Acer has revived the iconic Gateway brand and is selling it exclusively at Walmart. Despite it not being either Prime Day or Black Friday, the world's largest retailer has slashed the price of Gateway Creator to $499, down from $649, a tag that includes free shipping. That is half the price of the Asus TUF F15 which has the same configuration bar a highly higher screen refresh rate.
This is a laptop geared towards creatives as its hardware is powerful enough to be used as a mobile workstation for AutoCAD 2024 (launched earlier this year) or indeed any other Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications.
The device is the cheapest new, branded laptop that I have found that comes with a new-ish processor and a recent dedicated graphics card at that price point. Plus on top of that, it weighs less than 2kg - meaning that although it is not an Ultrabook, it isn't that far off.
Gateway Creator laptop: A brief look
As we noted in our best laptop for AutoCAD guide, gaming laptops tend to be cheaper than creative-focussed 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 2023. As a bonus, they can fulfil two separate use cases with ease: working and playing and the Walmart Creator is the perfect example for this (without the flashy lights).
It has an 11th generation six-core Intel Core i5-11400H CPU with a dedicated Nvidia Geforce RTX 3050 GPU with 4GB GDDR6, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB NVMe Gen3 SSD, all powered by Windows 11. Its battery is likely to be small-ish (which Walmart, optimistically, says will last you 10 hours) and its display is a 15.6-inch full HD IPS one with a 120Hz refresh rate, a clear nudge towards gamers.
The Creator laptop does come with Wi-Fi 6, a spare bay for a 2.5-inch storage drive (SSD or HDD) and because it is a traditional laptop has more ports than your usual thin-and-light laptop: 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 1, 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, 1x USB 2.0, HDMI 2.0 video output, Gigabit Ethernet, 3.5mm headphone.
Oh and you do get a 1-megapixel webcam and a backlit keyboard with a dedicated numeric keypad as well.
