Review – Vamspaz

Black Myth: Wukong on the HP Victus 16- will it game?

Aug 172024

Unless you’ve been living under a graphically heavy rock, you would’ve heard of Black Myth Wukong by now. Built using the latest unreal engine 5, it is destined to be a graphics card killer given it’s gameplay footage. Fast paced action forms the core of the game, which almost always beckons high fps.

High fps would then need strong hardware, specially with ray tracing capabilities to truly enjoy the game’s beauty. While we wait for the game to release tomorrow, let us try and understand what it can ask from a laptop, specially a 30 series one like the HP Victus 3060.

My Victus is the 7 5800 H with a 3060 and 16gigs of RAM. When I bought this three years ago, cyberpunk 2077 was already out for almost an year. I did want to play cyberpunk and went for this laptop. Never have I felt the need for more out of the laptop. As I mentioned in an older post, games like days gone, metro exodus rtx edition run great at 1440p. Cyberpunk too runs great (enough).

However, one thing which didn’t bother me originally but is starting to take over is the fan noise. I think it is the age of the fan blades, or the cpu paste or something else like bad chips. I won’t go much further here explaining the state of the laptop but that’s the summary of the laptops state.

I installed the benchmark tool published officially for Black Myth Wukong and there are many options available there. You could play around with the resolution (depends on the monitor), rtx setting, frame gen and get the max, avg and min fps.

The tool just crashed at the cinematic graphics setting with rtx at the highest and frame generation off. I know this is too much to expect of the laptop, but hey. Learning by experience. What impressed me about the laptop was that it managed to complete the test at just one setting lower than cinematic. Mind you, it eek’d out only 18fps max but the tool completed.

Where the benchmark felt much gamer friendly was with the frame gen on. There were frame drops in three places, but in the end we got 81 fps with at rtx disabled, frame gen on, 1080p and high graphics preset.

This test is just to understand what can happen to the laptop when you do dive into the game and buy it. What may be a disappointment is that the fast action may not be that smooth as we will start seeing on streamers’ rigs.

Thank you publisher for giving us this tool to plan what to do next.

HP Victus 16 – 3 years review

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Jul 282024

This review is of the OG model, 5800H with the 3060 after using it for three years now.

When I bought this in 2021, it was one of the cheapest offering for a 3060. My main criteria for buying the laptop was that, the price. Second was the number of ports on offer. 3 USB type A, 1 type C with display out, 1 HDMI, Ethernet and the SD card slot. As I intended to game on a monitor, the display quality wasn’t a big concern for me.

You can check out the one year review here.

After that review there weren’t many changes done to the laptop. Only change I did was to upgrade storage to 2TB, which makes the total to 2.5 TB. There has been little to no dip in performance, though it needs a monthly clean up of dust (pretty dusty at my place).

HP Victus 16, a review- Yay or skip?

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Sep 122021

About a month ago, I was searching for an upgrade to my FX503. There were lots of options and I went through comparisons of the 1050 with 1650, 1650ti and the 1660ti. I finally decided to take the HP Omen with the Ryzen 4600 H with 1660ti. The build reviews were nice and the performance was great, owing to the 6GB VRAM. Also, the selection of ports was decent. I needed a type-C port.

Amazon gave a suggestion about the new laptop launch, the Victus line right around the sale day and the listing got me intrigued. Gaming laptop at 72k. My initial budget was 70-80k and this 3050 model was well within the range.

Then I pulled an all-nighter comparing 3050 with the 3060 and boy was I taken aback. The 3060 performed so much better and I now had to manage my budget by pushing it over a lakh. Nail biting stuff but I went through buying the 3060 model.

The packaging was fairly minimal.

The port selection is quite useful, all being high speed ports of version 3.2. The type-C port is version 3.2 gen 2 too with sleep charge and display 1.4 support.

Port Selection Left — Port Selection, Left

The HDMI port supports up to version 2.1 which is great for upwards of 4K 60 FPS with a supporting monitor or TV.

Galaxy tab S7 – a capable tablet

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Oct 042020

Ever got bored of gaming on the same old small screen of your phone? Ever felt the need to own the Snapdragon version of a Samsung device instead of the Exynos one? Ever felt the need to own a device which isn’t a laptop but can act as a lightweight one?

