HP Victus 15 has a short two-hour battery life even when on the lowest power settings

We recently reviewed the 2022 HP Victus 15 and found it to be underwhelming for the price. Though we don't expect to be blown away from a lower-end gaming laptop, its low bang for the buck just can't compete with other budget to midrange gaming laptops in the same $1000 to $1200 USD price range. Unfortunately for HP, the problems don't end there.

We experienced two noteworthy and potentially frustrating bugs on our test unit related to the battery life and fan noise. Firstly, battery life would be far too short at just 2 to 2.5 hours even with all power settings set to their bare minimum. Most gaming laptops would last for several hours longer when under similar conditions, but runtimes are oddly short on the Victus 15 despite its reasonably-sized 70 Wh battery pack. Results would not improve even after retests.

The second issue would occur when switching between the three power modes on the HP Omen application as shown by the screenshot below. For some strange reason, Quiet mode is noticeably louder than Default mode (29.2 dB(A) vs. 26.2 dB(A)) when idling on desktop with no running applications. The fact that HP has two additional toggles on top of Performance mode (Maximum fan mode and Game Boost mode) makes the entire control process unintuitive for casual gamers. We recommend avoiding Quiet mode especially since it does not appear to improve battery life by any significant margin.

The Victus 15 can still be a good budget gaming laptop if it can fix the above bugs and retail for under $1000 USD. Until then, there are arguably better options out there with faster GeForce RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 6600M graphics such as the Lenovo Legion 5 15.