Review Summary
Expert Rating
Unlike HP’s more premium Omen lineup, Victus laptops tone down the flashy gamer aesthetics and instead focus on delivering a no-nonsense gaming experience with reliable internals. One such laptop is the HP Victus 15-fa1412TX, which sits at the intersection of affordability and performance.
Powered by the 12th Gen Intel Core i5-12450H processor and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050A graphics card, this laptop promises to handle a range of modern games in respectable settings. On paper, it’s a compelling package, especially when you factor in the 144Hz Full HD display, 512GB Gen4 NVMe SSD, and a backlit full-size keyboard. But is the real-world performance that good? Let’s find out in our in-depth HP Victus 15-fa1412TX review.
Table of Contents
Design and Display
At first glance, the HP Victus 15-fa1412TX doesn’t scream “gaming laptop,” and that’s actually one of its strong points. It goes for a clean and minimal look that works equally well in a classroom, office, or gaming setup. The chassis is made entirely of plastic, but it feels solid and well-built. There’s a bit of flex in the lid and keyboard deck if pressed firmly, but nothing that feels concerning in daily use. The finish is a matte “Performance Blue,” which looks nice and modern, although it does attract fingerprints fairly easily.
Branding is minimal—there’s a clean “V” logo on the lid and below the display. It is quite prone to fingerprint smudges, though, similar to the Apple logo on MacBooks, so keep that in mind. Speaking of which, the keyboard backlighting is also white, which is a nice change from the usual RGB overload and helps keep things professional-looking. Overall, the design is quite similar to the ASUS Gaming V16 I reviewed recently, and unlike the blue keyboard lighting there, I much prefer the subtle look of the white light on this HP laptop.
The HP Victus 15-fa1412TX is equipped with a 15.6-inch Full HD (1920x1080p) IPS display that offers a 144Hz refresh rate and a 9ms response time—a staple of most gaming laptops in this price segment. It’s not great by any means, but it definitely gets the job done. And that’s the base logic here with the display.
Since it comes with an IPS panel, you get better viewing angles, which is handy while watching a movie, editing photos, or gaming. That said, colour accuracy isn’t its strongest suit. The panel covers only around 45% of the NTSC colour space, which means colours aren’t as vibrant or true-to-life as professional monitors. For content creation or colour-sensitive work, this won’t cut it—but for gaming and general media use, it does the job well.
Brightness is another area where the display falls a bit short. At around 250 nits, it’s fine indoors but can feel a little dim in bright environments or near windows. It’s enough for late-night gaming or indoor use, but not ideal for outdoor use or well-lit rooms. Speaking of gaming, the 144Hz refresh rate makes a huge difference by offering smoother animations, but ultimately, for gamers, it means fluid gameplay and a noticeable edge in fast-paced titles like Valorant, Apex Legends, or Fortnite.
Ports, Audio, and Connectivity
The display is well complemented by a dual speaker setup tuned by Bang & Olufsen. The audio is decent for everyday use, watching YouTube, catching up on Netflix, or even light gaming. The sound is clear, the vocals are crisp, and there’s minimal distortion even at high volumes. That said, I’d strongly suggest getting a pair of gaming headphones or external speakers for your competitive shooters for an immersive experience.
Moving on to connectivity, it’s a gaming laptop, so naturally, you’d expect a plethora of ports. The good news is that HP doesn’t disappoint there. However, the arrangement of these ports is unlike most laptops out there, with the majority of the ports being on the right side. The left side only features the barrel charging port coupled with a USB-A port (5Gbps) and a 3.5mm headphone jack. There’s also a full-sized SD card reader near the bottom edge of the laptop.
Then, over to the right side, the laptop comes with an HDMI 2.1 port, another USB-A port, a RJ45 LAN port, and a USB-C (5Gbps) port. The Type-C port also supports DisplayOut, so you can technically have a triple monitor setup with this laptop.
Other than that, the Victus 15-fa1412TX’s built-in webcam is a standard 720p HD shooter—nothing fancy, but functional enough for everyday video calls and virtual meetings. It sits on the top bezel and includes dual array microphones for clear voice capture.
Keyboard and Touchpad
Next, we have the keyboard. Since HP markets this laptop as the “Student Edition,” it’s nice of them to include a full-sized layout complete with the Numpad. As far as the typing experience goes, it’s mostly pleasant. The keys are well-spaced, have a good amount of travel (around 1.5mm), and offer a soft but satisfying actuation.
The white backlighting is subtle and functional. It’s a single-zone backlight with no colour customisation, but it lights up evenly, which helps with typing or gaming in low-light conditions. Brightness isn’t adjustable, but it’s bright enough for nighttime use without being blinding.
As far as the touchpad goes, it’s quite large, smooth, and responsive, positioned slightly off-centre to the left. The surface here is plastic—not glass—but it feels premium and doesn’t cause any noticeable drag while gliding. It’s accurate enough for general browsing, light editing, and day-to-day tasks. The touchpad click mechanism, however, is one area that feels a bit mushy. The left and right clicks work fine, but the feedback could’ve been firmer for a more satisfying press.