The galaxy tab S7 has it covered. Well at least the second need may not be very relevant in this case, as the tab S7 (hereon referred to as the tab) doesn’t have an Exynos version. The tab’s insides include the latest (at the time of this writing) Snapdragon 865+ chipset, 6 gigs of RAM, 128 gigs of storage, and a respectable 8000 mAh battery.

The hardware externally is great too. You get the S-pen in the box, which can attach magnetically at the back. The USB type-C gen 3.2 is quite handy with different peripherals. Also, you may fancy the attachable, optional, keyboard cover which comes with a kickstand. The cameras are OK, just OK, not the note or the S series level.

With the commonalities aside lets dive into the gaming part. The 865+ proves once again why it is best for gaming. On this tab, you can see its prowess. I’ve tested the tab with the following games:

Nvidia shield Tegra K1- Gaming tablets from the yesteryear part 2

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Feb 212020

The Shield K1 tab was quite a masterpiece of its time. An excellent 8 inch display with a 1900X1200 resolution IPS panel with dual front facing speakers, an okayish front and rear cam combo (both 5 MP with HDR), a mini HDMI out(upto 4K output), an OTG compatible micro USB port, a micro SD card slot and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

The exterior is nothing to complain about. The speaker grills are covered with rubber and the back is plastic with a rubber finish too, for a great grip. All this external interface is built around an NVidia Tegra K1 processor with 192 kepler cores for graphics with an ARM Cortex 2.2 GHz CPU, attached to a 2 GB memory. Storage is 16 GB which was not bad for a 2015 device. The 128 GB supported micro SD card slot allows one to use a memory card as internal storage which can be quite handy.

Acer predator tab – Gaming tablets from the yesteryear part 1

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Dec 142019

When you think about anything gaming, you get a little bling in mind. Come on, yes you do. Well, I do. The design language is sure to include some good red and shininess, some sharp highlights and some more.

The Acer predator in its 8 inch 1920X1200 (16:10) goodness flaunts an IPS LCD screen, a memory card slot, a volume rocker, a power button topped up by 2 Gigs of RAM, 32 gigs of storage and an Intel Atom processor (X7-Z8700).

These aside I want to particularly mention the 4 speakers on the 4 corners of the device. Sharp to touch and hear they pack a good punch in the audio department. Watching movies and YouTube, listening to music on device or online, are a treat. Whats more, the tab has a vibration motor, not seen in many, if any tab(which doesn’t have call functionality).

Circle CH70 – A gaming chair review

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Sep 272019

Ergonomics starts with a good chair. Back and neck support are the two places where any neglect will cause pains during long work or gaming sessions. I learned that the hard way when going through regular 4 hour stretches of TAB.

The Circle CH70 gaming chair comes with the typical gaming flair- the car seat design, adjustable height and angle, a back support pillow and a neck support pillow. It uses a good amount of memory foam (density grade 30) to ensure there is no permanent deformity. Honestly, I would recommend this chair even at offices if it were up to me. Sigh, it isn’t though.

It comes in three colors – black, red and green and the specifications are available pretty clearly on their website and hence I will concentrate on the experience part.

Asus FX503- a budget gaming laptop

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Jun 052019

When you think about gaming, specially upgrading from a non gaming laptop, budget is definitely a concern. Unless you have been using a serious pro type laptop (pardon my jargon, I am not sure what expensive laptops are called other than expensive), you will think about the next laptop to be up-gradable and not too heavy on the pocket.

Enter budget gaming laptop. Many lightweight ones sport the MX950, which is passable as being a mobile grade graphics chipset. Before the GTX series goes out of stock, the desktop grade graphics card, meaning it will eat your battery life and throw out awesomeness in terms of graphics quality, is the Nvidia 1050. Which is also on the laptop I am reviewing after a lot of usage. There are other chips from AMD too but for the sake of this being a specific laptop review I will skip that part. (Vamspaz is all about gaming so rest assured there will be more articles on other cards too.)

This model in particular comes with a 1080p 15 inch TN display, meaning a wicked refresh rate with bad visibility. It has 2 USB 3.0 ports and one 2.0. One HDMI 2.0 port, one card reader and the usual Kensington lock.

Powering this is a 6 cell battery with an 8GB RAM and a 1TB HDD. I have upgraded this to a 16GB RAM and a 1 TB HDD+ 128 GB(OS drive) SSD configuration. Also, it has the above mentioned GTX1050.