I've got to be honest, I nearly did a double-take when I saw that a Gateway gaming laptop was on sale at Walmart for $800. I thought for a moment I might have time-traveled back to the year 1999. Was I about to kick my brother off the family computer to play Starcraft again? But no: it's 2022, and Gateway is alive and kicking and this laptop, in particular, actually seems to be a pretty good deal.
This Walmart-exclusive notebook is discounted $200 off its usual $1000 price tag and comes with a free month of Xbox Game Pass for PC.
In case you're wondering how it's possible for Gateway to be back, Acer acquired Gateway long ago, in 2007, and has since released a line of budget tablets, notebooks and 2-in-1s under the Gateway name.
This 15-inch Gateway Creator notebook is powered by an Intel Core i5-11400H CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and an RTX 3050. This GPU can hang with the GTX 1660 Ti, plus it utilizes RTX 30-series goodies like DLSS and ray tracing support.
The Creator Notebook should be able to get you some reliable gaming performance at 1080p on medium settings. The speedy 120Hz IPS display is great if you mostly play competitive shooters like CS:GO or Valorant.
I was happy to see that the Gateway had 16GB RAM, because we've noticed recently that cheaper laptops often only provide 8-12GB of RAM. That's getting tough to recommend for serious gaming.
It's also rare to see a laptop this cheap have more than 256GB of SSD storage, so seeing that it has a 512GB NVMe SSD inside is pleasant surprise. Ideally 1TB is the preferred storage capacity we want to see in an SSD on a laptop, but considering the price of $800 that's pretty good. Walmart does have a sale on a 17-inch version of this laptop with a 1TB SSD and slightly better CPU and GPU for an extra $150 in case you needed something a little bigger with more oomph. Just don't expect it to be light.
Our friends over at LaptopMag actually reviewed a slightly underpowered version of this Gateway Creator notebook back in 2020 and praised the system's performance and sleek design despite not having great battery life.
