This $499 Walmart Creator laptop is the perfect budget notebook for Photoshop fans
Want to tackle Photoshop, AutoCAD, Blender, Premiere or Davinci on a budget and on the go? I found your ideal partner
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Acerhas 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 ofGateway Creatorto$499, down from $649, a tag that includes free shipping. That ishalf the priceof theAsus TUF F15which 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 amobile workstationforAutoCAD 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 anUltrabook, it isn’t that far off.
Gateway Creator Notebook | Nvidia RTX 3050 |Intel Core i5-11400H |15.6-inch | 16GB RAM| 512GB SSD|$679$499 at WalmartWant to tacklePhotoshop,AutoCAD, Blender,Premiere ProorDavincion a budget and on the go? You won’t find anything cheaper for a brand new laptop with such a fantastic configuration. Buy it before it runs out of stock or you might end up kicking yourself afterwards.
Gateway Creator laptop: A brief look
As we noted in ourbest laptop for AutoCADguide,gaming laptopstend to be cheaper than creative-focussed ones or portables with a specific use-case, such aslaptops 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-coreIntelCore i5-11400HCPUwith a dedicated Nvidia Geforce RTX 3050GPUwith 4GB GDDR6, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB NVMe Gen3SSD, all powered byWindows 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 (SSDorHDD) 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.
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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
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