The black-and-white cow-spotted boxes are back. Gateway, a legendary label in pre-internet direct PC and storefront sales, was acquired by Acer in 2007 and faded from view in the years that followed. Now, it has reappeared as a Walmart-exclusive brand, akin to Ematic and onn. The first new Gateway laptop to reach PC Labs is the $699.99 model GWTN156-1, dubbed Ultra-Slim—a rather generic consumer notebook that doesn’t come close to unseating our Editors’ Choice, the Asus VivoBook S15, but has one or two points in its favor in addition to the nostalgia factor. But it needs more horsepower, and a better build, to compete in the price bracket Walmart has placed it in.
You Call That Slim?
The Gateway lineup at Walmart ranges from Android tablets and supercheap Windows 10 S devices with eMMC flash storage to three 15.6-inch notebooks. The legit-laptop line comprises the Ultra-Slim seen here, available in black, blue, green, or pink (although only the black was in stock when I checked Walmart.com), and two Nvidia GeForce-equipped systems aimed at content creators, one of which is in PCMag.com’s review pipeline.
Except for relying on Intel integrated graphics instead of a discrete GPU, the laptop here could be the most well-rounded of the three, with a quad-core, 1.0GHz (3.6GHz turbo) Core i5-1035G1 processor, 16GB of memory (the content creator models, puzzlingly, come with only 8GB), a 256GB solid-state drive, and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch display. A fingerprint reader in a corner of the touchpad permits Windows Hello logins.
Despite the “Ultra-Slim” moniker, the Gateway, at 0.8 by 14.8 by 9.6 inches, is bulkier than the Asus VivoBook S15 (0.63 by 14.1 by 9.2 inches) and Acer Aspire 5 (0.71 by 14.3 by 9.9 inches). At 4.1 pounds, it splits the difference between the 3.97-pound Asus and 4.19-pound Acer. It’s a black plastic slab with no flex when you grasp its thick-bezeled screen, though some when you press the keyboard deck.
On the laptop’s left edge, next to a security-cable locking notch, are the connector for the compact AC adapter, USB 3.0 Type-A and Type-C ports, and an upside-down HDMI video output. At the right are another USB-A port, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack. Wi-Fi 5 (not 6) and Bluetooth handle wireless communications. Windows Settings lists “GPU Company” rather than Gateway, Acer, or Walmart as the manufacturer.
Old-School Cursor Keys
Oddly, every so often the speakers would blare a second or two of sound when I had a set of headphones plugged into the audio jack. Without headphones, the audio doesn’t live up to the “Tuned by THX” branding on the palm rest—it’s muted even at top volume, with no bass and too muddled to make out overlapping tracks. The 720p webcam captures fairly colorful but soft-focus and digitally noisy images.
The nonbacklit keyboard combines top-row function keys for brightness, volume, and media control with a numeric keypad—in a retro touch, the only Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys are those on the keypad (7, 1, 9, and 3 respectively), which will make for lots of awkward toggling of Num Lock if you’re navigating a spreadsheet while using the keypad. The keyboard has a shallow, clacky typing feel, but the buttonless touchpad taps and glides smoothly.
The 1080p display is reasonably bright, though white backgrounds are just a shade off washday white. Contrast and clarity are good, with sharp details. Colors are economy-class, though, fairly well saturated but not vivid. Viewing angles are broad, though plagued by reflections at extreme off-angles.
The Windows 10 Home software preload includes a Norton Security Ultra trial and promos for the Elvenar, Forge of Empires, and Kidomi games. Also, endeavoring to improve the sound output, I found that the THX icon is just a link to an advertising web page, not an audio control utility.
Performance Testing: A $700 Showdown
For our performance comparisons, I pitted the Gateway Ultra-Slim against four other laptops in its price range. The Acer Aspire 5 and Asus VivoBook S15 are direct competitors, while the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 and Acer Nitro 5 are jokers in the pack: The former is a 14-inch convertible instead of a 15.6-inch clamshell, while the latter is a budget-model gaming rig whose Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU will give it a huge advantage in our graphics benchmarks. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
The Core i5 CPU in the Ultra-Slim is a four-core/eight-thread chip from Intel’s 10th Generation “Ice Lake” line. There is a key difference, though, between the higher-end Ice Lake processors and the lower-end ones, which we will get to in a moment. (The one in the Ultra-Slim is on the lower end of the equation.)
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 Gateway brought up the rear in this event, joining the Asus in posting an honorable PCMark 10 score but one shy of the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity. All five laptops acquitted themselves well in PCMark 8’s storage exercise, as is the norm for laptops with SSD boot drives.
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.
As expected, the six-core Ryzen 5 H-series chip in the Acer Nitro 5 dominated these benchmarks, leaving the Ultra-Slim’s 1.0GHz Core i5 limping behind in the dust. Granted, the Nitro 5 is a gaming laptop with a meaty chassis and beefier thermal loadout, but the MSRP is the same.
Just as striking, though, is the dominant performance of the more mobile-minded Ryzen U-series CPUs in the Aspire and IdeaPad models; they clubbed the Core i5 in the Gateway machine, and it was not even close to a fair fight. Even the Core i5 in the VivoBook S15 topped it. The Ultra-Slim will get you through multimedia tasks, but you’ll need to be far more patient than with the other like-priced contenders here.
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.
Another poor relative showing for the Gateway Ultra-Slim here, which is especially disappointing as the high burst clock speed of its Core i5 didn’t seem to help it much. (Usually, this test brings that to the fore.) Let me say it again: On CPU-intensive tasks, this laptop will teach you (and at times, test your) patience.
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 Acer Nitro 5 is in a league of its own here, with the notebooks with integrated graphics (particularly Intel integrated graphics) well behind. The four non-gaming laptops are clearly in their own category and not designed for serious gamers. As for that Ice Lake-related nuance alluded to earlier: Note that the Core i5 Ice Lake CPU in the Ultra-Slim is not one of the upper models in the line with Intel’s upticked Iris Plus graphics, but pedestrian UHD Graphics. The former would have led to better scores. (More in line with the Radeon Graphics models, mind you, not challenging the GTX 1650.)
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.
Same trend, similarly unflattering to the Gateway. Of course, the GeForce GTX 1650 in the Nitro dominates again, but the Gateway’s integrated graphics are also outpaced by the Ryzen/Radeon pair. Buyers of the Ultra-Slim (or the Aspire or VivoBook) will have to be content with casual or browser-based games only.
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 Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.
The Ultra-Slim and Aspire showed the least stamina, but more than 10 hours of battery life is by no means bad for a desktop replacement. It’s doubtful someone would carry a 15.6-inch laptop through a full day of work or school, but at least it’s possible.
Gateway’s Return: Not Quite Spot On
The Gateway Ultra-Slim languished in our performance tests, but performance isn’t its main attraction; it offers a decent if economical keyboard, screen, and port layout in a reasonably handsome package. The problem, however, is that it’s 2020, and the new wave of Ryzen-based laptops does it better for the same money. This model needs to drop in price by $100 to $150.
The Ultra-Slim is unlikely to make Gateway a household name again, like it was in the ’90s, but if it sees some reduction in price, Walmart shoppers could do worse. Until that happens, though, we can only cite the wisdom of Bart Simpson regarding cows—and suggest opting for an alternative like the Acer Aspire and Lenovo IdeaPad Flex models cited earlier.
