a little while back walmart tried to get into making gaming computers which was
basically only good for giving reviewers like us a good laugh
that died and their second even cheaper foray was even worse i've used hundred
and fifty dollar phones that perform better than this
but today that changes this
is the gateway 15.6 inch performance notebook gwtn 156-3bk
and sure it might not sound like much and it might not look like much
but it also doesn't cost much it's currently on sale at walmart for
700 bucks while packing an rtx 2060.
that means this could very well be the cheapest gaming laptop that's able to
deliver a proper aaa high frame rate gaming experience
but does it also deliver a good laptop experience
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rocking a core i5 10 300h and an NVIDIA rtx 2060 this thing should on paper be
flipping capable as a gaming machine
so then let's get right into it can it run cyberpunk 2077
oh heck yeah it can here we are on
medium settings running at about 60 frames per second which for a game like
this is about what you need to have a good time and it still looks really good
even if the sliders in the game aren't all cranked to the right
now you might be concerned that the rtx 2060 we have in here is going to be last
gen very soon but remember guys this is
a good thing this laptop is compelling because of the
700 promo price and with new hardware
just around the corner we can expect this promo price to stick around well
not for that long probably until they're all sold out back to games then it also
delivered very reasonable frame rates in shadow of the tomb raider and in rainbow
six siege we easily got over 120 frames per second on ultra which is good
because yes pleasant surprise it also has a high
refresh rate display more on that later though
now we would have run some more benchmarks but this thing only comes with a 256 gig SSD
so after installing those three games she was full
so i think at this point we got to open it up and find out if the storage and
RAM for that matter are easily upgradeable because if they aren't
it's going to be pretty hard to recommend it after just 10 phillips
screws good news everyone two easily accessible sodium slots and
two m.2 slots each only half full this
means over the first year or so with a little bit of saving it would be simple
to turn this thing into an even more capable machine just like you'll be a
capable machine if you wear the LTT beanie lttstore.com i like it so
performance wise then the performance notebook 15.6 inch is checking all the
boxes but i wasn't really concerned
about that what was more of a concern for me was all of the other things that
make a laptop good like the keyboard the screen and the trackpad
to compare then we've brought in the hp omen 15. on paper the specs here are the
same but when on sale the omen 15 is still 300 more so where did gateway find
300 of cost cutting well in a few places
first of all build quality both of these laptops do have plastic chassis but hp
wrapped the top half in aluminum leading to quite a bit more stiffness and
generally a more premium feel everywhere your hands make contact with it with
that said the gateway isn't terrible in this regard either with a solid
acceptable c plus for i o they're shockingly similar even sharing the
exact same Intel wi-fi six networking card that's an area that lots of other
companies have cheaped out on in the past with their budget offerings though
the hp does gain a couple of points for including Thunderbolt 3. moving on to
the display previously some cheap high refresh rate panels would have either
been tn or only support 6-bit color and
i'm happy to report that the gateway has a proper ips type 120hz panel with 8-bit
color the high refresh rate display simply means that you will be more
competitive in multiplayer games than someone with a 60 hertz screen
and at 1080p resolution the rtx 2060
will be running just about everything above 120 FPS to really take advantage
of it in a vacuum then looks really good
but then side by side with the hp it's just no competition the brightness and
colors on the omen just blow the gateway machine out of the water
it's not going to be a huge problem if you only plan on gaming or you sit in
the dark a lot but if you're doing any photo or video editing i would save up
for something with a better display another area gateway could have cheaped
out is the cooling good cooling means a lot of copper and copper is very
expensive and running furmark for half an hour confirmed that sure the hp does
have better cooling its GPU leveled out at just 67 degrees while the gateway was
at 72 but given that both managed basically
the same clock speeds and ended up being constrained by power not thermals i was
pretty happy although the hp did end up with a 2-3 FPS lead both of them were
also similarly loud but the fans in the gateway had a bit more of that
high-pitched whine that makes them more annoying truthfully though with either
of them you'll probably want to stay away from open-back headphones while you're gaming this general trend of this
being good and this being better continues for the
keyboard trackpad and speakers the hp
wins but only just and the gateway remains
good enough such that you won't be complaining while using any of those
things bringing us then to our first real
problem battery life in pc mark 10's modern office benchmark
the omen 15 put up a respectable 6 hours and 14 minutes in the same benchmark
with the same settings and screen brightness our gateway managed just an
hour and a half that is a big uff right
there if you catch my drift an hour and a half isn't just bad like it's way
worse than what made sense to us so we
started the test again and realized oh good old norton antivirus was chewing up
90 of the CPU scanning every part of the test that opened by using the best piece
of software norton makes we were able to increase the battery life of this thing
to nearly six hours freaking wow at least it wasn't a
hardware problem right now it should be mentioned that hp did still deliver more
performance on battery and has a much bigger battery so if you plan on doing
anything away from the wall besides watching videos or using word it will be
a better choice but the gateway wasn't nearly as bad as it seemed out of the
box i do still have a question though i keep calling this a gateway but
who the heck actually made this laptop gateway has been basically a dead
company for the last 10 years with its owner acer letting it slowly rot at
first i thought maybe it was just like a rebadged nitro 5 packaged up for walmart
but looking at the nitro 5 and the performance notebook side by side
they're clearly not the same machine at all my next guest then was clavo but i
couldn't find any matches and it also wasn't uh born technology who makes
gateway's other walmart exclusive laptops we actually looked at one of
those a little while back so go watch that video if you want to see what a slow motion dumpster fire looks like no
this was made by tongfeng the gk5nr00
to be exact is that right zero oh wow unbelievable which is good to know if
you want to find some upgrades for it off of sites like aliexpress for example
this much juicier 62.3 watt hour battery can be had for just 68
almost a nice price basically then from this comparison the
hp omen 15 is a better laptop in every single way and if you find it on sale
it's the one you should get out of the two but the gateway performance notebook
15.6 inch also doesn't have any brutal
flaws at seven hundred dollars the performance
notebook gives you everything you need and over the next year or two it can
easily become a fair bit better as you upgrade the RAM storage and maybe even
the battery so it's certified cheapskate legit
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bigger cheapskate by the way we also checked out a 250 laptop from walmart a
while back that was shockingly good thanks to the power of AMD's
return to competition thank you AMD
thank you AMD for blessing us with competition in the CPU market
praise be to AMD