Victus by HP - Plenty of Power. Not Many Frills

Gaming laptops are funny beasts. While most of us normies probably prefer a device that's slim, light and has heaps of battery life, it seems gamers have different priorities.

If you're more concerned with Hulk-smashing radioactive robots than presenting the perfect PowerPoint at an online meeting, who cares about a bit of excessive fan noise in the background? You've gotta keep things cool for maximum performance, right?

That said, many gaming laptops come with so many bells and whistles (and lights) you'd have to be a very successful pro gamer to be able to afford one. So there might just be a gap in the market for a more affordable machine. Perhaps we could keep the performance but without the fluff?...

The Victus by HP aims to do just that; HP has its Omen range at upper end of the market but for those of us on a more realistic budget, a Victus like the one I've been sent to review might be just the ticket. My Victus has a massive 15.6-inch display, a more-than-healthy 16GB of RAM, a very capable AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU and is fitted with an AMD Radeon RX 6500M dedicated graphics card.

This makes it a very snappy performer indeed.

Apps and games install and load super fast. The dedicated graphics card combined with the low-glare, 144Hz FHD display makes for an extremely responsive, silky-smooth gaming experience and I've had no issue running any game at high-performance settings.

The screen is bright without being dazzling - bright enough to use when sun shines through the window behind me anyway.

So this is all good news right? Not bad for just a tick over two grand.

But just so you've got all the info, there have defintely been some compromises made to keep the price down.

Like pretty much every gaming laptop I've ever used, battery life is not great. You just can't run those big fans and the giant display for any length of time without some serious juice. That means - as usual - you'll probably want to take the 150W external power brick with you which will add yet more weight and bulk to an already oversized mobile computing experience. And no, you can't just whack any old USB-C charger into the USB-C port - it does power delivery but it isn't for charging the laptop itself. This is a worry as I've found the conventional, right-angled barrel-style plug from the power supply tends to push against my leg when I'm using the Victus on my lap and I feel like it's already kind of wobbly in its socket.

I don't love the keyboard on the Victus either. For starters, I get you've got a certain design theme going on here using a certain sci-fi-ish font and yes, I'm a reasonable touch-typist but when the 5 key looks exactly the the S key, you might be taking things a bit far. There's fairly good travel and spacing so the typing process is comfortable and accurate enough but some of the choices have left me scratching my head.

While there aren't standalone media controls or brightness keys, these are doubled onto the function keys, although the keyboard backlight key (F4) merely turns the backlight on or off - there are no varying degrees of brightness you can toggle through as I've encountered on other keyboards.

There's a full number pad - that's good - but no Home or End keys which frustrates me very much indeed.  No Home or End keys yet there are dedicated shortcut keys to launch the calculator and the OMEN Gaming Hub. I find this a weird choice given I've never wanted to use a calculator in the middle of a game and to be honest, the OMEN Gaming Hub is kind of clunky.

OMEN comes preinstalled and you'll usually find some version of this kind of utility on most PC's and laptops these days. The idea is a one-stop app to ensure your computer is running as efficiently as possible and in the case of a high-performance gaming machine like this, that might mean a lot of tweaks to divert as many resources into your game as possible.

If anything, OMEN offers too many options; not only can you adjust fan speed and free up RAM but you can really dig down into the background processes and hidden apps, stopping any or all of them if you desire.

Fine. Whether that's something you need to access mid-game with the push of a dedicated shortcut key seems pretty debatable though.

OMEN also has a gallery where you can store your favourite desktops and screenshots - even sharing them with the wider OMEN community should you choose to. Is there a wider OMEN community? If so, this is the first I'm hearing of it.

You have the option to use OMEN as a launcher for your games - no matter what platform you've installed them from. This is a tidy bit of organisation and will save you cluttering up your destop with numerous shortcut icons.

You can even add to this already full-featured gaming hub by installing the Light Studio plugin; this gives you access to any RGB accessory you have connected and lets you unify them into a grand lighting scheme of your own design, saving you the bother of trying to coordinate different apps for different devices. Light Studio recognised my HyperX mouse right away which is great because ironically I hate flashing lights and I was able to turn the pulsating scroll-wheel off immediately. Even more ironically, the Victus doesn't have any RGB features itself. No accent lighting anywhere. The shiny "V" logo embossed into the lid doesn't light up and the aforementioned keyboard backlighting comes in white, white or white.

One last complaint about the keyboard; no fingerprint reader either. This wouldn't be the end of the world if there was a Windows Hello camera for face unlock. There isn't. That means the inconvenience of a pin every time you need to log back in. A first-world problem. But still a problem.

By the way, the camera is terrible. I thought we'd stopped putting fuzzy 720p sensors like this on flash laptops but apparently not. No HDR and just really bad low-light performance which, given this is a gaming computer, is probably the kind of light you'll be in when you're using it. Not recommended for online work meetings.

Luckily, the mic quality seems okay - so even if they can't see you properly, they'll probably be able to hear you. I suppose this is more important in a gaming situation anyway.

The Bang & Olufsen-tuned speaker array is fine - offering good stereo effects although perhaps a little lacking in bass response and sheer volume.

But surely most serious gamers will be connecting their own headset, right? And I feel like this is what HP is banking on with the Victus; this is something you plug other things into (or connect to via bluetooth or Wi-Fi) - if it's big sound and cinematic video quality you want, add speakers, headphones or an external webcam.

You'll find a decent number of connectivity options; a couple of USB-A ports, the aforementioned USB-C, an HDMI 2.1 slot, headphone jack, SD card reader and a flip-out ethernet port for a hardline LAN connection if you're not satisfied with Wi-Fi 6.

The main event is the thunderingly powerful combination of lots of RAM with the truly impressive AMD Ryzen 7 processor. That and a genuinely decent display are surely all you really need to have a good time gaming. Yes, there are other options out there that have it all; a full light and sound extravaganza if that's what you really want - but you'll be paying three or four-thousand or more for the privilege.

The Victus keeps it real, while still providing the essential performance most gamers are looking for.

    

Click here for more information and pricing on the Victus by HP.