Hi Internet, this is guy.
I was honestly thinking whether to write this review or not. On the one hand, I really do not review laptops that much - in fact, this is the second laptop I bought in the past 6 years; but on the other, since there were many factors I put into consideration before I made the purchase, I feel like it's worth a review.
Before I dive in deeper, let me list the specs:
- CPU: Ryzen 5 5600H
- Memory: 2*8GB DDR4 3200MHz
- Storage: 512GB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD
- Graphics: Integrated Radeon Graphics & GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4GB
The story began earlier this year. After the purchase of the electronic drum set and EZDrummer 3, I realized that with the settings I use, there were quite some delays between the trigger and the return, I had to have my old laptop run hot if I wanted to have a good drum session. The same goes for my DaVinci Resolve experience, while I use only the CPU for my rendering, my old i5-7300HQ is just not up for the job anymore. Not to mention that it could barely play Phasmophobia at low settings.
So, once I moved to my new place, my hunt for a new laptop began.
To be clear, my goals for this laptop are very simple, and they were already mentioned - EZDrummer 3, DaVinci Resolve, and Phasmophobia. Everything else comes as a bonus. I also set myself a budget of 1,000 Canadian dollars - before tax, anything more expensive is either overpriced or not needed by my needs. I wasn't looking to play anything too demanding on it either, as I have a desktop (3700X + 3070) for my at-home use.
My choices came down to 3:
1. HP Victus 15 (the one I bought, $899.99)
2. Gigabyte G5 (i5-12500H, 8GB, 512GB, RTX 4060, $999.99)
3. Acer A715 (Ryzen 7 5700U, 16GB, 512GB, RTX 3050, $899.99)
I spent the longest time researching the Gigabyte G5, while it does have that 4060, it still has two major flaws:
- Overheating: This was demonstrated by many people on YouTube that both the CPU and the GPU would go way beyond 90 degrees Celsius and 80 degrees Celsius respectively, during a Fortnite (or any light gaming) session. Although this issue was resolved by a BIOS update, and from what I've seen online, it was indeed fixed, I still can't trust it. Maybe one day the overheat will come back again, and decrease the life of this laptop further.
- 150W power brick: To my knowledge, while the 12500H is a 35W chip, when it's boosting (which happens all the time), the power goes up to 115W. The RTX 4060, on the other hand, is a lower-tier model, and it runs at 75W max. Do you see where the problem is yet? Even if we are not considering the power usage of memory, storage, USB, and the display, at 100% load of the power brick, the entire system is only at 79% of its peak performance, and it was still overheating. I'm assuming that Gigabyte fixed the overheating issue by turning down the performance, which is why I ended up not buying the G5.
The flaws of the HP:
- The screen can be very wobbly, although when I was testing it at the Canada Computers store, it was not that wobbly when you type.
- The charging port is a hit or miss sometimes, I have encountered quite a few HP laptops that had dead charging ports.
- Compared to the Acer, it has a weaker Ryzen 5 processor.
The flaws of the Acer:
- The keyboard can be a hit or miss, of all the Acer laptops I have come across, all of their keyboards would fail first.
- Compared to the HP, it is slightly chunkier.
- Compared to the HP, it has a slower RTX 3050.
The final decision was quite simple - since I will need to move the laptop from place to place, the slimmer HP became the better answer.
I don't want this post to be too long, so I'll continue with the actual review of it in part 2.