JANUARY 2022 PCWorld 49The color gamut of the Victus 16 is not
outstanding, though this isn’t a typical
requirement for a gaming PC.office work, as well as the separate Default or
Performance modes for gaming.
Even when the fans rotate at full speed,
however, I couldn’t detect any coil whine
— just an elevated whoosh of the system fans.
HP has done well here. As our performance
tests indicate, though, the laptop’s
performance somewhat drops over time due
to thermal issues.
The Victus is an all-plastic laptop, which
feels sturdy enough to use without any give
on the keyboard. The display can oscillate
back and forth when jarred or moved,
however, especially when it’s being adjusted
back and forth. That didn’t concern me
particularly, though it felt a little flimsy.
The display isn’t outstanding, though it’s
not bad for the price. The display bezels
doesn’t protrude more than a few
millimeters, though there’s a massive 1-inch
chin at the bottom. The screen-to-body ratio
is 84 percent.
Remember, traditional laptops usually fall
either into the 15-inch or 17-inch category, so
this 16-inch (or as HP puts it, a 16-inch in a
15-inch form factor) is somewhat unusual. HP
offers display options that range from 1080p
(250 nits) at the low end up to 1080p at
144Hz (300 nits) inside our review unit,
without HDR capabilities. HP also sells a
1440p screen option at 165Hz for an
additional $110, offering a higher-resolution
screen at a better refresh rate. By our
measurements, the 300-nit screen
dramatically overperformed, putting out 360
nits at maximum brightness. Our colorimeter
reported that the display offered 100 percent
of the sRGB color gamut, but fell short in
other areas.
Our review unit did not include a
touchscreen display, an uncommon feature
on gaming laptops.
You’ll have a variety of memory and
storage options from which to choose,
available from HP’s configuration page. There
are two options that aren’t well spelled out,
above. First, you have a specific option to
configure two 256GB SSDs together in an
RAID 0 configuration (fave.co/3E382iv),
where data is striped across both drives for