Price when the price has been tested.
$1,249.99
The best price today is at the best price.
Retailer Price Delivery $1199.99 View Price comparison from over 24’000 stores around the world. The HP Victus 16 is a small but growing number of gaming notebooks with a solid, comfortless keyboard and minimalist design style. These elements have a strong effect on working and play. Combine this with the reasonable $1,200 price tag and you’ll have a recipe for a handy midrange gaming notebook that won’t hit your wallet all the time. Yes, HP turned the python orange out the window. That said, we weren’t overly impressed by the audio and the included GeForce RTX 3050Ti GPU certainly runs on the farewell of the GeForce RTX 30-series spectrum. Nonetheless, the Victus 16 is a strong performance model for a major gaming device.
HP Victus 16 basic features.
HPs Victus is basically the newest brand of HPs Pavilion Gaming. The V logo is extracted from the diamond used by its more hardcore Omen gaming brand. Essentially, a gaming machine designed for a variety of tasks. It’s represented in design and badging. The Victus 16 is equipped with three models from HP.com: the $1,129.99 16-e0097nr (with a Ryzen 7 and a RTX 3050 Ti GPU), the 809.99 16z-e000 (with a Ryzen 5 and a Nvidia GTX 1650) and the $729.99 16t-d000 (with a Core i5 and a GTX 1650). Our review is the 16-d0097nr, the class’s highest-class version. We also found the 16-d0020tg (core i5-11400H and Nvidia RTX 3050Ti) for $1,049.99 at Target, as well as the 16-e0010nr (with a Ryzen 5600MHz CPU and a RTX 3050 GPU) for $1,099.99 at Newegg.
Processor: Intel Core i5-11400H, Core i7-11800H (test test) Display: 16 inches (1,920,080, 144Hz), 300 nits rated (as per test); 16.6 inches (2,5601440, 165Hz), 300 nits rated (and tested); 600 nits rated (as per test): 350 nits compared to 1600 nits. Memory: 8/12/16/332 GB DDR4-2933; 16 GB (2×8 GB), which is described in the test. Memory: 256GB/512GB RAM, 32GB RAM and 32GB RAM, and as required. Graphics:RGEF 3050Ti (4GB)/RGEF 3060 w/6GB of GDDR6 (tried) (as tested) (RTX 3050Ti (3GB) / RGEF 3060 (based on the test test). Ports:1 USB-C (5Gbps, DisplayPort 1.4, charging); 3 USB-A (5Gbps, 1 w/charging enabled); HDMI 2.1, Gigabit Ethernet, SD card slot, 3,5mm jack. Camera: Users view video in 720p. The battery is 70.4Wh; full: 65.2Wh. Wireless: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax22), Bluetooth 5.0. Workstation:Windows 10 Home. Measures: 14.57 x 10.24 x 0.93 lbs. Weight:5.44lb Gray:Silver (reported), Blue: Performable, White: Ceramic. Prices: $1,249.99 at HP.com.
I didn’t get all the boxes and build quality.
