HP Victus 15 (2022) Review: Solid, No-Nonsense Gaming Laptop

By: shobhit In: Personal Computing Reviews, Reviews

Published On: October 1, 2022
Last Updated: October 3, 2022

Gaming is an expensive hobby. More so now as gaming laptops have become even more expensive thanks to the chip shortage. HP recently introduced its mid-range Victus line of gaming laptops – positioned below the flagship Omen line and replacing the ageing Pavillion Gaming series.

The Victus 15 does not offer a splashy all-metal design, a touch screen, or a foldable hinge. However, it comes with powerful internals for the price (AMD and Intel’s latest chipsets and powerful dedicated graphics) with an aim to deliver a solid gaming experience without spending a fortune.

Also read: Flipkart Big Billion Days sale: Best Deals on Laptops From Apple, HP, Lenovo, Asus

Does the HP Victus 15 deserve a place in your gaming arsenal? Let’s find out:

Table of Contents

Key specifications

The specifications are pretty good for the price. The HP Victus 15 is available with both Intel Core and AMD Ryzen processors. Our review unit came with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor, which is an 8-core CPU with a maximum clock speed of up to 4.4GHz, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. This variant has a list price of Rs 1,00,581 but is available online for around Rs 80,000 (at the time of publishing).

The graphics are handled via the Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU with 4GB of GDDR6 memory. Other specifications include a 512GB NVMe SSD, a 15.6-inch FHD IPS LCD display with a 144Hz refresh rate, and a 4-cell 70Wh battery.

Design and display

The Victus 15 looks sleek and classy – with a matte finish, stealth dark grey colour, a blue keyboard backlight, and a huge glossy ‘V’ embossed on the lid. Being a 15.6-inch laptop with a sizable battery, it is quite heavy (2.29kg). The build quality is decent but nothing to write home about. The plastic build does not feel very premium, the display wobbles a fair bit, and the keyboard flexes a little while typing. The hinge mechanism also does not inspire a lot of confidence.

All in all, the laptop looks premium, even though the build quality is not up to scratch. HP has not skimped on the ports on offer. The left side houses a USB 3.2 Type-A port, a 3.5mm audio jack, an SD card slot, and a proprietary charging port. The right edge is home to a full-sized HDMI port, another USB-A port, a USB Type-C port and an Ethernet port – which is a rarity these days.

The included 720p webcam is rather poor – it should suffice for basic video calls but that’s about it. The results are decent with good lighting but detail gets lost and noise creeps in when the light goes down. The laptop lacks any biometric recognition – the webcam does not support Windows Hello facial recognition nor is there a fingerprint reader.

The speakers are average. The sound on offer is tinny and flat but the volume is decent. The speakers are good enough for watching a YouTube video in a pinch but for movies or gaming, a good headset is recommended.

As mentioned above, the laptop has a 15.6-inch IPS LCD display with a 144Hz refresh rate. Thanks to the high refresh rate, wide viewing angles, and FHD resolution, the display lends itself well to the laptop’s primary purpose of gaming. That said, the colours are a bit dull and the maximum brightness (250Nits maximum) is lacking.

Keyboard and touchpad

The HP Victus 15’s keyboard is spacious and the keys have a decent amount of travel. The backlight is bright enough but it cannot be adjusted. It can either be switched on or off – nothing in between. This becomes annoying in low lighting as the backlight cannot be dimmed. As we touched on above, the keyboard flexes a fair bit while typing making it unsuitable for marathon typing sessions.

The trackpad is also large and spacious and has good tactile feedback. The haptic response is also above average. It lends itself well to Windows 11’s multi-touch gestures – which are a bit flaky but do the job.

Performance

Our HP Victus review unit came with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor and dedicated Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics with 4GB memory. The Ryzen 7 is a powerful 8-core CPU with a maximum clock speed of up to 4.4GHz. The Victus is also available with Intel’s 12th-gen Core processors.

Thanks to the fast SSD and powerful processor under the hood, the laptop blazes through day-to-day tasks such as web browsing, word processing, streaming movies and TV shows, and so on. The 16GB of RAM also makes multi-tasking a breeze – the laptop never feels as if it is bogging down, even with a lot of applications and dozens of Firefox tabs open in the background.

Gaming performance is also more than adequate for the price. The RTX 3050 Ti is a fairly capable GPU for gaming and graphic-intensive tasks alike. Most games run well at low-to-medium graphic settings with an average frame rate of 60fps and less-intensive titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider run flawlessly. The icing on the cake is the fact that the laptop does not really overheat much, even in intensive situations. In our benchmarks, the laptop scored 7,381 in PCMark 10 Extended and 13,543 in 3DMark Fire Strike.

Battery life and software

The Victus 15 has a decently-sized 70-watt-hours battery. The battery life is good but nothing spectacular. In my three weeks plus of use, I managed to eke out around 6-7 hours from the Victus on average. This is not a bad result by any means but is also nothing to rave.

Windows 11 Home is pre-installed and runs fluidly. There are a lot of pre-installed apps. Some are genuinely useful like the Omen Gaming Hub app, which allows you to disable unneeded Windows services/ processes and optimise network traffic to boost gaming performance, and Office 2011, which is worth a pretty penny if purchased separately. Others such as McAfee LiveSafe, ExpressVPN, and LastPass are intrusive and keep on giving you pop-ups to purchase the full version.

Verdict

The HP Victus 15 is a solid mid-range gaming laptop that offers a lot of value. It provides good performance, a 144Hz display, a solid GPU, and a myriad of ports without burning a huge hole in your pocket. The build quality, maximum display brightness, and battery life are average at best but the laptop delivers where it counts – a good gaming experience.

Also read: Best laptops under Rs 30,000 with SSD in India [September 2022]