Victus By HP 16 Is A Gaming Laptop For PC Gaming Newcomers

In addition to refreshing its Omen line of laptops today, HP also announced a new gaming laptop brand called Victus by HP 16. The Victus, it seems, is for those who are new to the world of PC gaming and may not necessarily want to buy a top of the line gaming laptop as their first foray. While that suggests hardware that's more accessibly priced, it seems that the Victus 16 will still offer some solid hardware for those who know they want something in the higher tier.

As announced today, Victus by HP 16 will use either 11th-gen Intel Core processors (up to a Core i7-11800H) or Ryzen 5000-series mobile CPUs (up to a Ryzen 7 5800H). Unlike the Omen notebooks HP announced today, the Victus 16 will offer prospective buyers the choice between NVIDIA and AMD Radeon GPUs. On the NVIDIA side of things, graphics options top out at an RTX 3060, while fans of team red will be able to get up to an AMD Radeon RX 5500M. Users can also opt to include as much as 32GB of DDR4 3200 RAM, but if you're new to PC gaming, we can tell you that you probably don't need quite that much RAM – 16GB should be enough.

HP says that the Victus 16 will be offered in three different colors: mica silver, performance blue, and ceramic white. They'll have a standard backlit keyboard – no per-key RGB lighting here – modeled after the keyboard found on Omen laptops.

For storage, HP says that the Victus 16 will come with either a single SSD up to a 4th gen PCIe drive or dual SSDs configured in RAID 0. That sounds a lot like what the new Omen 16 and 17 notebooks offer, so these computers seem to have a lot in common. Indeed, HP calls Victus the "younger sibling" to the Omen brand.

While HP's announcement mostly focused on the Victus's top-end hardware options, one place where it's clear that it will offer some less powerful hardware configurations is in the starting price. In contrast to the four-figure starting prices of the new Omens, the Victus 16 has a starting price of $799.99 for AMD models and $849.99 for Intel models, suggesting that there will be at least some mid-range configuration options available. The Victus 16, like the new Omens, will be available beginning in June.