Some gaming laptops are taking a beating in pushing gamers’ experience, and the blue light on the keyboard has won the key. The Victus 16 is much more refined: the review unit’s black-on-black aesthetic accentuates what you see on the screen much more than anything else. As far as its weight is 5,44 pounds and 0,93 inches thick, it isn’t too large. The weigh is slightly smaller than the last of the 16-inch gaming notebooks we reviewed, the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, which costs a lot more but also has a high-resolution screen that helps to get started faster. The HP Victus 16 is front-runner, pushed out hot air. Mark Hachman / IDG. In my book, that’s a real plus. We haven’t yet realized a future where lightweight laptops are docked into external graphics enclosures, so you can mix and match productivity and gaming, so they fill this niche instead of PCs like Victus. The laptop works very well for a small price point. The system fan suck air out of the iceplug of the laptop and push it out the sides and back. The Victus has four heat pumps. It boasts 54 percent bigger fin length, 33 percent larger fan size and 30 percent more airflow than a previous Pavilion Gaming notebook. In real time, this brings a very quiet voice as the fans spin during the office like web browsing, even more arousingly than the other productivity notebooks I have around the office. Naturally, the fans are dialing up a lot during the game. If you would like, tap the diamond key near the power button to open the Omen Gaming Center. There are two buttons in a tab to control the performance of the laptop, in which you may put it in Quiet mode, whereas for office, the different controls on Performance and Default mode. There is also large ventilation at the bottom of the Victus. Mark Hachman / IDG. Even though the fan rotates at full speed, he did detect a coil whine just an elevated whoosh of the fans. HP does well here. Even though we tested the laptop for performance, it could turn a little down over time due to the heat issues. The Victus laptop is a durable laptop that is easily accessed without any worry about the keyboard. When jarred or moved the displays, so its being adjustable in between. I didn’t even feel bad about that. The display isn’t brilliant, but it’s not bad for the price. Display bezels measure more than two millimeters, though there is a big chin at the bottom. The ratio between screen and body is four hundred percent. Remember that traditional laptops usually fall in a 15 or 17-inch category, so this 16-inch (or as it happened to HP) is slightly different. HP has a camera-captured model that runs from 1080p (250 nits) to 1080p at the lowest price, and 144Hz (300 nits) on our review unit. HP also sells a 1440p screen at 165Hz, and a minus 10 dollars, with a better screen refresh rate. The 300-nit screen dramatically overperformed, causing 360 nits of brightness. Our colorimeter says that the display offers a full range of colors, but it won’t fit into other areas. Our review unit didn’t have a touchscreen display, an uncommon feature on gaming laptops. Victus 16 has a color gap, but not outstanding, as it isn’t a typical gaming condition. Mark Hachman / IDG. You’ll have the choice between memory and memory options, available from HP’s configuration page. There are two things that aren’t well spelled out. First, it’s a specific option to set up two 256GB SSDs together in an RAID 0 configuration. An image of the drives is taken by the sands that combine all of them in order to achieve more performance. Third, HP proposes storage as a cache for the hard drive, teasing storage performance significantly. The Victus 16 boasts a wide array of I/O ports; from Gigabit Ethernet to HDMI, USB-A, USB-C and full size SD card reader. I noticed the USB-A port on our review unit didn’t always detect a USB key after being inserted and needed some giggling to establish a connection. Mark Hachman and IDG have a working relationship. This type of product is available in two different formats, one with 5 Gbps, and one with 12GB of bandwidth, which can be used for Sleep and Charge, and the other with 4GB of Ethernet. A Gigabit Ethernet port, built-in, is also a big part of the device. This means connecting to a pair of 4K displays, one via the USB-C port, and the other via the HDMI connection. That basically eliminates the need for an Thunderbolt port. The right-hand side of the laptop has USB-A ports. Mark Hachman / IDG
Experience-level recording, audio-leveling and webcam, so you can use the video conferencing.
