A review of the Victus 16 by HP, a solid gaming PC that does a lot of good for the price

In parallel with the more serious and expensive Omen, HP wanted to offer gamers a secondary route with the Victus range, an axis that combines both a sober design and an open approach to non-gaming uses and a fairly powerful configuration. provides many uses. All this is sprinkled with an irresistible argument: a very reasonable price.

In this case, what we have is a machine under 1200 euros. In 2021, the Victus 16 was the first to embody this new family, which has since been joined by a tower and a 15-inch little brother, which we’ve already had the opportunity to test.

I take advantage of the offer

Presentation: big, heavy and comfortable…

As the name suggests, here we are dealing with a big man with a 16.1-inch Full HD panel updated at a frequency of 144 Hz. And when I say “big boy,” I mean impressive, even for a gaming laptop. If its dimensions speak volumes about its size, its weight puts it in the category of computers we’d carry as little as possible, except for Dwayne Johnson. At 2,462kg, it’s still 16.3% heavier than the average gaming PC we’ve had in our hands over the past 24 months, and that’s saying something – even as ultraportables for gamers start to proliferate. In fact, this Victus 16 can almost be considered more of a tower than a laptop.

Moreover, its connection is almost as impressive as a tower. We don’t miss a thing when we lug around this well-built, sober (so much so that we doubt it’s a gaming PC) and functional chassis. It’s decked out in matte black, nicely trimmed with the brand’s shiny V on the hood and a few branding reminders beyond. If Victus likes the game, it also appreciates fingerprints, but nothing catastrophic. It is a living machine.

When you open the machine, you have a full keyboard in front of you, as it offers a discreet numeric keypad that doesn’t flash in a thousand colors. We won’t complain about that. The buttons are responsive and quite flexible. They look more like a classic laptop than a gaming machine, but that’s not a concern. Remember that Victus is there to accompany you in your play, work or study stages. This keyboard option perfectly meets both of its areas. We regret that the numeric keypad is slightly off-centered. When typing, we scrolled a quarter to the left, not exactly in the middle of the screen. This is especially strange when dealing with Victus. The touchpad is nice and responsive, and we have no serious criticisms of it. But it obviously cannot replace the mouse in the game phases.

Display: high contrast, less color

Now let’s look up and look at the screen. Apart from the bottom part, Victus 16’s Full HD screen is surrounded by very thin bezels. In any case, it’s pretty decent for a gaming machine, especially in this price range. Again, we get the impression of restraint, which is not unpleasant.

The screen size provides great comfort, even if the Full HD image seems a bit stingy on a panel of this size – but this is according to the chosen configuration. We just regret that the resolution of the screen is a little low (137 points per inch), we sometimes see the pixels a little, especially when reading or writing an article online… like this one.

Measured by 01Lab at 296 cd/m2, the Victus 16’s brightness isn’t memorable. It can even be said that this is a weak point. What’s more, it’s said to be 13.5% below average for gaming laptop screens that have passed through our hands, which are rarely stellar at this point.

On the other hand, and this contributes to good readability in games, the contrast is quite high, at 1423:1, which makes it almost 20.5% higher than the average of its competitors. If the effort is commendable, we would still appreciate the panel being more faithful to the colors to be displayed.

In this case, with the 5.17 Delta E 2000, we are far from perfect, even at the antipodes of the best. The Victus 16 is 63% worse in this area than the gaming PCs we’ve tested over the past 24 months. In addition to this lack of colorimetric fidelity, the coverage of the RGB spectrum is incomplete and unsatisfactory. Don’t be surprised if the colors are a little weird at times.

Performance: good but limited

Released last year, the Victus 16 refers to the eleventh generation Core i5, the Core i5-11400H. It supports a 2.7GHz processor with 16GB of RAM, which is a solid but not lightning-fast processor – a good compromise for a Windows configuration aimed at multitasking. The graphics part is entrusted to GeForce RTX 3060, a special card provided by NVidia. It sits in the middle of this RTX 3000 family, representing its current high-end offering while we wait for the next RTX 4000s.

The set is cooled by two large fans, which you will be able to hear regularly and loudly. In addition, we regret not being able to take advantage of the Bang & Olufsen audio system during the game phases. It is better to play with headphones and reserve its speakers for your favorite series or songs.

Nevertheless, this cooling system, coupled with a fairly efficient but not terrible configuration, allows the Victus 16 to be 18.4% cooler than the average gaming PC.

