HP Victus 15" Gaming Laptop, Intel Core i7-12650H, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Graphics, FHD Display, 144Hz, Up to 8.5 hrs battery, Win 11, Mica Silver, 15-fa1003sa

This is a really good laptop. It looks nice and the keyboard is easy to use. I have tested Halo MCC with Halo Reach and ODST. It runs them perfectly with XboX live. Games load very fast, too. The audio is pretty good from the speakers with a good stereo width. It boots up in a few seconds and runs multiple applications without any slug effects. It is quite lightweight. The body has it's aesthetics and the screen looks great. No shade/glare effect.It's cons could be considered. The material used for the body is lower quality than it's internal power. But, i find it to be good and i keep it clean. It could have done with another USB slot because i run external HDD as well as XboX/PC controller. I also use USB MIDI devices, so i personally require more, but all in all, i am happy with it for the price. It's a good'en.

The media could not be loaded. HP Victus 15.6” (Ryzen 7 8845HS, RTX 4060) – Quick Review (Performance: Ryzen 7 8845HS + RTX 4060 delivers smooth gaming and multitasking.Cooling: Improved thermals with minimal throttling.Display: 144Hz refresh rate, but brightness and color accuracy could be better.Battery: 5-6 hours for casual use, much less for gaming.Build: Sturdy but plastic; simple design.Keyboard & Trackpad: Decent, but no per-key RGB. Speakers: Average, lacks depth.)Verdict: Great value-for-money gaming laptop with strong performance, good thermals, and a smooth display.

I'd been wanting a Windows 11 machine to get familiar with the OS and was tormenting myself with what spec PC to build. I decided a gaming laptop was going to be the best price to performance ratio and settled on this as it was such a good price on sale.You get everything you need with the laptop, decent gaming mouse and headset. The mouse has a dpi button and colour changing led along with two side buttons and has some weight to it. The headset has a built in volume control and microphone and is more comfortable that my PS5 official wireless headset.The laptop is very fast for the money with 4gb dedicated graphics memory, a full HD screen and a back-lit keyboard. 8gb of ram seems to be enough for now but it could do with more storage. 256gb is more like 170gb once you update windows and install game launchers like Steam, EA and Ubisoft Connect. This is OK for me though as I have a lot of older games in my Steam library such as Fears 3, Alien Rage and Halo 3 and these all fly on max settings. Plugging in an external monitor turns this into a gaming desktop and it doesn't seem to slow down at all running this way. I have been playing older games in full HD at max settings on a dell 27inch gaming monitor with no performance difference to just using the laptop screen.The only negative points other than the small HDD is the fan noise. I guess the reason they give you the headset is so you don't hear the fans blowing like a PS4 when playing games or even just installing windows updates. The keyboard back light initially seemed to be automatic like as you type it came on but after updating the firmware this seems to now be a manual on or off instead.I've looked up upgrading the ram and storage and it does seem possible but there are no easy access panels on the bottom so I think you have to disassemble it to a degree.Overall this is very good value for money if you aren't planning on installing multiple games that need lots of storage.UPDATE:After using this laptop for months I thought a slight update would help. If you want to upgrade the RAM and M2 drive in this, it's really easy. There is an unused ram slot so I installed an extra 8gb and changing the 256gb storage for something like 1tb is really cheap and easy. To install these you have to take the bottom of the laptop off which is involves prying open a corner and then working your way around unclipping the tabs. It's a bit fiddly but once your are in, everything is accessible. I didn't disconnect the battery when I swapped the M2 and Ram and got away with it but bare in mind that the laptop provides power to the Usb C ports when its shut down so you might want to not follow my lead on that.If you buy a crucial M2 drive you can use their free cloning software to transfer the contents of the old one using an enclosure. Once you have swapped it out you can put the original in the enclosure and have a fast external storage device.I've been seriously impressed with this laptop using it for the last 4 months or so and have spent most of the time using it with a monitor effectively as a desktop gaming machine.

The laptop exterior is built very well, high quality on the keys, screen and chassis but unfortunately the quality ends there, one week into buying this laptop it started intermittently shutting off, black screen no power. Contacted amazon support about this and they claimed they couldn't provide a replacement but could have it repaired but it would take a bit more than two weeks, this didn't work for me as I needed it for work so Amazon suggested I take it somewhere locally and refunded me £130 to cover it which initially was good service, had the laptop serviced in a shop locally and the bloke said something about a ribbon cable?Anyways, fast forward a month and everything is going great, that was until I did a windows update as per usual and HP support center (the preinstalled HP software) decided to UPDATE THE BIOS, WITHOUT WARNING OR CONSENT FROM ME, luckily the bios update occurring in the middle of the windows update didn't brick the laptop as messing up a bios update can very easily brick the motherboard of a computer/laptop, however it did completely corrupt my windows install, losing me all of my work and personal files, I had to go home from work to pick up a USB stick and create windows installation media just so I could reinstall Windows.Once I got back up and running I noticed that every week or so the laptop would bluescreen with the error code always relating to the BIOS, so that automatic bios update did actually mess up the laptop and it took me 7 more bluescreens and subsequent losses of work to finally decide to refund this piece of crap.Amazon customer support had suddenly decided that despite my laptop being within the one year refund period and despite me having pictures of every time the laptop crashed that I wasn't eligible for a refund, despite the last time I contacted them about the laptop it being offered to me as an option, I had to argue them up the wall and escalate this to a shift manager to get them to offer me a refund for the faulty product and the real stinger being they subtracted the £130 that I had to use to repair the first fault off the total of the laptop, I bought it on sale for £479.99 and after it all I am being refunded £349.99, I am now at a loss of £130 because this laptop didn't work from the factory, but at this point I actually don't care, I just want it gone and if I only get most of my money back I can settle for that.I will never buy a laptop through Amazon again as their customer service has significantly deteriorated, they will try at every turn to stop you for getting your money back. If I had the energy for it I would have fought for the £130 back but it wasn't worth my peace of mind.Don't buy from HP if you can avoid it, if you can't, make sure the first thing you do is uninstall HP support center or disable the automatic bios update feature because that being enabled by default on a casual user-bases' device is utter insanity and a disaster waiting to happen.And I suppose the bigger lesson is be really really careful buying any kind of expensive electronics from Amazon because they won't hesitate to turn tail and try to lie/cheat/steal you out of your money.