Deal | Affordable HP Victus gaming laptop with RTX 3050-beating RX 6550M gets 40% discount in Best Buy sale

The HP Victus 15 is 1 15.6-inch entry-level gaming laptop that ordinarily wouldn't be worth much consideration, however a new Best Buy deal offers 40% off the entry-level gaming laptop, bringing the price down from $799.99 to a very budget-friendly $479.99. 

As far as hardware goes, the HP Victus 15 is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS CPU, which has 6 Zen 3+ cores with SMT, giving it 12 CPU threads in total, with a maximum turbo frequency of 4.55 GHz. In terms of performance, the Ryzen 5 in the HP Victus 15 trades blows with the Intel Core i7-11800H and AMD Ryzen 7 6800U in our benchmarks, making it a solid value option, thanks to its high core count and reasonable power consumption of just 35 W. 

While the HP Victus 15 is only equipped with a single 8 GB stick of DDR5-4800 MHz RAM, the laptop has dual RAM slots, making it upgradeable with a RAM kit, like a significantly faster Crucial 2×8 GB DDR5-5600 kit ($55.99 on Amazon). The included SSD is a 512 GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 unit, which should be enough for a modest game library and can be upgraded at a later date. 

For graphics, the HP Victus packs an AMD Radeon RX 6550M GPU, which sits firmly in the entry-level of AMD's laptop GPU line-up and matches the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 4 GB in our performance testing. While the RX6550M certainly isn't going to be playing any modern AAA games at high resolution and high frame rates, there are plenty of games that will even max out the monitor's 144 Hz refresh rate at 1080p with a mix of medium and high settings. 

The Victus 15's RX 6650M is connected to a 144 Hz IPS display with support for AMD FreeSync Premium to smooth out frame dips in more scenic games and prevent frame tearing in fast-paced shooters and the like. The 15.6-inch display is acceptably bright for indoor use, with HP claiming a maximum brightness of 300 nits. 

HP claims a battery life of six and a half hours while streaming content over Wi-Fi, and, in our review of a similar HP Victus 15 with an older AMD Ryzen 5600H ­— a less efficient chip with a similar layout — we found the laptop's biggest advantage to be its thermal management and quiet operation. 

The HP Victus 15 certainly isn't for any hardcore gamers, thanks to its low power GPU. However, it should be perfectly adequate for anyone who wants a basic productivity laptop with a bit of extra performance headroom and GPU acceleration for more demanding tasks and the odd game on the side.