By: Aaron Zeng
You may or may not have heard of Gateway, a brand owned by the big tech company, Acer. Recently, Gateway has introduced a new laptop from their Gaming Series, the Gateway 15.6’ FHD Gaming Laptop. With an impressive array of features, this budget beast might just be your next purchase.
This laptop can be purchased from your local Micro Center, at the Acer section of laptops, or on Gateway’s website. The thing that makes this laptop a budget beast is that it is on sale for 500 USD before tax. With a 15.6 inch screen, it is big enough to fit all your favorite games in. With the GPU, which is the part of the computer that accelerates graphics rendering, being a NVidia Geforce RTX 3050 4gb, it is able to run your favorite games, that is if you put the higher-end ones on lower settings. With the CPU, which is the brain of the computer, being an 11th gen Intel Core i5 11400H running at 2.70 gHz and 4.5 gHz turbo, it is nothing to brag about, but will certainly get the job done whether you’re working or playing games. But that’s not all, this thing also comes with 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM, which loads all the stuff you use. This DDR4 RAM is not quite future proof if you’re trying to get the most out of the RAM, but you can’t expect everything from something that’s just 500 dollars. The storage, which well stores all your info, has 512 gigs of SSD, not quite the one terabyte most are looking for, but it will do the job, plus upgrading is always an option. With 4 hours of battery life, it should be able to withstand shorter gaming sessions and can probably go to 5 or 6 if you’re doing more mundane tasks. And with the laptop only being 4 pounds, (3.96lb or 1.80kg) it is fairly portable and great if you wanna game during traveling or on vacation. Unfortunately, the screen is not touchscreen, but many people don’t use that feature anyway. While the monitor is going at 120 Hertz, not quite the 144 Hertz recommended for gaming, it works adequately.
The Review:
Before I even opened the box, I was impressed. The case and packaging itself wasn’t your normal laptop box, but a beautiful case with handles and colorful printing on it. When I opened the box, the laptop, like all other laptops, was firmly in between many pieces of packing material. The protection was so good, it was a challenge to pull the laptop out of the box. It also came with a number of instruction manuals and guides, along with the charger.
My first impressions of the laptop were pretty good. The exterior was sturdy, and it had a really clean design. The laptop passed the flex test, as when I pressed down on it there was barely any flexing at all. Very sturdy for a 500 dollar piece of tech. When I turned the laptop on, I was met with some LED lights on the keyboard. I couldn’t find any way for it to be RGB, but a cool light blue color does the trick just fine. Later, I played around with the keyboard and found that you could change the brightness of the keyboard, from very bright down to no lights. The touchpad was a bit weird, it initially had a bit of friction but after wiping and drying it well, it was great.
Now for some extras: the keyboard has a handy CPU button, where you can change it to 3 different modes: office, for light everyday use, gaming, for when you’re well, gaming, and finally turbo, which makes it run at the max 4.5gHz. The laptop has a 2 in 1 card reader, which is pretty neat, 3 USB ports, a USB-C port, a lock port, power connector, audio and mic jack, a network jack, and of course a power connector. The cooling in this laptop is what you would expect from any laptop, not very effective. Even with many vents, the laptop can still have trouble cooling and can get very loud sometimes, which is why I recommend getting a laptop cooler off somewhere like Amazon for just about 20-30 dollars.
For the gaming test, I went ahead and tested a few games on different settings. First up, GTA V on high gets an average of 101.1 FPS, ultra getting an average of 52.9 FPS, and low getting an average of 151.3 FPS. For Valorant, high settings got an average of 240.2 FPS, ultra got an average of 122.7 FPS, and low got an average of 362 FPS. I decided to try Cyberpunk 2077, and it did better than I thought. It got 59.1 FPS on high, 31.2 FPS on ultra, and 88.2 on low. Not bad for a 500 dollar laptop.
My final thoughts on this laptop is that if you’re a casual gamer looking for a laptop to play entry to mid level games, this is great for you. Even if you’re looking to bring it to school, only weighing in at 4 pounds it is very portable. Even better, if you’re traveling this laptop is great if you wanna game on your vacation. 500 bucks for such a good build is hard to resist-if you’re looking for something like this, hurry because the deal won’t last forever.