The low price tag helps bring this cheap 16-inch gaming laptop into the circle of selected gaming laptops worth buying.

HP Victus 16 joins a small but growing number of gaming laptops. The sturdy, comfortable keyboards of these laptops are surrounded by clean, minimalist design aesthetics. These elements make them suitable for work and entertainment. Combine it with the relatively cheap price tag of $1,200, and you will get an intriguing mid-range gaming laptop that won't affect your wallet too much.

Yes, HP threw the RGB lighting out the window. In other words, the audio did not impress us too deeply, and the accompanying GeForce RTX 3050Ti GPU must belong to the low end of the GeForce RTX 30 series spectrum. Nevertheless, Victus 16 can still bring considerable value to mainstream gaming PCs.

HP's Victus basically replaced HP's Pavilion Gaming brand. The "V" logo is "extracted" from the "diamonds" used by its more hardcore Omen gaming brand. Essentially, it is a gaming PC designed for various tasks, which is reflected in the badge and design.

Victus 16 is available in three configurations from HP.com: 16-e0097nr for $1,129.99 (equipped with Ryzen 7 and Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU), 16z-e000 for $809.99 (equipped with Ryzen 5 and Nvidia GTX, 1650) for $729.99 16t- d000 (including Core i5 and GTX 1650). Our review unit is 16-d0097nr, the highest level version.

We also found the 16-d0020tg (with Core i5-11400H and Nvidia RTX 3050Ti) on Target for $1,049.99, and the $919 16-e0010nr (with Ryzen 5600H CPU and RTX 3050 GPU) for $919.

Some gaming laptops go too far to promote the "gamer" experience, with RGB lighting all over the keyboard. Victus 16 is more subtle. Our evaluation unit has the beauty of black on a black background, which emphasizes what you see on the screen more than anything else. It weighs 5.44 pounds and is 0.93 inches thick, which doesn't make people feel overpowering. The weight is slightly heavier than the other 16-inch gaming notebook Acer Predator Triton 500 SE we reviewed. The latter is much more expensive, but it also includes a screen with a higher resolution and a faster refresh rate.

In my book, this is a real advantage. We haven't fully realized the future of thin and light laptops docking with external graphics chassis to mix and match productivity and gaming, so PCs like Victus fill this area. By default, the laptop is cool enough to run, so that the system fan draws in air from the bottom of the laptop and pushes it out from the sides and back. Internally, Victus contains four heat pipes. According to HP, the heat sink length has increased by 54%, the fan size has increased by 33%, and the airflow has increased by 30% compared to the previous Pavilion Gaming notebook.

In the real world, when the fan spins while browsing the web and other office work, this translates into a very quiet hiss, only louder than other productivity laptops around my office. Of course, fans will dial a lot during the game. If you want, you can click the diamond button near the power button to open the Omen Gaming Hub. There, you will find a one-click performance control tab to manually put the laptop in quiet mode for office work, and a separate default or performance mode for gaming.

However, even though the fan was spinning at full speed, I couldn't detect any coil whine—it was just the system fan's "swish" rising. HP has done a good job in this regard. However, as our performance tests have shown, due to heat dissipation issues, the performance of the laptop will decrease over time.

Victus is an all-plastic notebook computer that feels sturdy enough to be used without distortion on the keyboard. However, when subjected to vibration or movement, the display may swing back and forth, especially when adjusted back and forth. This didn't make me particularly worried, even though it felt a bit fragile.

The display is not outstanding, although its price is good. Although there is a huge 1-inch chin at the bottom, the protruding amount of the display frame does not exceed a few millimeters. The ratio of screen to body is 84%.

Keep in mind that traditional laptops usually fall into the 15-inch or 17-inch category, so this 16-inch (or, as HP says, 16 inches in a 15-inch form factor) is a bit unusual. The display options offered by HP range from the low-end 1080p (250 nits) to the 1080p (144Hz (300 nits)) in our review unit, without HDR capabilities. HP also sells a 165Hz 1440p screen option for an additional $110 to provide a higher resolution screen with a better refresh rate. According to our measurements, the performance of the 300 nit screen significantly exceeds that of 360 nits at maximum brightness. Our colorimeter report shows that the monitor provides 100% of the sRGB color gamut, but it does not meet the requirements in other respects.

Our evaluation unit does not include a touch screen monitor, which is an uncommon feature on gaming laptops.

