HP Victus 15 Review

We wrote a review of the dark silver HP Victus 15, but it also comes in white and blue. The laptop has a smooth body with a big V in the middle that reflects light. Under it, between the hinges, it says Victus, in case the V wasn’t enough to tell you. The vents are in a big hole in the back of the victus. There are cut-out vents under the laptop, near one of its feet. On each side, near the feet, there are two cutouts for speakers. I have been looking everywhere for a cheap gaming laptop that I could suggest to people who want to spend less than $800. I hoped and prayed that it would be the HP Victus 15, which has been one of Best Buy’s best-selling items this year.

After playing games on the Victus for a few days ($799.99 for my Core i5/8GB/512GB/GTX 1650 model), I’ve learned that it’s not the sure thing I thought it would be. The low price is appealing, and it will be even more so if you can find it on sale, but the old GPU in our test model doesn’t offer the frame rates I’d expect from a modern gaming laptop. That doesn’t mean you should never buy a Victus, but you should have realistic expectations, as is often the case with cheap game computers.

HP Victus 15 Specs

PROS:

1. Excellent price
2. Good performance in games
3. Can also be used for work.

CONS:

1. Battery life is not good.
2. Pretty simple style

Design

We wrote a review of the dark silver HP Victus 15, but it also comes in white and blue. The laptop has a smooth body with a big V in the middle that reflects light. Under it, between the hinges, it says Victus, in case the V wasn’t enough to tell you. The vents are in a big hole in the back of the victus. There are cut-out vents under the laptop, near one of its feet. On each side, near the feet, there are two cutouts for speakers.

The style isn’t too flashy, so it can be used in an office or at a game store. It looks a bit more grown-up than the red and black designs that were so popular a few years ago. Even though it might be a bit heavy to carry around. The power charger port, a USB Type-A port, an SD card slot, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack are all on the left side of the Victus. On the right side, there is an HDMI 2.1 port, another USB Type-A port, Ethernet, and a USB Type-C port. When you open the laptop, the 15.6-inch screen has a big V and is surrounded by a thick frame.

Price

The most basic HP Victus 15 costs only $599 (about £490 or AU$865) in the US, which is a very low price. With changes like an AMD Ryzen 7 or Intel Core i7 processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPU, 16GB of memory, or a 512GB SSD, the price goes up. The best price is about $1,200 (about £980 or AU$1,730). Don’t forget to look at the HP deal codes you can use to save even more. At the moment, this laptop seems to be very hard to find in the UK and Australia, and we don’t know if or when it will become available there. We’ve asked HP for more information and will update this review if they tell us more.

Performance

Even though it’s a cheap gaming laptop, the HP Victus 15 takes airflow seriously. It has two fans and a bigger air vent at the bottom than previous models. When it comes to games, this is a cheap laptop, so there are some things you have to give up when you have lower specs. For example, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 laptop GPU that comes with the least expensive HP Victus 15 computers only has 4 GB of VRAM. Standard tests like Cinebench, Geekbench, PCMark10, and 3DMark showed that the HP Victus 15 was not as good as other game computers.

But there wasn’t a big difference between those scores, even though the machine we tried had much less powerful technology than other cheap computers. The HP Victus 15 does well with other jobs that aren’t tied to gaming. It can do many things at once, like watch movies, make voice and video calls, edit papers, and more. This laptop is a good choice if you want one that has a good mix of features.

Battery Life

As with a lot of game computers, the battery is by far the worst thing about the HP Victus 15. In both of our battery tests, the laptop only lasted a little over four hours, which is half of a full workday. It lasted about the same amount of time when we used it for simple daily jobs. For games, the battery goes down much more quickly, so you could only play for maybe two hours at a time. But using the charger that comes with it, it only takes about an hour to get to a little over 60% charged. If you used a USB Type-C charger, it would take less time, so we’d suggest that if it’s a possibility.

The Bottom Line

The base model of the HP Victus 15 has a very low price, especially if Best Buy keeps its discount, but to be honest, there’s no reason to settle for GeForce GTX 1650 graphics when so many cheap gaming rigs today have RTX 3050 or 3060 GPUs. If your budget can’t go over $600 or $650, look for a higher-end version of the Victus 15, or look elsewhere at better-equipped rivals like the MSI Katana GF66 or Acer Nitro 5.