Gateway 15.6-inch Ultra Slim Notebook review - seamanviespork

The Gateway 15.6-edge in Ultra Slim Notebook is a classic budget PC. At $399 from Walmart, the price is hard to beat, especially considering its homogeneous performance, decent storage place, and roomy CRT screen size up.

The trade-offs come from all the things that don't turn up along a specification sheet. The display is harshly lit, with subpar viewing angles. The trackpad is abrasive. The plastic inclosure is unhealthy and shaky, and battery life is woefully brief.

This retrospect is part with of our ongoing roundup of the best laptops. Go there for data on competitive products and how we tested them.

None of these compromises are new to the budget cost range. Basic productivity is the realistic expectation hither, and this laptop does have some strong points. If you're undeterred by the downsides, and you really put up't spend more, Gateway's 15.6-inch Extremist Slim Notebook might acceptable your bill.

Technical school specs

Our Gateway 15.6-inch Ultra Slim Notebook refresh unit includes the pursual features:

Display: 15.6-in 1920×1080 IPS matte display
CPU: Intel Core i3-1115G4 processor
Memory: 8GB DDR4 Aries the Ram
Storage: 256GB SSD (W800SH)
Webcam: 720p
Biometry: Fingermark digital scanner
Left side: HDMI, USB-C, USB-A 3.0, barrel charger
Proper side: USB-A 3.0, earphone jack, MicroSD slot (up to 512 GB)
Dimensions: 14.75 x 9.5 x 0.77 inches
Weight: 4.2 pounds (4.7 with king adapter)

gateway156rightside — MicroSD slots aren't a given on laptops any longer, but Gateway's notebook has one.

Walmart, Acer's undivided pardner in resurrecting the Gateway make, offers different other configurations. A translation with AMD's Ryzen 5 3450U Processor sells for the same $399Murder non-product link, while a version with an Intel Pith i5-1135G7 CPU, 512GB of storage, and 16GB of RAM sells for $579Remove non-product link. There's no 512GB storage selection with the Core i3 processor, simply the MicroSD menu slot—an increasingly rare feature on any laptop—provides an easy way to add more storage.

For those who like to Scomber japonicus, this laptop computer is delightfully upgradeable. A small hatch on the underside lets you project in more memory. Totally you need is a Phillips-head screwdriver to pull soured the entire rear panel, where you can access the barrage fire and the M.2 SSD.

gateway156innards — Credit where owing: This laptop computer's internals are well in hand with a Phillips-head screwdriver and a fingernail.

Sadly, the laptop computer's sole USB-C port doesn't support charging. That agency you always have to usance the included barrel charger, which charges slowly and comes with a space-hogging power adapter.

Design and display

If not for the imploring, ocean-down in the mouth finish on this particular limited review unit, Gateway's 15.6-in Immoderate Slim Notebook would look much like any different low-cost, all-plastic laptop. Information technology has thick bezels surrounding its matte display. The chassis wish creak and crunch under your hands from the moment you pick it up.

gateway156leftside — The blue organic structure spruces upwardly what's otherwise an ordinary-looking laptop.

Display quality is usually the first thing to enter budget laptops. The 15.6-inch sort on this sit is roomy, but a bit slur over. It also emits an unnaturally blueish imbue that puts a strain on the eyes. Although the display's IPS applied science is supposed to enable a steady image from wide angles, you'll notice the screen darken and brighten As you tilt IT. The screen's matte finish does have same vantage, though: It's comfortable to read outside, even connected a sunny day.

Keyboard and trackpad

Keyboard and trackpad quality are other area where the Gateway Ultra Slim laptop compromises to stumble a glower price. While the keys themselves offer respectable jaunt, they feel mushy and curving. The plastic enclosure contributes to a hollow feeling under your fingers.

gateway156keyboard — The trackpad has a serrulate plastic finish and a built-in fingermark reader.

The trackpad is worse: Its rough plastic end up makes your fingers stick and hinders fine-grained cursor movements. Establish quality is an issue here as well, as press refine firm along the trackpad produced 2 perceptible clicks in a row. (Thankfully, only the first one registered Eastern Samoa an actual mouse click.)

Webcam, audio, security

The Gateway 15.6-inch Ultra Lean Notebook's webcam offers the same 720p resolution as the vast majority of Windows laptops, most of which continue to treat camera quality American Samoa an rethink. We wouldn't expect a camera happening a $399 laptop to support Windows Hello face recognition, and this one doesn't. However, a privacy shutter or kill exchange for the camera would have been nice.

The fingerprint reader is a prissy security fix a sub-$500 laptop, despite its odd position in the top-right corner of the trackpad.

gateway156topbrick — To charge the Gateway laptop computer, you'll have to use its big power adapter and barrel charger.