You can get a variety of memory and storage options from HP's configuration page for you to choose from. There are two options above that are not well explained. First, you have a specific option to configure two 256GB SSDs together in a RAID 0 configuration, where the data is striped across the two drives to improve performance. Second, HP provides Optane storage as a kind of cache for hard drives, which in theory can further improve storage performance.

Victus includes a 5Gbps USB-C (with DisplayPort 1.4 and sleep and charge functions), an HDMI 2.1 port and three USB-A (5Gbps) ports, one of which has sleep and charge functions. "Jaws"-style Gigabit Ethernet ports also appeared. This allows it to connect to a pair of 4K monitors, one via the USB-C port and the other via HDMI. This basically eliminates the need for Thunderbolt ports.

Although you will never mistake HP Victus for a productivity PC, the keyboard will not disappoint. Perhaps to put the keyboard on the right side of the keyboard, the key width seems to be a millimeter smaller than that of a productivity laptop. The pitch or the gap between the keys seems to be about the same. The smaller keys make my typing a bit difficult, although a flexible and comfortable keyboard should be sufficient for typing and scheduling MMO raids. The display ratio of approximately 16:9 also allows HP to be installed in the numeric keypad on the right side of the keyboard, which is a necessity for left-handed gamers.

Hewlett-Packard has an excellent traditional keyboard, and even an excellent keyboard, Victus deserves this reputation. I typed this review on the Victus keyboard, and I can say with certainty that I would be happy to use it for a long time. Just don't expect RGB or even complex backlighting, because there is only one lighting level.

Otherwise, the keyboard is standard, but has specific function keys for launching the Windows Calculator application and Omen Game Center, as described below. HP claims that its touchpad is 19% larger than the Pavilion gaming PC. Although it feels a bit cheaper than the touchpad on a productivity notebook, the surface is smooth, and the touchpad is basically clickable on its entire surface.

I found HP Victus audio a bit disappointing. The dual speakers will definitely emit enough volume. In fact, I had to adjust the volume slightly below the maximum for testing. HP asked Bang & Olufsen to adjust its speakers, just like it does with many laptops. The resulting soundscape sounds a bit clumsy, although there is no corresponding treble and bass, but the midrange is emphasized. To be fair, using the built-in graphic equalizer in the B&O Audio Control app really helps, but I have never found a mix that sounds right.

Victus 16 also provides noise cancellation for video conferencing or simply interacting with Cortana and other digital assistants. In general, these work well, although there is usually no background noise in my home office.

As you might expect, Victus 16’s webcam range is between normal and poor, with a 0.9Mpixel (720p video) user-facing sensor. Despite the good color balance and exposure, the resulting image is grainy. Don't expect too much from the webcam, you will not be disappointed. The webcam or any other sensor on the laptop does not support Windows Hello.

HP includes ten of its own applications on HP Victus, from the HP Audio Switch that replicates the Windows switch speaker output function to myHP, a gateway to get tips and tricks about the PC, and selected third-party products. HP also loaded Victus with a trial version of 100GB Dropbox, ExpressVPN ads, McAfee LiveSafe, and trial versions of Personal Security, Disney+, Amazon.com and Amazon Alexa.

One app worth trying is Omen Gaming Hub, which is the focal point of those who own HP gaming products and the dashboard of Victus 16 itself. Hub provides the opportunity to earn reward points and try artificial intelligence guidance, a feature that HP added two years ago. The dashboard provides real-time views of CPU and GPU utilization and temperature, as well as network accelerators (where you can assign specific network priorities to applications and games) and performance control, which is an alternative to the Windows 11 performance slider.

There is also a specific "Undervoltage" tab where you can try to reduce the CPU voltage (although not the clock speed) to try to save power. HP warns that this may be a risky choice, but because even experimenting with it can cause crashes and blue screens of death. We did not test this feature.

Although the Core i7-11800H processor in the HP Victus 16 has medium performance, the GeForce RTX 3050Ti is at the low end of the 3xxx series, although it can provide RTX ray tracing graphics and DLSS 2.0 for budget laptops, and this still applies for something ,

We compared the $1,249 HP Victus 16 with several gaming laptops we tested before, and most of them are somewhat different. Our first comparison is our best 15-inch gaming laptop, the $1,649 ASUS ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition, which uses a full AMD configuration and performs well. We also include the $845 Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-54-51M5), the best budget gaming laptop (with a 15.6-inch display) of our current selection, and its latest 2021 cousin, worth $1,700 Acer Nitro 5 AN515-45-R7S0. We also conducted HP Victus with the US$2,199 Gigabyte Aorus 17G, our best 17-inch gaming laptop, and our selected best budget 17-inch gaming laptop (affected by the epidemic), the US$2,800 HP Omen 17-cb0040nr compare. To this end, we have added the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, which is priced at $1,749.99, which is a competitor’s 16-inch gaming laptop. The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE of the same name costs $1,299, which is roughly the same price as HP Victus, but only has a 14-inch screen.

