Review of the gaming notebook HP Victus 16: came, saw, won!

There aren’t too many gaming laptops. This statement is clearly agreed by the engineers of the American company Hewlett-Packard, who supplemented their two gaming series of mobile PCs with a third – Victus. It is more functional than Pavilion Gaming and more compact than Omen, as they say, the golden mean.

The diagonal of the HP Victus is equal to the new-fashioned 16 inches, ie a larger screen is installed in the body of the classic “fifteen”. The configuration of the processor and video card can vary: from the original gaming Core i5 with Radeon RX 5500M to the flagship Ryzen 7 with GeForce RTX 3060. The latter we will discuss in detail in this article.

Housing, screen, interfaces

There are three HP Victus 16 color options to choose from: blue, white and dark gray. The latter probably satisfies most potential buyers. The case is completely plastic, weighs about 2.5 kg, and has five ventilation grilles. Two blowers are located at the bottom, and three blowers – at the back and right. The top cover is attached to the base with a solid wide hinge. The keyboard has a single color backlight.

The frame around the screen is very thin, which allows you to place an IPS-matrix of increased diagonal – 16.1 inches. With a 144Hz eSports refresh rate, FullHD resolution is optimal. And the brightness can be raised to 300 nits (more only for laptops with OLED-matrices). Color rendering is 100% sRGB and 75% AdobeRGB. Simply put, the screen is suitable not only for games, but also for professional video editing and semi-professional photo processing.

For stationary use at home or in the office, you can connect an external 2K or 4K monitor to the notebook using HDMI 2.1 or USB Type-C (supports Display Port function). Three other USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports have the classic Type-A format.

There is also an SD card reader and Gigabit Ethernet. While the Wi-Fi 6 wireless adapter (MIMO 2×2) is even faster – in theory up to 2.4 Gbps (in practice, one and a half times less). Don’t forget about Bluetooth 5.2, which allows you to use TWS headphones with support for modern audio codecs.

Speed, upgrade, autonomy

The heart of this HP Victus 16 configuration is the Ryzen 7 5800H processor. It has 8 physical cores of the latest AMD Zen 3 architecture and 16 virtual SMT streams. The frequency is automatically adjusted from 3.2 GHz with a parallel load on all cores to 4.4 in single-threaded tasks.

There is also a built-in graphics accelerator Radeon Vega 8, which is used in 2D programs to reduce heat and save battery power. Vega can hardware play almost all modern video formats: H264, H265 and VP9. The only exception is the most advanced AV1 codec. The GeForce RTX 3060 discrete graphics card is responsible for decoding it. It is a representative of the latest NVIDIA Ampere architecture with 3840 microchairs and a 192-bit bus.

Unlike most desktop RTX 3060s with 12GB of GDDR6 video memory, the mobile version is only 6GB. But for games with a screen resolution of 1080p is not necessary. E-sports games, such as Dota 2 or Apex Legends, produce a frame rate of 144 FPS, which corresponds to the screen refresh rate. In theory, drawdowns can occur except in CoD Warzone at maximum graphics settings. But in practice, DLSS intelligent anti-aliasing technology allows you to increase FPS at the touch of a button.

The cooling system consists of two thick heat pipes and two fans. It copes with its task with moderate noise and without the slightest hint of throttling. The SO-DIMM connectors have 16 GB of DDR4-3200 MHz RAM in dual channel mode. You can upgrade to 32 GB in the future.

Copper heatsinks for two M.2 SSDs with PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface are also provided. One slot has a solid state drive with a capacity of 1 TB, the other is free. For automatic backup, you can combine two SSDs into a mirrored RAID array. There is no seat for the 2.5-inch HDD, but it allowed you to install a truly long-lasting 70 W * h battery. The complete charger has a power of 200 W.

Conclusions

HP Victus 16 is a de jure gaming, but de facto professional laptop. The 16-stream Ryzen 7 processor and RTX 3060 video card make it a suitable solution for video editing and 3D modeling. Gamers will be able to enjoy photorealistic graphics in games with Ray-Tracing technology. It is possible to upgrade both RAM and SSD. The laptop is equipped with Bang & Olufsen stereo speakers, making it sound better than most of its classmates. And thanks to the pre-installed licensed Windows 10, the laptop is immediately ready to work.