Though you don’t ever mistake the HP Victus to a productivity PC, the keyboard doesn’t disappoint either. To accommodate the keypad on the right of the keyboard, the width of the key is perhaps a millimeter smaller than a productivity laptop. The pitch or the gap between the keys looks almost the same. The lower keys threw my typing for a bit of an avalanche, although the flexible, yet confortable keyboard may also suffice for producing a paper as well as orchestrating an MMO raid. The roughly 16:9 ratio, therefore, allows HP to have a number pad on the right side of the keyboard a necessity for left-handed gamers. The Victus has a reputation on its own, and his reputation has changed. I typed that review on the keyboard of Victus so I can safely say that I’d be relatively happy to use it on a long-term basis. Just don’t expect anything from RGB or even sophisticated backlighting, as there is only one light level. If the keyboard doesn’t work, the function of the keys is included in the software program, as well as the game platform aka Omen. HP boasts that the touchpad is 19 % bigger than its Pavilion Gaming PCs. While it is a little cheaper than most productivity notebooks, the surfaces are smooth and the touchpad is essentially touchable over its entire surface. The keyboard from Victus 16s is very comfortable to use, with a gaming laptop. There are dedicated keys for the HPs Omen Gaming Hub (the diamond) and the Windows Calculator app. Mark Hachman and IDG. I found the HP Victus sound somewhat disappointing. The dual speakers certainly put out too much volume. Rather, I had to turn the volume down slightly below the minimum, so that I could test the volume. Its biggest surprise is the fact that it allowed Bang & Olufsen to tune its speakers like many other laptops. The resultant soundscape sounds a bit clunky, emphasizing that the midrange doesn’t have any corresponding highs and lows, so it’s not worth a thousand dollars. Of course, using the built-in graphics equalizer inside the ‘broadcast’ software helped, but I couldn’t find a whole lot of music that sounded very right. The Victus 16 also offers noise cancelling features for videoconferencing or simply interacting with Cortana and other digital assistants. But generally, they worked fairly well, though my home office is often empty of background noise. This Victus 16s webcam ranges from poor to poor, with a 0.9Mpixel (720p video) sensor. The result of the resulting image is brilliant despite a good color balance and the ability to focus. Don’t expect much from the webcam and you’ll not be disappointed. Windows Hello isn’t supported either through the webcam or by any other sensor on the laptop. Another app that is worth considering is the Omen Gaming Hub, the focal point for those who own HP gaming products, and the Vinci-Casso platform. The Hub lets you win rewards and try out AI-powered coaching, something HP added two years ago. The dashboard gives an actual view of CPU and GPU utilization and temperature, as well as the Network Booster (where you might assign specific networking priorities to apps and games) and the Performance Control (where performance sliders are inserted). There is also a specific tab for undervolting, where you can reduce the CPU (though not the clock speed) so you can save energy. HP warns this might be a risky choice, as it could be possible even if experimenting with it can help a single person get through some crashes and BSODs. We failed to test this feature. Omen Gaming Hub app allows you to check your Victus key. Mark Hachman / IDG / IDG / IDG.
Performance
The Intel Core i7-11800H processor in the HP Victus 16 is moderately powerful, yet the GeForce RTX 3050Ti is on the far edge of the 3xxx series, although it can offer RTX, ray-traced graphics and DLSS 2.0 to budget notebooks, and that’s for something, which stands for something, indeed. We compared the 1 249 HP Victus 16 to several gaming laptops we’ve previously tested, mostly of which are different in a way. Our comparisons begin with our best 15-inch gaming laptop, the $1,649 Asus RPG Strix G15 Advantage Edition, which runs in the same light as a four-inch processor. We also included the 845 Yerto, Tendrio Fuseo, the current pick for the most expensive gaming laptop (with 16 centimeters of hiloscope), and the 170-yet’s Acerto, the Tentiful Yerto, the Yerto, a 5-Mega-Neo-Mileo, the 645-Meo. We also compared HP Victus to the $2,199 Gigabyte Aorus 17G, our best 17-inch gaming laptop and our pick of the best budget 17-inch gaming laptop, the 2800 HP Omen 17. cb0040nr. We added an Acer Predator Triton 500 SE $1 79.99, a competing 16-inch gaming laptop. At $1,299, the similarly named Acer Predator Triton 300 SE is about the same price as the HP Victus, but only with one fourteen-inch screen. For example, a traditional notebook generally falls into a 15-inch or a 17-inch category, the larger chassis allows more space for additional cooling. We tested the laptop in the default mode, allowing it to dial the fan speed when necessary. We chose the PCMark 10, a benchmark that was based on the laptop’s performance, so we could determine whether it’s useful, if the laptop is being