Keep in mind that traditional laptops are usually classified as 15-inch or 17-inch laptops, and larger cases usually allow more space for additional cooling. We tested the laptop in the default mode, which allows it to increase the fan speed when needed.

We chose the PCMark 10 benchmark test as an overall indicator of laptop performance-of course, this is useful if the laptop is used for work during the day. The benchmark tests office scenarios such as light games, word processing and spreadsheets, as well as more intensive applications such as CAD. We only recently started using this benchmark, so only a few gaming laptops scored in this test. We can tell you that the best 14/15-inch workhorse laptop we picked, the HP Envy 14, has a PCMark 10 score of 5,330. Victus blew it out of the water with a score of 7,007.

Cinebench R15 and R20 provide two different performances for the CPU performance provided by HP Victus, which can run the laptop in a multi-threaded benchmark test or only in a single-threaded operation. Although games have begun to take advantage of multi-core and multi-threading, many traditional games still rely heavily on single-threaded operation.

We also used Cinebench R23 to test the thermal throttling of the laptop. A more advanced version of the Cinebench benchmark provides the ability to run a single test as well as repeated loop benchmarks. This test detects thermal issues that may degrade CPU performance over time. Although HP touts its advanced cooling system, performance did drop by 14% (from 12,038 to 10,405) when running the cycle benchmark.

We used Handbrake to test the cooling system of laptops by transcoding Hollywood-length movies into a format that can be used by tablets. Although transcoding is not that useful in a world where movies can be downloaded from Netflix, it is still an effective way to discern how Victus 16 manages heat under load.

3Dmark provides a general test of game performance outside of the actual game. Various Fire Strike benchmark tests emphasize Victus 16's RTX 3060 CPU. We have included Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme tests for a more comprehensive evaluation.

We are also running the Time Spy benchmark in loop mode to test whether performance also drops over time. 3DMark looks for and expects the 3D performance of your laptop to be consistent over time, even if benchmarks push the GPU (and some CPUs) to the limit. Fortunately, this did not happen and the laptop always provides a stable frame rate.

Finally, there is battery life. As most gamers understand, long battery-powered gaming sessions are not what gamers expect, but it is definitely a good thing to have it in a pinch. Here, Victus 16 provides about five and a half hours of battery life, which is not bad for gaming laptops. However, it is a bit lower than the competition. It also includes a fast charging function. This laptop fits HP's claim that it can be charged to 50% in about 30 minutes.

To test game performance, we used our traditional gaming benchmark, Rise of the Tomb Raider. Here, Victus 16 performed well. We used similar settings for the recent Tomb Raider: Shadow, and achieved similar results (95 FPS) with DirectX 12 enabled. Using DirectX 11, the benchmark score is 75 FPS.

In the more modern game Metro: Exodus, HP Victus 16 produced a benchmark score of 29.9 FPS when running at 1080p Extreme settings. In contrast, ASUS ROG Strix Advantage Edition has a benchmark score of 48 fps. Another Acer Nitro 5 (AN517-41-R3NX with Ryzen 7 5800H and RTX 3080 GPU) records 42 frames per second. Generally speaking, we believe that 30fps is almost impossible to use for slower-paced third-person games, and most people prefer first-person shooters with 60fps or higher.

Our results indicate that HP Victus 16 should be a strong competitor for 1080p games, although you need to reduce the graphics quality in some places.

HP's Victus 16 obviously has considerable value as an economical gaming notebook. The price of $1,249 is commendable, especially when supply chain issues severely affect profitability and availability. However, HP apparently sacrificed some of the highlights of rival laptops to provide a serious gaming PC for users who care about content on the screen rather than under their fingers. Laptops that can balance work and entertainment are also worth mentioning.

To be fair, if it weren’t for the great contributions of ASUS ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition and Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, we might award Victus 16 Editor’s Choice Awards, both of which provide outstanding performance and higher resolution screens. Good refresh rate. However, the prices of these two laptops are also hundreds of dollars higher. If this is important, Victus 16 is a more economical choice.

Among the notebooks we have tested, we think it is fair to recommend ROG Strix G15, Triton 500SE and Victus 16 today. Although Victus 16 may not be your first choice for gaming laptops, we still think it is still a good choice.