Great battery life, a powerful RTX 4070 GPU, and 16GB of RAM all in one HP laptop for only $849 —- 2025 is off to a good start

[Admin]

This 15.6-inch HP Victus 15 gaming laptop features an AMD processor and Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU for only $849.

Great battery life, a powerful RTX 4070 GPU, and 16GB of RAM all in one HP laptop for only $849 —- 2025 is off to a good start : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Check your work. This laptop IS the HP Victus 16, with the 16.1" screen.

 

[HideOut]

I just wish it was 32GB of ram. Th is kind of power and only 16 is fail.

 

[abufrejoval]

I just wish it was 32GB of ram. Th is kind of power and only 16 is fail.

It has SO-DIMMs, you can swap with up to 96GB currently.

Same with the NVMe, 8TB are easy, many of these actually have dual M.2.

And with this kind of a rebate you can decide where to spend some of the savings, now or later.

If it was available at anywhere near the same price in Europe (and if I hadn't just spent that same amount on a Lenovo LOQ ARP9 with slightly older/lesser specs in Summer), I'd pull the trigger on this one: it looks to be a really good deal!

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

It has SO-DIMMs, you can swap with up to 96GB currently.

Same with the NVMe, 8TB are easy, many of these actually have dual M.2.

And with this kind of a rebate you can decide where to spend some of the savings, now or later.

If it was available at anywhere near the same price in Europe (and if I hadn't just spent that same amount on a Lenovo LOQ ARP9 with slightly older/lesser specs in Summer), I'd pull the trigger on this one: it looks to be a really good deal!

True, but you're looking at around $150-200 between 2x16GB DDR5 5600 (it has 2x8GB installed according to listings in other stores for the exact model, A1SV3UA#ABA) and a 1TB NVMe SSD depending on brand and sales. Cheaper than the price gouging OEMs will want for the same upgrades but that "$400 off" basically turns into just $200.

 

[abufrejoval]

True, but you're looking at around $150-200 between 2x16GB DDR5 5600 (it has 2x8GB installed according to listings in other stores for the exact model, A1SV3UA#ABA) and a 1TB NVMe SSD depending on brand and sales. Cheaper than the price gouging OEMs will want for the same upgrades but that "$400 off" basically turns into just $200.

My impression is that these extremely cut-corner optimized systems which they produce early on to match a price line turn into the worst dead inventory towards the end, if they can't get sold early on.

With soldered RAM laptops, there is nothing to be done, plenty of 8GB hardware that was basically built crippled and can't be salvaged. But when the components are swappable, it's much better for the potential buyer.

An official dealer can't do upgrades before flinging them, the cost of logistics and the warranty hassles make that economically impossible. But for buyers who don't mind (or actually quite enjoy) getting their fingers into hardware, it's a bonus.

And then you can really game on 16GB of RAM and 0.5TB of NVMe for a while and do the upgrade later, once it's become a limitation.

And if you're really tight, you can even upgrade only one module and wind up with RAM that's only single channel in high memory. Especially with a discrete GPU that's nowhere as bad as having too little RAM and even onboard iGPUs will allocate their frame buffers first from low (double channel) RAM.

Eventually used RAM and NVMe storage might become even cheaper yet, if you dare trying that (or can test the stuff on pickup: it's a laptop after all).

There is just so much more potential with systems that still have swappable components.

I'd still consider this a very sweet deal, especially when you compare it to what will come out after CES, including Strix Halo designs that will offer far less gaming power at much higher prices.... for those who need to last on batteries. And I'm pretty sure those will come with soldered RAM, because only ultra fast LPDDR5 will deliver the bandwidth those iGPUs require for performance.

And RTX50? Nothing below four digits for a year at least, I'd say.