On that note, one more thing I noticed is that if you press a bit hard on the left palm area, the left click is registered. Interestingly, this wasn’t the case on the AMD version of the HP Victus that we previously tested. So, while I’m inclined to believe that this is a one-off issue with our unit, which is a retail unit that we bought and not something that HP sent to us. As such, I’d advise you to check your unit as well, and if you face any issues like it, get it replaced via HP as soon as possible.
Performance and Battery Life
Of course, when it comes to a budget gaming laptop, everything else is secondary. The primary focus is performance. Our unit here comes equipped with an Intel Core i5-12450H processor coupled with 16 GB DDR4-3200 MHz RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD. It’s an SSD from the house of Samsung, and as you can see, the performance is really good in CrystalDiskMark.
The only caveat here would be the capacity, which at 512GB will get occupied rather quickly. Unfortunately, the HP Victus doesn’t feature a secondary SSD slot, so you will have to forgo this excellent SSD. That’s particularly a shame because if you dig inside, you’ll notice that the motherboard does indeed have space marked out for another SSD. It’s just HP that decided not to add a slot for it.
To be fair, it’s not an uncommon practice, but I wish HP didn’t do this. Nonetheless, as things stand, the only way to upgrade the storage is to swap out the existing SSD and slot in a new one. You can upgrade the RAM as you please; however, considering it already comes with 16GB, most users wouldn’t need anything more.
Okay, so moving on to benchmarks, I tested the laptop through our usual set of synthetic benchmarks. As expected, the i5-12450H outputted decent results and was in line with other laptops powered by the same processor that we’ve tested, including the Acer ALG and the Colorful P15. At least, that was the case for Single-Core tests. The Multi-Core performance is slightly behind the competition in both Cinebench R23 and R24. Then again, the HP pulls itself in GeekBench’s benchmarks, so there’s that.
What I was particularly interested in was the GPU performance. The RTX 3050-A GPU features just 4GB of VRAM compared to the 6GB VRAM found on the vanilla RTX 3050 GPU. On the flip side, it’s built on the modern Ada Lovelace architecture. In all honesty, I was expecting lower performance than the 6GB variant, but that’s not exactly the case here. This is well reflected in our run of synthetic GPU benchmarks on the laptop, including the entire suite of 3DMark.
As you can see, the HP Victus performs just in line with the 6GB RTX 3050 on the Acer ALG. Of course, the Colorful P15’s RTX 4050 is a much better performer, but that’s to be expected.
So what about gaming then? That’s where we do see a massive difference, and unfortunately, it’s not in a good way. With an average of just 30 FPS in Forza Horizon 5 and 23 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077, the performance of this HP Victus is quite disappointing. Now, just to be clear, these are at the highest settings, but for comparison, we have other RTX 3050 6GB laptops too. As an end user, you’ll be forced to play games only in Medium settings. While the new architecture does enable good DLSS 3 performance, it does not bring a significant difference to the performance if you compare it with a 6GB RTX 3050 GPU.
Interestingly, we also noted similar results with the ASUS TUF Gaming F16 (review), which also packs in the same RTX 3050A card. The newer architecture isn’t doing a lot for gaming performance, and consumers can find better performance on older laptops that feature a 6GB variant.
The limited VRAM also impacts creative performance, as seen in its PugetBench score of 3933 in DaVinci Resolve. While many buyers consider budget gaming laptops for video editing and other creative tasks, this particular score suggests this Victus laptop might not be the most appealing option for budget-conscious content creators.
Then there’s the battery life. Packing in a 52.5Wh battery, HP claims the laptop should last up to 6 hours and 30 minutes. Well, in our testing, the laptop lasted a little over 4 hours, which is pretty decent considering the overall package. If anything, it’s more than the average of 3 hours that you’d get from most gaming laptops, especially in this price bracket.
As for charging, the box comes with a 135W barrel plug charger. There’s no support for USB-PD charging, which again isn’t surprising. The good news is that the charger can take it from 0 to 50% in under 30 minutes.
Verdict
All things considered, the HP Victus 15-fa1412TX stands out as a dependable all-rounder for around Rs. 70,000. It delivers genuine gaming performance in a design that’s both wallet-friendly and office-appropriate. Whether it’s for casual to mid-level gaming, academic tasks, or everyday productivity, this laptop comfortably juggles it all, from Chrome tabs and spreadsheets to Valorant and Cyberpunk.
That said, it’s not the absolute best gaming performer in this price range. If raw performance is the top priority, the Colorful P15 still takes the lead. It packs the same i5-12450H processor but upgrades the GPU to an RTX 4050 with 6GB VRAM, giving it an edge in more demanding titles. Plus, it includes an additional M.2 slot, which allows for easy storage upgrades without sacrificing the bundled SSD.
Still, the Victus makes a compelling case thanks to HP’s solid reputation, long-term reliability, and better after-sales support, which are factors that matter just as much to many buyers. So if performance is important but peace of mind matters too, this Victus strikes a fine balance.
Editor’s Rating: 7/10
Pros:
- Sleek, minimal design
- Smooth 144Hz display
- Adequate thermal performance
- Decent gaming performance
Cons:
- 4GB VRAM limits creative workloads
- Dim display with average colour accuracy