As we have seen over the past several months, and Acer and Walmart have teamed up to offer a line of relatively affordable Gateway-brand gaming laptops that punch above their price class. Such is the case with this Gateway Creator Series configuration that is on sale for $599 (opens in new tab).
For anyone who has never heard of Gateway, the company pioneered selling PCs directly to consumers way back in the 1980s, and was easily recognizable by its iconic cow-themed graphics on the boxes those PCs shipped inside. Gateway existed as its own entity until Acer acquired the company in 2007.
(opens in new tab)Quick history lesson aside, this Gateway branded laptop sports a 15.6-inch display with a 1920x1080 resolution and fast 120Hz refresh rate, the latter of which is not something you typically find in this price range.
This is powered by a 6-core/12-thread AMD Ryzen 5 4600H processor clocked at 3GHz (base) to 4GHz (boost), with 8MB of L3 cache, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU. It's a respectable foundation, even if not powerful enough to take full advantage of the 120Hz refresh rate in more demanding games (zipping past 60 fps is certainly doable in some instances, though, especially lightweight esports titles).
It also wields 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, neither of which are especially exciting (if not unexpected at this price), though getting inside to upgrade (opens in new tab)one or both is easy enough—just remove a few screws and pop off the bottom cover.
(opens in new tab)If you are looking for an affordable gaming laptop (opens in new tab) with a bit more punch, check out this other Gateway model on sale for $799 (opens in new tab) (down from $999). It pairs an Intel Core i5 10300H processor (4C/8T, 2.5GHz to 4.5GHz, 8MB L3 cache) with a beefier GeForce RTX 2060 GPU, which can push faster framerates and allow you to enable ray-traced visuals in supported games.