used during the day. The test results are used to simulate light gaming, word processing, and spreadsheets. We’ve only recently changed the standard of use, so just a few of our gaming laptops have scored from that test. The HP Envy 14, which is a 15-megapixel laptop, says a PCMark 10 score of 5,330. The Victus blows it out of the water with a score of 707. Cinebench’s R15 and R20 provide two different upgrades to the CPU performance described by the HP Victus, both in light of the mulithreaded benchmark and in a single-threaded operation. If games are taking advantage of multiple cores and threads, there is still a much needed use of single-threaded operations for many traditional games. If you throw a CPU-dependent application at the HP Victus 16, it will perform very well. Mark Hachman / IDG We also used Cinebench R23 to test the laptop for thermal throttling. A simpler version of the Cinebench benchmark can run any single test and run one more or more of the tests, not only does it loop in the benchmark, but also it loops back in the end. This test detects thermal issues that can delay CPU performance. Although HP combines its advanced cooling system, performance fell by 14 percent and drew 12 088 to 10 405 while running the test run. We test the computers’ cooling systems with Handbrake and transcode a Hollywood-length film to the tablet. The Victus 16 can manage heat while under load. I noticed the HP Victus 16 is one of the most popular gaming laptops. The Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition outperforms all these. Mark Hachman / IDG. 3Dmark provides a generic test of performance in non-real-games. The number of Fire Strike meter tests emphasizes the use of the Victus 16s RTX 3060 CPU. We have both the Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme tests for a comprehensive evaluation. There are a number of GPUs that are more powerful than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050Ti used by the Victus. Mark Hachman and IDG We also ran the Time Spy benchmark in looped mode to determine if performance in a particular area and beyond decreased. 3DMark looks for, expects, your laptops’ 3D performance will continue to be consistent with time, even if the benchmark pushes the GPU (and, in part, the CPU) to its limits. Unfortunately, this didn’t occur, and the laptop delivered an entire frame rate. Batteries also survive. As many gamers understand, long and battery-powered gaming isn’t something gamers expect, but it’s definitely nice to have in a pinch. This case, the Victus 16 offers about a 5-and-a-half hours battery life, which is not bad for a gaming notebook. Nevertheless, its a bit too low to take on competition. This also includes quick-charging capabilities. This laptop met HP claims that it could charge up to 50 percent in roughly 30 minutes. Keep in mind that laptop makers must provide both cooling and batteries with the laptop chassis. Larger laptops, heavier ones, can include larger batteries. Mark Hese / IDG For the test of our traditional gaming benchmark, Rise of the Tomb Raider. There isn’t much on the Victus 16 here. We used some similar settings as its more recent counterpart, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and got similar results (five FPS) with DirectX 12 enabled. Using DirectX 11, the benchmark was 75 FPS. On a more modern game, Metro: Exodus, the HP Victus 16 gave a benchmark of 29,9 FPS while running at 1080p Extreme settings. The Asus ROG Strix Advantage Edition scored a benchmark score of 48 fps by comparison. Another Acer Nitro 5 (AN517-41-R3NX with an AMD 7 5800/H and an RTX 3080 GPU) recorded 42 frames per second. In general, we would consider 30fps to be hardly playable for slower-paced third-person games. Most people prefer to try out 60fps or more for first-person shooters. Our results suggest that HP Victus 16 should be a solid contender for 1080p gaming, but you will need to make the most of the graphics in places. Mark Hachman / IDG.
Conclusion: Very good, just not the best.
HPs Victus 16 also offers a huge value as a cheap gaming notebook. The price tag of $2249 is worth an applause, especially with supply-chain woes gnawing at profit margins and availability. Even though HP clearly sacrificed some of the bling of other notebooks to give a free gaming PC to users who care more about the information they have on the screen than under their fingers. Laptops that use dual-duty tools such as work and play are worth to highlight and also. To be honest, we are likely to award the Victus 16, an Editors Choice award if not for the substantial contribution of the Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition and Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, both of which deliver spectacular performance and a higher-resolution screen with faster refresh rates. To date, both notebooks cost hundreds of dollars and more. If that matters, the Victus 16 is a more budget-friendly option. Of these notebooks we have tested, we think we should recommend the ROG Strix G15, the Triton 500SE, and the Victus 16. Even though the Victus 16 is a good choice for a gaming notebook, we still think that its a good choice.
