If the Gateway Ultra-Slim targeted mainstream laptop shoppers, the second notebook we’ve seen from the classic brand reborn as a Walmart exclusive aims at digital content creators—well, sort of. The Gateway Creator GWTN156-2 ($799) has a strong six-core AMD Ryzen 5 4600H processor, but only 8GB of memory instead of the 16GB or more preferred by Adobe Photoshop and Premiere users. Your local Walmart might put it in the gaming-laptop aisle because of its 120Hz screen and free month of Xbox Game Pass, but its Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU isn’t capable of triple-digit frame rates, and it’s priced $130 higher than the comparably equipped and more expandable Acer Nitro 5. Plus, it has three video-outs on the back. It’s an odd-duck mix of components. Ultimately, the Creator impresses us little more than the Ultra-Slim—neither laptop is actually bad, but Gateway’s comeback is a fizzle so far.
Another Black Plastic Slab
The GWTN156-2 is a 15.6-inch laptop with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch display, a 256GB PCI Express-based solid-state drive, and a backlit keyboard that can stick with your favorite color or cycle through a panorama of pretty ones, though it’s not customizable by zones or individual keys as some gaming rigs are. The screen bezels are attractively thin—so thin that the webcam is mounted below the display, which as always yields awkwardly angled shots of your neck and chin. There’s neither a fingerprint reader nor a face-recognition webcam for skipping passwords with Windows Hello.
The Creator is average in size for a big-screen laptop, at 0.8 by 14.2 by 9.7 inches, but relatively light at 4.2 pounds. Its plastic construction is fairly sturdy, though there’s some flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. A button next to the power button toggles between Gaming mode, which automatically adjusts fan speeds to keep the machine cool, and Office mode, which offers three preset speeds. The fan controls are also present in a Control Center software utility that lets you tweak the keyboard backlighting, view a system dashboard, or choose among standard, gaming, video, or reading screen modes.
Ports wrap around three sides of the laptop. On the left side, next to a Kensington cable lock slot, you’ll find Ethernet and USB 2.0 ports and headphone and microphone jacks. Two USB 3.1 Type-A ports and an SD card slot are at the right. Around back are one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort video outputs (quite the unusual mix), a USB Type-C port, and the connector for the AC adapter. If for whatever reason you want to hook up a whole heap of external monitors to your laptop, you just found the right one.
Old-School Cursor Controls
There’s a spare End key on the top row but otherwise, as with the Gateway Ultra-Slim, the only Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys on the keyboard are those on the numeric keypad. That’s fine until you try using a spreadsheet, which will require endless toggling of Num Lock as you move between data entry and navigating the worksheet.
The typing feel, alas, is flat and lifeless, with a small but annoying number of missed or unregistered keystrokes. Mouse lovers will find two ways to turn off the buttonless touchpad—pressing Fn+F5 and double-tapping an LED in its corner—but most users will find the pad glides and taps smoothly enough and clicks competently.
The 1080p screen doesn’t get very bright, but white backgrounds are acceptably white and contrast is good. Viewing angles are broad and colors, while they don’t exactly pop, are reasonably rich and well saturated. Fine details are clear and the edges of letters don’t look pixelated. A Tuned by THX utility offers a choice of standard or optimized screen modes, the latter allegedly improving color accuracy, white point, and overall quality. (I didn’t see a dramatic difference between it on and off.)
More THX software comes into play with the bottom-mounted speakers, which you can switch from a rather flat stereo default to faux surround sound with THX Spatial Audio; you can also tweak the sound by trying some music, cinema, game, and voice presets and playing with an equalizer. Audio is fairly loud and full; the bass isn’t strong, but it’s easy to distinguish overlapping tracks.
The 720p webcam captures colorful but somewhat soft-focus and noisy images. The Windows 10 Home software preload is supplemented by a Norton Security Ultra trial and the Elvenar and Forge of Empires games, as well as the abovementioned utilities.
Performance Testing: AMD ‘Renoir’ Rocks
We test plenty of creative laptops built for content professionals, but they’re not fair for this review’s performance comparisons because they cost far more than the $799 Gateway Creator—$1,999 for the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15, $2,299 for the Dell XPS 15, $2,699 for the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED, and so on.
Trying to limit myself to affordable portables, I ultimately chose our budget desktop replacement Editors’ Choice award winner the Asus VivoBook S15; a 15.6-inch convertible, the Lenovo Yoga C740; and two low-cost gaming rigs, the aforementioned Acer Nitro 5 and the MSI GL65 9SC. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The Creator aced this, our most important test, barreling past the 4,000-point mark that indicates excellent productivity. As usual, all five laptops’ solid-state drives did admirably in PCMark 8’s storage subtest.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
We’ve praised AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series “Renoir” mobile CPUs before, and the Gateway was outstanding in these events. Its six-core, 12-thread architecture is the closest thing you’ll get to workstation cred at this price.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
The Yoga’s win was more or less followed by a four-way tie for second place. The Creator is as good a choice as any 1080p laptop for occasional image editing, though we prefer SD slots that swallow cards to those that leave them sticking out to snag in your briefcase, as the Gateway’s does.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.
The Gateway’s GeForce GTX 1650 GPU won’t keep up with the GTX 1660 Ti or GeForce RTX silicon, but it blows away integrated graphics to offer acceptable gaming performance.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.
Again, the three GTX 1650 notebooks finished in a predictable dead heat. Hardcore gamers will want something stronger, but these frame rates are fine for casual after-hours entertainment.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern AAA titles with built-in benchmark routines. We run these tests at 1080p resolution using both moderate and maximum graphics-quality presets—Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12.
Another photo finish for the GeForce GTX 1650 rigs, hovering right around the magic 60fps mark at the games’ best image-quality settings (and not making use of the Gateway’s 120Hz display). No laptop with only 256GB of storage will let you load more than a few recent AAA games (so in this case, we’d give the nod to the Nitro 5 for its available M.2 SSD slot and 2.5-inch drive bay). But the Creator qualifies as a player.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of SteelTears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.
If the Acer, Asus, and Lenovo are impressive and the MSI is underwhelming, the Gateway is satisfactory. It’ll get you through, or almost through, a full day or productivity or creative work.
Verdict: This Cow’s an Odd Duck
We have fond memories of numerous Gateway PCs, so we wish we could be more enthusiastic about the brand’s return. The Creator’s CPU performance and sound are pluses, but it would benefit from double the memory and storage, as well as some real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys and a better keyboard feel.
It is possible that you might want to give it a whirl, if its unusual component mix appeals to you: lots of video outs, plus a high-refresh screen paired with a decent CPU and a modest GPU (say, for powering older, legacy games at high frame rates). It’s far from the worst laptop you’ll see at Walmart, but it doesn’t shine in a hyper-competitive field of under-$1,000 desktop replacements and budget gaming rigs.
