We recently reviewed the 2022 HP Diet 15 and found it to be underwhelming for the price. Although we don’t expect to be blown away from a lower-end gaming laptop, its low bang for the buck just can’t compete with other budget to midrange gaming laptops in the same $1000 to $1200 USD price range. Unfortunately for HP, the problems don’t end there.
We experienced two noteworthy and potentially frustrating bugs on our test unit related to the battery life and fan noise. Firstly, battery life would be far too short at just 2 to 2.5 hours even with all power settings set to their bare minimum. Most gaming laptops would last for several hours longer when under similar conditions, but runtimes are oddly short on the Victus 15 despite its reasonably-sized 70 Wh battery pack. Results would not improve even after retests.
The second issue would occur when switching between the three power modes on the HP Omen application as shown by the screenshot below. For some strange reason, Quiet mode is noticeably louder than Default mode (29.2 dB(A) vs. 26.2 dB(A)) when idling on desktop with no running applications. The fact that HP has two additional toggles on top of Performance mode (Maximum fan mode and Game Boost mode) makes the entire control process unintuitive for casual gamers. We recommend avoiding Quiet mode especially since it does not appear to improve battery life by any significant margin.
The Diet 15 can still be a good budget gaming laptop if it can fix the above bugs and retail for under $1000 USD. Until then, there are arguably better options out there with faster GeForce RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 6600M graphics such as the Lenovo Legion 5 15.
After graduating with a BS in environmental hydrodynamics from the University of California, I studied reactor physics to become licensed by the US NRC to operate nuclear reactors. There’s a striking level of appreciation you gain for everyday consumer electronics after working with modern nuclear reactivity systems astonishingly powered by computers from the 80s. When I’m not managing day-to-day activities and US review articles on Notebookcheck, you can catch me following the eSports scene and the latest gaming news.
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