At a mere $599 at Walmart, there's no cheaper laptop than this Gateway one that ticks the two most important demands of most recent creative applications (e.g. AutoCAD 2024 or Photoshop CC) and games: 16GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics card.
The weirdly-named GGNC51518-BK is not pitched as a a gaming laptop despite coming with a free 1-month Xbox Pass for PC. Its Creator branding underlines Gateway's attempt to capture a wider audience.
And boy, is it a great deal: in less than two years, its price dropped from $1000 to $800, then to $679 and now to $599.
Gateway teams an 11th generation Core i5 CPU (11400H with six cores) with an Nvidia Geforce RTX 3050 (with 4GB VRAM), a pairing that should make it fast enough for even the most complex AutoCAD drawings.
Other than the fact that it is a bit on the heavy side (4.0lbs), likely to have a smallish battery (based on its rated 4-hours battery life and a 2021 review from Laptopmag of its predecessor) and is thicker than your average laptop (at 0.8-inch), it hits all the right notes.
A 15.6-inch full HD display with a 120Hz refresh rate, two 8GB DDR4 memory modules (16GB in all) and a 512GB NVMe SSD make up the rest of the specification. Oh and not to forget that It has plenty of ports - four USB, a Gigabit Ethernet LAN, audio port and HDMI.
Laptopmag's review gave its predecessor a 3.5 star, adding that "The Gateway Creator Series 15 laptop brings fantastic performance at a budget price, but is let down by an abysmal battery and a weak CPU."
Then again the review was on a $799 model with half the memory (and storage), a slower CPU and a weaker GPU. For anything creative or gaming, you won't get a faster, more powerful system (desktop or PC) for less than this. Buy it now before the price goes up.
The device is the cheapest new, branded laptop that I have found that comes with a powerful processor and a dedicated graphics card. As we noted in our best laptop for AutoCAD 2023 guide, gaming laptops tend to be cheaper than creative-focused ones or portables with a specific use-case, such as laptops for engineering students.
With an emphasis on graphics, gaming laptops typically surpass the recommended requirements for AutoCAD 2024. As a bonus, they can fulfil two separate use cases with ease: working and playing and this Gateway laptop is the perfect embodiment of this.
