[Video Review] HP Victus 15 (15-fb0000) – Affordable for the right reasons
HP Victus 15 (15-fa0000, fb0000, fa1000, fb1000) in-depth review
Even though Victus is not HP's most affordable gaming brand, it actually presents you with the best offers. And a little something tells us that it won't be only seasonal.In fact, the Victus 15 (15-fb0000) can be your best way to enter the gaming world. In particular, the 15-fb0000 comes with AMD CPUs from the last generation - Ryzen 5 5600H, and Ryzen 7 5800H. This is great, because these processors are still very powerful, and are pretty easy to cool.Graphics-wise, your choices are a bit limited. You won't be able to get anything more powerful than an RTX 3050 Ti. However, even the [...]
Pros
- Fantastic price
- Good keyboard
- 2x SODIMM DDR4 + 1x M.2 slots (one supports Gen 4 drives)
- Good cooling
- Decent battery life
- Quick pixel response times (AUO AUO3B9C)
- No PWM (AUO AUO3B9C)
Cons
- Narrow viewing angles (AUO AUO3B9C)
- Only 52% sRGB coverage (AUO AUO3B9C)
- Flimsy hinges, resulting in a bouncy lid
- HDD/SSD
- up to 2000GB SSD
- M.2 Slot
- 1x 2280 M.2 NVMe slot See photo
- RAM
- up to 64GB
- OS
- Windows 11 Home, Windows 11, Windows 11 Pro, Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro
- Battery
- 52.5Wh, 3-cell, 70Wh, 4-cell, 52.5Wh, 3-cell , 70Wh, 4-cell
- Body material
- Plastic / Polycarbonate
- Dimensions
- 357.88 x 255.01 x 23.5 mm (14.09" x 10.04" x 0.93")
- Weight
- 2.29 kg (5 lbs)
- Ports and connectivity
- 1x USB Type-A
- 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
- 1x USB Type-A
- 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps), Sleep and Charge
- 1x USB Type-C
- 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps), DisplayPort, Sleep and Charge
- HDMI
- 2.1
- Card reader
- SD
- Ethernet LAN
- 10, 100, 1000 Mbit/s
- Wi-Fi
- 802.11ax
- Bluetooth
- 5.2
- Audio jack
- 3.5mm Combo Jack
- Features
- Fingerprint reader
- Web camera
- HD with temporal noise reduction
- Backlit keyboard
- optional
- Microphone
- Dual Array Digital Microphones
- Speakers
- 2x Speakers, HP Audio Boost, Bang & Olufsen
- Optical drive
All HP Victus 15 (15-fa0000, fb0000, fa1000, fb1000) configurations
Gamers, gather ’round! We’ll show you the HP Victus 15. Or just a quick recap of our comprehensive review on our site.
Click that link fast, like it’s a unique item dropped from a boss, and you’ll get the laptop’s price, some sweet comparisons, and all the juicy details.
But, if you’re in the middle of a game and can’t take a break, no problem, stay with us right here, just for a few minutes!
[Design]
The Victus 15 is an affordable and compact gaming machine that weighs 2.29 kg while being 23.5 mm thick. The build quality is a little sacrifice but the design is a top-notch mix of office and gaming characteristics. The laptop is entirely built of plastic, which causes some flex from the lid and base. The bigger crime is the bouncing lid, which also doesn’t open with one hand.
Once opened, we see a pretty big grill, which is used for ventilation, as the speakers are on the bottom.
[Input devices]
Below it, there’s a great keyboard with a NumPad for the number crunchers among you, long key travel, and clicky feedback. The Arrow keys are a bit smaller than we’d want, but the rest is great.
The touchpad can be a tad more responsive, however, the surface is smooth and the tracking is precise.
[Ports]
Moving to the sides, we’re surprised to see an SD card reader on the left, along with the power plug, one full-sized USB 3.2 (Gen. 1) port, and an audio jack. On the other side, there’s an HDMI 2.1 port, one more full-sized USB port, a LAN port, and a USB Type-C 3.2 (Gen. 1) port with Power Delivery and DisplayPort capabilities.
[Display]
The base configuration that we tested comes with a Full HD TN panel, but there are IPS options as well, which we heavily recommend. For the designers among you, there’s a version with 100% sRGB coverage as well. The TN panel just doesn’t cut it in 2023, having poor viewing angles, a max brightness of 267 nits, and a very low contrast ratio of 400:1, so the blacks aren’t really black. It shows 52% sRGB coverage, while the accuracy improves significantly with our Design and Gaming profile, going from a dE value of 11, down to 3.3.
On the other hand, the panel has a relatively fast response time of just 11.8 ms and shows 0 PWM usage across all brightness levels.
We’ll have our display profiles linked in the description below, and in the upper right corner.
[Sound]
The speakers are a high point of the laptop, offering clear audio that’s clear of deviations across all frequencies.
[Battery]
Our laptop runs a Ryzen 5600H, which goes pretty easy on the 52.5Wh battery, making it last for 11 hours and 24 minutes of Web browsing, or 8 hours and 50 minutes of video playback.
[Performance]
The Ryzen 5 5600H offers similar performance to the Ryzen 5 6600H from last year, but pretty much all 12th Gen Alder Lake H-series SKUs from Intel would put it in the bin. With that said, the 5600H is still a viable option, having the power to do video rendering, streaming, and other heavier work.
Moving to the GPU, we have the GTX 1650, a pretty outdated card that was released in 2019. The 3050 and 3050 Ti cards that are available offer around 50% to 100% more performance in benchmarks, so if you can squeeze the cash for it, you definitely should.
In our gaming tests, we want to highlight Days Gone, a game with beautiful visuals that the GTX 1650 runs with no problem. We got 63 fps at High settings, which is good.
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The gaming footage is right out of our LaptopMedia benchmarks channel, which has tested almost every popular laptop GPU in many games, so you can get an accurate performance assessment before committing to a device.
[Cooling]
Looking at the cooling setup, you wouldn’t guess that it’s for a gaming laptop, as it’s got just two heat pipes and two fans that sit next to each other.
However, the Ryzen 5 doesn’t need much, managing to maintain 3.66 GHz after 15 minutes of testing. It does reach 91°C, but that’s within the CPU’s operating temperature, so it’s fine. The GTX 1650 also isn’t very demanding, maxing out its 50W TGP, while running at just 65°C. At the same time, it reaches the highest clock speeds that we’ve seen from a 1650 card.
The Victus 15 surprises us with its comfort. The fans aren’t audible most of the time, while the base has a hotspot of just 35°C.
[Teardown and upgradeability]
Once inside, we have to show you what you’re working with. The Victus offers two SODIMM slots for up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, as well as one M.2 PCIe slot for Gen 3 SSDs.
We’ll leave our disassembly video in the description, in case you already have the Victus 15 and want to know how to upgrade it.
[Verdict]
The Victus 15 from HP turns out to be a real charmer of a gaming laptop, complementing its low price with good hardware that performs well. It’s surprisingly quiet for a gaming rig, which is another bonus. Just skip out on the TN panel and we think you’d be quite pleased with it.
For more information about the Victus 15, swing by our website and check out our in-depth review of the laptop, with more tests and benchmarks.