget gaming laptop, but it commits the sin that the best in its class avoid—its cost-cutting design pokes through in several key ways.
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