There are a lot of excellent gaming laptops out there, but they tend to be really expensive and usually outside the budget of most people on the market. Luckily, there are some solid budget options, especially if you don’t need anything super fancy and aren’t playing the latest AAA games. One great example is this configuration of the HP Victus 15, which usually goes for $1,000, but you can grab it right from HP for just $690.
Why you should buy the Victus by HP Gaming Laptop
The beating heart of any gaming machine is the GPU, and for this HP Victus 15, you get an RTX 3050, which is an entry-level card that is good for 1080p performance at 60FPS. You may have to make a couple of compromises here and there to get yourself the best framerate performance, although not too much. That said, it’s worth considering upgrading to the RTX 4050 for an extra $90 since it gives you access to the latest DLSS 3 and a bit more performance. You can also upgrade the screen to a version that has a 144 Hz and 9 ms response time for just $25, and while that will absolutely tax the GPU when gaming, it’s an excellent quality-of-life upgrade for the day-to-day for just that little amount of money.
As for processing power, the Intel Core i5-13500H is a very solid mid-range CPU that can more than handle the RTX 3050 or RTX 4050 and is great for general productivity work. If you need a bit more power, you could upgrade it to an Intel Core i7-13700H for $170, or $300 if you also choose the RTX 4050 option, but unless you do a lot of creativity work, it’s probably not worth the cost. The same can’t be said for the 8GB of RAM, and that is worth upgrading to 16GB, although the $90 may be a bit much, especially since you can find some good laptop RAM deals and upgrade them yourself. That said, you can save yourself the trouble if you don’t want to bother with it, and the same goes for the 1TB SSD upgrade for $90; you could do it yourself, but if you don’t have any tech experience, it can be a bit difficult.
Overall, the HP Victus 15 is still great even at the base specs, but it has a couple of great upgrade options that are worth grabbing, especially if you can put some of the $310 discount from HP towards them. Even so, if you’d like a couple more options, then be sure to check out these other great gaming laptop deals.