Like a lot of other PC makers, Gateway follows the trend of partnering with a big audio brand to refine its laptop speakers. In this case, the spouse is THX, and as expected, this kind of aural window dressing can only do sol much within a laptop computer's pent space. The upward-firing speakers are so adjusted—you can listen to euphony or YouTube videos without feeling like you're trapped in a ti. But they're on the quiet position, so you may sieve out to listen your video or league shout out in droning environments.

Microphone caliber is sketchy. When I captured an audio sample, IT made my voice well-grounded somewhat nasally compared to what I've captured from other laptops. I could also hear its overly aggressive attempts at noise cancellation.

Performance

We seldom get a low-end Intel Core i3 processor to test here at PCWorld. All but vendors require to reveal off the fastest versions their computers, which means we typically fetch up with Core i7 or Essence i5 configurations instead.

Using the Core i3-1115G4 processor in Gateway's laptop computer was clarifying. For basic document editing and web browse, the Core i3 chip was perfectly zippy, proving that you credibly preceptor't need anything faster unless you're acquiring into media creation or gambling.

Unfortunately, that reality doesn't turn up in benchmark tests, so keep that in mind as you peruse the charts below.

Start with PCMark 10, which simulates a gamut of productivity tasks, the 15.6-edge in Ultra Slim down Notebook's 11th-generation Sum i3 CPU did manage to outpace the 10th-gen Core i5 in Microsoft's Surface Go laptop. Non surprisingly, it fell well behind higher-remnant 11th-gen chips.

gateway156pcmark — The Gateway 15.6-inch Ultra Lose weight Notebook performs upright delicately for productivity, even if its PCMark stacks come short compared to laptops with high-ending CPUs.

The Core i3-1115G4 is a dual-core processor, thus every bit you mightiness expect, multi-threaded performance in Cinebench is lackluster. Placid, single-rib performance was impressive: Gateway's laptop beat out several 10th-gen Core i5 chips and held its own against the 11th-gen Core i5 in Horsepower's Enviousness 14.

gateway156cinebench — Single-threaded performance is what matters for document redaction and web browsing, and Gateway's laptop computer does recovered with information technology.

HandBrake is where that lack of multi-core mightiness genuinely shows. This test involves encoding a large video file, as you might do if you were editing or converting personal videos. The chore genuinely benefits from lashing of computing cores. Gateway's laptop completed the job at a glacial pace of 1 hour and 32 minutes.

gateway156handbrake — Don't expect the Marrow i3 processor to make flying work of video encryption.

The strange big downside to Sum i3 processors is the lack of Iris Xe graphics for gaming. No unrivalled should expect a $399 laptop to exist a gaming machine. In case you were curious, though, Here are our findings, via the 3DMark Wild Life bench mark (below) and whatever communicative gameplay: You power be able to eke out some lightweight independent games, but don't expect much more than that. Even out the fairly lightweight first-person hitman AMID EVIL was unplayable for me due to constant stuttering.

gateway156wildlife — This isn't a gaming laptop, regardless of what the benchmark results say.

Battery life

Now for the potential deal-surf: barrage life. In our offline TV rundown test, the laptop computer lasted just shy of 6 hours (5 hours and 58 minutes). That's more than akin to what we see in mightiness-desirous workhorse PCs than typical thin-and-light laptops. It squanders any Hope of being able to move in a overloaded workday off the charger.

gateway156battery — Battery life is disappointingly weak.

Should you purchase the Gateway Ultra Reduce Notebook?

If $399 is all you can spend, the Gateway 15.6-inch Immoderate Slim Notebook computer is a sensible purchase. It offers basic productivity performance and a big expose (though of average quality).

If you'rhenium able to expand your budget, you might find a reasonably priced Windows PC without the Gateway's glary downsides, specially aside dipping back to previous simulation years. Lenovo's excellent C740 Yoga, for instance, still sells happening Amazon for $640Remove non-product radio link (with a smaller-size SSD than what we tested). For those who'll consider a Chromebook, the Acer Chromebook Tailspin 713 on a regular basis sells for inferior than its $629 interrogative price at Best Grease one's palmsRemove non-product link. HP's Envy x360 15 is a classy convertible that sells for as little as $720 happening HP.comTake off non-product link. And while we wouldn't shout it from the rooftops, there's a solid case for using an entry-level iPad as a laptop option.

The Gateway 15.6-inch Ultra Small Notebook's biggest saving grace English hawthorn atomic number 4 its potency to work as a flash background replacement. Actual-world performance is pretty spiffy, you keister elevate the retention if needed, and the HDMI port facilitates easy connections to external monitors. Using this laptop computer with an external expose, keyboard, and mouse would sidestep numerous of its biggest shortcomings. You'd make up toilsome-pressed to regain a comparable desktop for $400.

Only when you take information technology on tour will you remember why it was so cheap in the archetypical place.