JANUARY 2022 PCWorld 53replacement for the Windows 11
performance slider.
There’s also a specific tab for
“undervolting,” where you can try and reduce
the CPU voltage (though not the clock speed)
to try and save power. HP warns that this
could be a risky choice, however, as even
experimenting with it can lead to crashes and
BSODs. We didn’t test this feature.
PERFORMANCE
While the Core i7-11800H processor inside
the HP Victus 16 is moderately powerful, the
GeForce RTX 3050Ti is on the low end of
the 3xxx series (fave.co/3p4q9QX), though it
can offer both RTX ray-traced graphics and
DLSS 2.0 to budget notebooks, and that
stands for something,
We compared the $1,249 HP Victus 16 to
several gaming laptops we’ve tested
previously, most of which vary in some way.
Our comparisons begin with our best 15-inch
gaming laptop, the $1,649 Asus ROG Strix
G15 Advantage Edition (fave.co/3q58nfL),
which adopts an all-AMD loadout and does
so spectacularly. We also included the $845
Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-54-51M5) (fave.
co/3q7hFI1), our current pick for best budget
gaming laptop (with a 15.6-inch display), as
well as its up-to-date 2021 cousin, the $1,700
Acer Nitro 5 AN515-45-R7S0 (fave.
co/3p6sET6). We also compared the HP
Victus to the $2,199 Gigabyte Aorus 17G
(fave.co/3IXGDSO), our best 17-inch gaming
laptop and our pick for the best budget
17-inch gaming laptop, the (pandemic-fueled)
$2,800 HP Omen 17-cb0040nr (fave.
co/3yC80Nz). To this, we added the
$1,749.99 Acer Predator Triton 500 SE (fave.
co/3GPdYh2), a rival 16-inch gaming laptop.
At $1,299, the similarly named Acer Predator
Triton 300 SE (fave.co/3aUOWPO) is about
the same price as the HP Victus, though with
just a 14-inch screen.
Remember, traditional notebooks often fall
into either a 15-inch or a 17-inch notebook
category, with the larger chassis typically
allowing more space for additional cooling. We
tested the laptop in default mode, which allows
it to dial up the fan speed when needed.
We selected the PCMark 10 benchmark as
an overall metric of the laptop’s performance—
useful, of course, if you’re using the laptop for
work during the day. The benchmark tests
office scenarios like light gaming, word
processing, and spreadsheets, as well as more
intensive applications like CAD. We’ve only
recently shifted to using this benchmark, so
just a few of our gaming laptops have scores
from this test. We can tell you that our pick for
the best 14/15-inch workhorse laptop, the HP
Envy 14 (fave.co/3p4aPUv), reported a
PCMark 10 score of 5,330. The Victus blows it
out of the water with a score of 7,007.
Cinebench R15 and R20 provide two
different takes on the CPU performance the
HP Victus offers, both while running the
laptop in the multi-threaded benchmark as