When you look closely at its performance and compare it to all the gaming laptops tested by 01Lab over the past 24 months, it’s no surprise that the Victus 16 lags behind. Thus, its score with PCMark 10 is slightly less than 5% below the average score of its competitors. For the graphics part, its 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme score is also about 7% below the average of its competitors. Error of RTX 3060 not playing against RTX 3070 or RTX 3080. Range logic is followed. The same for the selected processor.

However, we decided to compare the Victus 16’s performance with two other machines. On the one hand, the Katana GF66 from MSI was sold for around 1,800 euros, including a 12th generation Core i5 and an RTX 3050 Ti. Dell’s Alienware x14, on the other hand, retails for around €2,500 and is powered by the same Intel processor, but in a portable version with an RTX 3060, the same card found in the Victory 16.

It is also worth noting that MSI laptop and hp laptop are quite comparable in their approach. Both offer fairly wide bezels, with the same size Full HD panel at 15.6 inches for the MSI and 16.1 inches for the HP. Alienware pushes further limits with the compactness of its ultraportable chassis with a 14-inch screen.

Finally, note that the three configurations have one thing in common: processor for MSI and Alienware, graphics card for Alienware and hp. This sheds an interesting light on the effect of one and the other on in-game performance. In other words, it’s better to opt for the Core of 11 quickly and in this case.^e generation and RTX 3060 compared to the twelfth generation Core and RTX 3050 Ti. The power difference between these two graphics cards justifies accepting a slightly less efficient and older processor.

Nevertheless, these results should be put into perspective from two main perspectives. The first is the obvious one of price. At just under €1,200, we easily forgive the Victus 16 for not being an overbearing monster.

The second is the limit of performance achieved in spite of everything. Yes, if you’re looking for the most fluidity possible, the RTX 3060 won’t let you play everything (ray tracing, high quality textures, etc.) thoroughly. However, with our two benchmark test sets (Rise of the Tomb Raider and Division), we can see that the number of frames per second is with the maximum parameters.

We also note that the Victus stays the course and doesn’t give much to the Alienware x14.

In this case, the Victus 16 even outperforms the Katana GF66 from MSI you tested, which costs €600 more… So it looks like hp is giving you something for your money with the Victus. .

To be sure, we turned to the second choice of newer and more demanding games, especially those that require the dedicated ray tracing hardware of the latest graphics chips.

With these games (Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077or Section 2), we immediately see that the trend observed with the older titles is respected. The Victus 16 dominates MSI’s Katana GF66 and stands up nicely to the Alienware x14, which was particularly superior in our tests. cyberpunk 2077, no doubt thanks to the Victus’ ability to overheat.

Finally, the cheapest of the three laptops is sometimes x1.7 more efficient than its competitors. And as a result, it’s almost always the only one rendered above 60 frames per second.

Of course, everything is not rosy, the configuration has its limitations, as we said, its components are not at the top of the range. Such a game Legion of watchdogswhen we try to push the settings (Ultra, RT and no DLSS) it warns that the CPU is too weak and the video memory is insufficient.

In other words, Victus 16 by hp cannot run all current games at full speed, and a fortiori not the most demanding future titles… But at this price, it is very forgivable, especially since we are talking about complex games with heavy effects, if you sacrifice some expectations, it will run despite everything. ..

Autonomy: not crazy, but not shy…

If we always ask gaming PCs more in terms of raw performance, we tend to overlook their poor performance in terms of autonomy. It is not easy to offer both large displacement and low power consumption.

However, keep in mind that the Victus series needs to open up a bit to something other than games. So he shouldn’t be too bad about it. In this case, the Victus is 16 by hp, but almost 7% less autonomous than the average gaming PC adopted by 01Lab. Obviously, with a versatile 5:03 battery life, you won’t be able to work for hours – let alone play for an hour or an hour and fifteen-plus hours of battery life.

When it comes to our second autonomy test, video streaming, the hp gaming pc doesn’t shine either. Turns off after 4:24. Nothing to keep you occupied during a long flight or train ride. But is this really the car you’d take for that?

Let’s quickly move on to the other two machines we compared the Victus with. Still, the comparison is interesting. On the one hand, we have the Alienware x14, one of the most autonomous gaming laptops to pass through our lab, an autonomy that can almost be matched by a classic ultraportable. And then, on the other hand, the MSI Katana is certainly unlucky, and not to say ridiculous, the autonomy is really low.

Ultimately, yes, the Victus 16 isn’t a marathon runner, but given the price and direct competition, it’s far from a toss-up.