Omen and Victus, HP updates its affordable gaming offer

Omen and Victus HP updates its affordable gaming offer

HP is announcing two major updates today. On one side, a new 16-inch Omen. On the other, a new appearance in the very recent Victus range, aimed at newcomers to the world of video games. Last year we saw the Victus 16 arrive, in January of this year, it was a tower that HP was introducing into this new family. Now here comes a new representative, the Victus 15, which HP describes as “streetfighter for mainstream gamers”… We let you interpret this formula as you wish.

The Victus range is enriched with a little brother

Inspired by the fairly discreet and pleasant design of the Omen, the Victus 15 is a gaming laptop (and content creation for the family, according to HP), available in three colors, and equipped with a Full HD IPS LCD panel (1920×1080 pixels 15.6-inch) refreshed at 144 Hz.

We will have to make sure of this during our tests, but the advertised brightness is not crazy, at only 250 cd/m2. This is often the price to pay for a high refresh of the panel.

To run all this, HP has built a configuration with a Core i5-12500H, a 12-core processor, four high performance and eight low consumption, capable of pushing its frequency to 4.5 GHz, while its consumption oscillates between 45 and 95W.

In the basic model, this processor will be accompanied by 8 GB of RAM (DDR4-3200 MHz), which could perhaps be a bit short. On the graphics card side, HP has chosen an RTX 3050 Ti, equipped with 4 GB of GDDR6 video memory.

The Victus 15 will run on Windows 11 and will benefit from an SSD (NVMe M.2) of only 512 GB…

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The device should weigh around 2.3 kg and run on Windows 11. Its retail price is announced at $799.99.

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Omen, a rise in power and in silence

HP has therefore also announced an update to its Omen 16, emphasizing a major effort to optimize heat dissipation. The engineers of the American giant have reviewed their Omen Tempest Cooling. This involves a new layout of the connectors, remote at the back of the device, to be able to expel more hot air via two large fans. They draw in outside air through the large grille on the underside of the case, and expel hot air to the sides and rear.

With an identical configuration, this new thermal approach would allow performance gains ranging between 8 and 18% depending on the benchmarks (from 3Dmark Firestrike Extreme, to 3Dmark Time Spy) compared to the Omen 16 2021 generation, HP advances.

Depending on the configurations selected, HP announces chip performance gains ranging from 10% for AMD’s Ryzen 9 processors to 36% for Intel processors. But this new ability to cool the configuration will probably be felt above all in terms of the GPU’s ability to increase load and heat. HP indeed indicates that it can dissipate an envelope of 150 W for the RTX 3070 Ti. A gain of about 30%.

To make life easier for players and optimize in-game performance, in particular by balancing the efforts between CPU and GPU, HP is highlighting its Omen Dynamic Power, a set of tools that are based on different measurements, in particular those coming from a sensor. infrared thermal.

These are therefore great promises made by HP, those of a more efficient machine, because it is better cooled and therefore quieter. We will have to see if all this turns out.

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On the screen side, the new 16-inch Omen follows in the footsteps of its big brother. Its 16.1 IPS LCD panel still displays a Full HD definition (1920×1080 pixels), refreshed at 144 Hz. Its brightness is announced at 300 cd / m2, with 100% coverage of the sRGB color spectrum.

For the configuration, HP is betting everything on AMD, with an eight-core Ryzen 7 6800H, which goes up to 4.7 GHz, and a Radeon RX 6650M graphics card, with 8 GB of GDDR6. The machine will ship 16 GB of DDR5-4800 MHz RAM by default, and the good news is that it has two slots for RAM. The storage is 1 TB (SSD NVMe M.2), where the generation only offered 512 GB by default.

This should make it possible to install games without relying too much, at least initially.

The 16-inch Omen is expected to start at $1,199.99

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