HP Victus 15 Review | PCMag

It's been half a year since HP debuted its Victus brand of affordable gaming laptops, positioned below the Omen line and replacing its Pavilion Gaming series. First up was the 16.1-inch Victus 16, on the high end of the budget spectrum at $1,249.99. The 15.6-inch Victus 15 reviewed here is a true economy model with a list price of $799.99 at Best Buy, but the retailer frequently discounts it—it was on sale for just $549.99 at press time. Despite the low price, it offers a few perks, like Intel's latest 12th Generation Core i5 processors and a 144Hz screen refresh rate. It's a decent deal, but its three-year-old Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics keep it from challenging GeForce RTX rivals like the MSI Katana GF66 and Acer Nitro 5.

AMD and Intel CPU Options: Something for Everyone 

HP offers Victus 15 systems with both Intel and AMD silicon. Our $799.99 review unit combines Intel's new Core i5-12450H (four Performance cores, four Efficient cores, 12 threads) with a far-from-new GeForce GTX 1650 GPU, along with 8GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 144Hz full HD display with a dim 250 nits of brightness.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The company plans two step-up models with 16GB of RAM, one at HP.com with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H chip and Radeon RX 6500M and one at Best Buy with a Core i7-12650H and GeForce RTX 3050 Ti. At this writing, however, HP had only Ryzen 5 systems for sale, though Best Buy did offer the Core i7 config for $1,099.99. 

Whatever the variant, the Victus 15 has a 15.6-inch non-touch screen with 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution. (A 300-nit low-blue-light panel is optional.) On our review unit, the screen's viewing angles are fairly wide; fine details are sharp; contrast is pretty good; and white backgrounds aren't too dingy. But colors are bland and lifeless rather than vivid, sorely lacking in brightness. If it didn't boast a 144Hz instead of generic 60Hz refresh rate, we'd call it a totally forgettable economy-class panel.

The Victus 15's plastic chassis—available in our dark grayish Mica Silver or $10 extra for Performance Blue or Ceramic White—measures 0.93 by 14.1 by 10 inches and weighs 5.06 pounds. That's trimmer than the Nitro 5 (1.06 by 14.1 by 10.7 inches, 5.51 pounds) and a match for the Katana GF66 (0.98 by 14.1 by 10.2 inches, 4.96 pounds).

(Photo: Molly Flores)

HP claims an 82.2% screen-to-body ratio for the Victus 15, with skinny side bezels but larger ones at the top (holding a webcam with no privacy shutter) and bottom. There's a lot of flex if you grasp the display corners, though not much if you press the keyboard deck. As with many gaming laptops, you'll find neither a fingerprint reader nor face recognition webcam to speed Windows Hello logins.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

You won't find a Thunderbolt 4 port, either, though we don't consider that a deal-breaker in an under-$1,000 laptop. The left edge holds a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an audio jack, an SD card slot, and the power connector. Another USB-A port joins a USB Type-C port, an Ethernet jack, and an HDMI video output on the right. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth handle wireless communications.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

A Puzzling Keyboard Layout, With No RGB

The keyboard has a comfortably responsive typing feel and—almost unheard-of for an HP laptop—cursor arrow keys arranged in the correct inverted T instead of a clumsy row. There are also top-row system controls and a numeric keypad. The buttonless touchpad is good-sized and glides and taps smoothly, though it has a somewhat stiff, dull click. 

On the minus side, while the keyboard is brightly backlit, it's in plain white with no multiple zones or per-key RGB color choices, so don't bother trying the supplied Omen Light Studio software. The Fn key doesn't team with the cursor arrows for Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down navigation, so you must perform those moves from the keypad, which is marred by the Num Lock key not having an indicator LED as the volume mute and touchpad toggle keys do.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Believe us when we say we've seen plenty of laptops with cheap, low-res 720p webcams, but the Victus' is poor even by the usual standards—it captures blurred, blotchy images with some noise or static. A speaker grille above the keyboard pumps out flat, tinny sound. There's no bass, you can barely make out overlapping tracks, and I couldn't find any of the audio software we usually see to select music, movie, or gaming modes or tinker with an equalizer. 

(Photo: Molly Flores)

HP bolsters the Windows 11 Home system with the Omen Gaming Hub app, which combines status info with options to optimize network traffic and disable Windows services and processes to boost game performance. HP QuickDrop transfers files to or from your smartphone. You also get McAfee LiveSafe, Dropbox, ExpressVPN, and LastPass trials.

Performance Testing: Battle of the Gaming Bargains 

For our benchmark charts, we compared the Victus 15 to four other wallet-friendly gaming laptops, led by the MSI Katana GF66 and two Acers, the Nitro 5 and Predator Helios 300. The Dell G3 15 is the cheapest in the field.

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.

We don't expect even a 12th Generation Core i5 to hang with Core i7 CPUs, and the Victus 15's Core i5 mostly doesn't (though the Nitro 5 and Katana are over- and underachievers respectively). So while it's not meant for workstation tasks such as video editing, the HP nevertheless performs nicely for a budget laptop, most importantly posting more than half again the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for everyday apps like Microsoft Office. 

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 Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing technology, although in the Victus 15's case, the GTX 1650 is unable to run F1 with DLSS turned on.

Officially, the GeForce GTX 1650 is still Nvidia's entry-level mobile gaming GPU, but realistically its day has passed and we're living in a GeForce RTX 3050 or 3050 Ti world now. The Victus 15 delivers playable frame rates at low to medium image quality settings (“playable” defined as the minimal 30 frames per second rather than the 60fps that even budget gamers seek nowadays), and it justifies its 144Hz display in esports titles like Rainbow Six Siege. But it's in the bottom three or four of all gaming laptops in our benchmark database. 

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(Opens in a new window)) 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 HP's battery life is fine for a gaming notebook, and its color fidelity is adequate for an economy model, albeit far short of suitable for image editing or content creation. But its 250-nit brightness would be disappointing in even in a bare bones Chromebook—we expect 300 and hope for 400 nits from all but the cheapest laptop panels.

Verdict: Only for the Tightest Budgets

The base-model HP Victus 15 has a temptingly low price (especially if and when Best Buy ever reruns its $200 discount), but to be blunt, there's no need to settle for GeForce GTX 1650 graphics when so many affordable gaming rigs today offer RTX 3050 or 3060 GPUs. Unless your budget just can't stretch beyond $600 or $650, look for a higher-end configuration of the Victus 15, or look elsewhere, to better-equipped rivals like the MSI Katana GF66 or Acer Nitro 5.