Our tests show that the Victus 15 can handle most modern tiles at 1080p on high or medium settings. Other configurations from HP that are more expensive than the ones we tested have better GPUs, but are priced higher. If you want an inexpensive start to PC gaming and don’t mind playing at full power, the Victus 15 may be the right laptop for you. However, if you spend a little more money, you may be able to get a little more gaming-friendly environment. We reviewed it in dark silver, but the HP Victus 15 is also available in white and blue. The laptop has a smooth chassis with a large, prominent, reflective V in the middle. Below that, between the hinges, is the word Victus, and on the back of the Victus is a large notch, where the air vents are located. Underneath the laptop, on one foot, there is a grid of vents. On either side of the feet are two notches for speakers. The keyboard is comfortable to type on and, unusually for an HP laptop, the cursor arrow keys are arranged in the correct inverted T rather than in awkward rows. The top row also has system controls and a numeric keypad. The touchpad, which has no buttons, is a good size and glides and taps smoothly, but it is somewhat stiff and has a dull clicking feel. The keyboard is brightly backlit, but is solid white, with no choice of multiple zones or per-key RGB colors; the Fn key does not work with the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down navigation cursor arrows, so you must perform these operations from the keypad, and the Num Lock key is not used. The Num Lock key is handicapped by the fact that it does not have an indicator LED like the volume mute and touchpad toggle keys. The HP Victus 15 performed below other gaming laptops in standard benchmarks such as Cinebench, Geekbench, PCMark10, and 3DMark. However, we did not see a significant discrepancy between these scores, even though the machines we tested were running much lower performing technologies than other budget laptops. As is the case with many gaming laptops, batteries are by far the worst aspect, and the HP Victus 15 is no exception. In both of our battery tests, the laptop lasted just over four hours, which is half a day’s work. For everyday tasks that did not involve strenuous work, it lasted only about the same amount of time. When used for gaming, the battery drains more quickly, lasting only about 2 hours at most.
