Gateway is not a company that you often hear about, given that it mostly peaked in the ’90s and early 2000s, but it’s recently started having a comeback. While the Creator Notebook doesn’t look flashy, it has some pretty nice specs under the hood. In fact, it’s a great gaming laptop deal if you’ve been wanting to pick one up, especially given that Walmart has just discounted it down to $799 from $999, making it a nice purchase if you want a good budget gaming laptop.
Right off the bat, what’s surprising is seeing an RTX 3050 as part of the specs, and while it isn’t the best GPU around, it’s actually pretty good for a sub-$1,000 laptop and should handle games relatively easily. Paired with that is an 11th-gen Intel i5-11400H — a great middle-of-the-road CPU — and when paired with the RTX 3050, it doesn’t cause a bottleneck and should also be able to do a good job running most programs, including creative ones. As for the 15-inch screen, it’s a Full HD, IPS panel, and it even hits a 120Hz refresh rate, which, while not 144Hz, is still pretty good for the price tag and should be great for most gamers out there.
As for other internal specs, you get a 512GB SSD, which is a bit on the low side for games these days, so you may want to look at external hard drive deals to help bolster your storage. RAM is also good at 16GB, so you shouldn’t have any issues running a couple of programs or have several tabs going at the same time. The Creator Notebook also has a couple of great other features, such as THX Spatial Audio, a backlit keyboard, and they even throw in a month of PC Game Pass.
While the Gateway Creator Notebook isn’t flashy, it’s still a pretty great budget gaming laptop, especially if you want to take it to school or work where it wouldn’t be appropriate to have tons of RGB lights everywhere. Even better, you can grab it for just $799 after a $200 discount at Walmart and use the money you would have saved to get yourself a good external hard drive. That being said, if this laptop doesn’t do it for you, we have some other great laptop deals that might fit you better.
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