HP Victus is an entry-level gaming laptop with a great keyboard, good display, and build quality, which is evident in its performance with demanding games.
HP has been making efforts to enhance its gaming offerings in the Indian market, and as a result, the company has introduced several new gaming laptops under its Omen and Victus sub-brands. The most recent addition to this lineup is the Victus 16, which is priced starting at Rs. 86,999 (s0095AX) for the base model. I have had the opportunity to use this laptop for a couple of weeks, and I will now share my experience with it.
Design: The Victus 16 comes in Performance Blue colour that is close to navy blue with the silver Victus logo on the lid. The laptop has a plastic chassis carrying slightly glossy finish that can catch fingerprints but doesn’t require to be cleaned up every single day. You get three vents including one on the back right next to the hinge.
The Victus 16 boasts a 16.1-inch display with an anti-glare coating. It houses a 1080p webcam on the top and a small Victus logo on the bottom bezel. The laptop has a wedge design with horizontal cuts on both sides. It weighs approximately 2.3kg and measures 2.3cm in thickness, making it a relatively heavy gaming machine.
The keyboard here is a full-sized backlit one with number keys and Ome gaming hub shortcut key. This keyboard is really comfortable and well-spaced to type on or used it for gaming. Typing long documents on it isa really nice experience thanks to the soft keys, one of the better parts about the whole experience of using this notebook, in my opinion. The trackpad is large enough and tracked standard gestures quite reliably during my usage.
Overall, the design of the HP Victus 16 offers a visually appealing gaming laptop with a comfortable keyboard and reliable trackpad.
On the left, there’s a LAN port, USB A 3.0 port and 3.5mm audio jack; while the right side houses the charging port, an HDMI 2.1 port, two USB A 3.0 ports and a USB type C port with DisplayPort 1.4.
Display: You get a 16.1-inch full HD (1920x1080) LED display with refresh rates of up to 144Hz. The display is not the brightest seen on a laptop at this price point but it’s still okay. The picture looks share and detailed for video playback as well as most of the AAA games. Higher refresh rates and sRGB colour gamut do help in animations and gameplay and seems like an essential need for a gaming laptop’s display today.
Performance and software experience: The Victus 16 sports AMD’s Ryzen 7840HS chip (up to 5.1Ghz octa core processor) & Radeon 780M Graphics, 16GB DDR5 RAM along with NVidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 GPU (with 6GB DDR6 dedicated) and 512GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe m.2 SSD. It runs on Windows 11 Home edition (22H2 version) with a few HP apps pre-loaded such as Omni Gaming Hub, HP Smart, Dropbox, McAfee, but not too many and these can be uninstalled too. Playing games like The Witcher 3, the laptop handles it at high to highest settings fairly well, keeping gameplay at about 65 frames per second without too much heating to report. You can expect to play other games like Sim at highest settings too but playing very demanding titles such as Forza Horizon 5 and Dying Light 2 and you can see the laptop show its limited headroom, displaying somewhat choppy performance if these games were set at their highest settings, though they were much smoother if these games were played at high settings, giving close to 100FPS under such loads. Basically, it can handle the most graphic-intensive settings at medium to high settings but not at the highest settings, and games that are a little less demanding at their highest settings well enough. You can customize keyboard lighting, themes and wallpapers, make a gaming launcher for a list of your installed games or even boost the internal clock speeds when a game is played using the Omen Gaming Hub app.
Battery life: Powered by a 70Wh battery unit with support for fast charge, the laptop ran for about 4-5 hours most of the days, with an hour of gameplay and mainly Web browsing and music playback for rest of the times. It charges from 1% to full in a little over two hours.
Other bits: WiFi and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity on the laptop are top notch with no major lags or glitches seen during my use. It comes with dual Bang & Olufsen speakers, which are decently punchy but not quite loud and deep for gaming needs or even videos, they aren’t bad, but they could have been better considering the use case here.
Verdict: In a nutshell, the Victus 16 clearly has its strengths and weakness when it comes to gaming performance. As mentioned, most of the games are handled at higher refresh rates with little to no choppiness, however, it shows its limited horsepower when playing the most graphic-intensive games. With this great keyboard, good display and build quality, a price tag of under 80k seems a little more justified, so if you get such a deal in the festive season with eyes on a gaming laptop, the HP Victus 16 might be worth a consideration.
