An affordable budget laptop with a mix of highs and lows
I’m one of the consumer PC experts at PCMag, with a particular love for PC gaming. I've played games on my computer for as long as I can remember, which eventually (as it does for many) led me to building and upgrading my own desktop. Through my years here, I've tested and reviewed many, many dozens of laptops and desktops, and I am always happy to recommend a PC for your needs and budget.
Walmart's latest 14-inch Gateway laptop has flaws but offers good performance, battery life, and connectivity for a low price, making it a decent overall bargain.
Finding a budget laptop that strikes the right balance of quality, functionality, and price isn't easy. The latest example of Gateway's rebirth as a Walmart house brand, the 14.1-inch Ultra Slim ($549 as tested), doesn't meet all marks, but is largely serviceable for its low asking price. The chassis is of decent quality but overweight for its size, and a poor touchpad and dull display limit the Ultra Slim's appeal. On the upside, its 12th Generation Intel processor delivers solid performance, its connectivity is admirable, and its battery lasts a long time, so it might be the bargain you're looking for. There are better options for those looking to spend more for a better value (the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14) or spend even less at the sacrifice of some speed (the MSI Modern 14), but this Gateway is on the whole a worthy budget option.
As an affordable general-use laptop, it's no surprise that the Ultra Slim offers a straightforward build and design. The all-black chassis is entirely plastic, but feels reasonably solid. There's some flex in the keyboard deck, but it's acceptable as long as you don't push too hard.
Some of the flex is due to a design quirk we've seen in Asus and other laptops—as you open the lid, its rear edge props the laptop at a slight incline to improve airflow below and provide a more comfortable typing angle. Most of the notebooks we've seen with this tilt are more expensive, so it's a plus in this economy model.
The Gateway's solid feel is also due to its weight; for a fairly compact 14-inch laptop, the Ultra Slim is heftier than you'd expect at 3.65 pounds. At second glance, you'll also notice it's thicker than most small-footprint machines, measuring 0.8 by 12.8 by 9.8 inches (HWD). Many 14-inch laptops are ultraportables that weigh less than three pounds.
The added heft won't stop you from stashing the system in your bag or briefcase, but it does feel dense. Lighter 14-inch notebooks such as the 3.09-pound HP Pavilion Plus 14 are usually more expensive (sleek engineering isn't cheap), so you can forgive the Gateway for the most part. That said, some affordable laptops are lighter; the MSI Modern 14 is $99 cheaper and only 2.8 pounds. The IdeaPad 3 14 and Asus VivoBook S14 are both just over three pounds.
The rest of the build is of so-so quality. The touchpad is a disappointment, with uncomfortable clicks—pressing the middle of the pad doesn't work consistently at all, feeling like a dead zone, while pressing the edges or bottom is more reliable. Of course you can tap rather than click, but as someone prone to full presses, I found it irritating. The pad is also textured and feels less premium than we like.
Nor does the keyboard impress us much. The keys feel both densely packed and too small at the same time, needing a good bit of adjustment or practice to avoid frequent typos. The keys are on the bouncy side but not too mushy, so the typing experience is decent once you get used to it.
You can say much the same for the screen. The 14.1-inch touch panel has full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution, so at least it's not a 1,366-by-768 non-touch display, but there isn't much to say beyond that. The picture quality is on the dull side, and brightness is low even at maximum. Checking the touch and 1080p boxes is nice, but the Gateway's simply isn't a good-looking display.
All these gripes are still within the bounds of acceptability for a budget system. The keyboard, touchpad, and screen are anything but great, but if you're seeking a functional 14-inch machine at low cost, there's nothing here that's a deal-breaker.
Connectivity is one of the Ultra Slim's rare positives, with two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, one USB-C connection, an HDMI video output, and a microSD card slot. Supporting features include a 720p webcam, a fingerprint reader, and Bluetooth 5.1.
The webcam's picture quality is predictably mediocre, again meeting the functional-but-unimpressive baseline. Videos are not very sharp, and the camera doesn't handle dim lighting well. The camera does have a sliding privacy shutter, however.
Just as important as the build for a budget laptop are its core components. As always, this is a balancing act for manufacturers, seeking a sweet spot of sufficient performance for everyday needs while keeping costs below those of more mainstream systems. In this case, you get an Intel Core i5-1235U CPU, 8GB of memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive.
The processor (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads) gives you Intel's latest architecture at a low price, while 8GB of RAM is the right call in this price range. The U at the end of the chip's model number denotes a wallet- and battery-friendly 15-watt processor, so it won't touch Intel's faster P and H series CPUs, but is a good fit here. The combination should get you through most daily tasks, while 512GB of storage is plenty if you're mostly saving documents and photos rather than games or lengthy videos.
If you want a litttle more juice, a $699 version bumps the processor up to a Core i7-1255U; both models are available in black, navy, silver, and rose gold. If you're shopping online, make sure you're looking at the 12th Gen version—the superstore still sells older models that otherwise look the same.
To put the Ultra Slim's performance to the test, we put it through our usual suite of benchmark tests against some competing models. You can check out their basic specs in the table below.
All our comparison systems are affordable 14-inch laptops, though some have newer CPUs than others. The MSI Modern 14 is a budget favorite, but its older-gen Core i3 processor is likely to lag behind. Lenovo's IdeaPad 3 14 is an AMD-based option priced at $519, while the Asus VivoBook S14 and VAIO FE 14.1 are a touch more expensive at $699 and $799 respectively.
The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's boot drive.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
We usually run an Adobe Photoshop performance test as well, but it repeatedly crashed on this Gateway, so that chart doesn't appear here.
The Gateway didn't stand out from the pack, though it showed suitable performance for everyday tasks and was competitive with the slightly more expensive models. It cleared the 4,000-point hurdle in PCMark 10 that indicates good productivity for the likes of Microsoft Word and Excel, and easily bested the uncompetitive MSI Modern 14. On the flip side, it's hardly a high-performance workstation. Like its rivals, it's clearly intended for routine word processing and web surfing rather than media editing or digital content creation.
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We normally run two additional tests from GFXBench 5.0, but they too failed to run properly on the Ultra Slim despite multiple attempts.
As with our CPU tests, 3DMark shows all these laptops (again excepting the MSI) landing in the same ballpark, which is no surprise considering their humble integrated graphics. They're strictly for casual games or streaming media, not the latest, most demanding games or graphic design or CGI rendering. Users who want to run such software know they need to shop in a different aisle.
We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Gateway's unplugged stamina is strong, a nice point in its favor. Actually, all five laptops reached respectable runtimes, though some have better battery life than others and every hour counts when you're away from a wall outlet. As for the screen, I said it didn't look very bright, and the SpyderX Elite proved my point—even at max brightness the panel managed only 214 nits, well below the 300 we consider a practical minimum, let alone the 400 we hope to see from a mid- or high-priced laptop. Its color coverage, like its rivals', was also poor. Screens are often one of the main areas of cost-cutting in budget notebook design.
The budget laptop segment is all about finding the best available deal, especially when that budget is well under $1,000. Walmart's Gateway 14.1-Inch Ultra Slim succeeds on the affordability front and delivers serviceable specs and good battery life, though it's hard to claim it's the best (or even particularly good) at any particular aspect. Its build quality, especially the touchpad, is mediocre, and its performance is decent but doesn't lead the way.
The Gateway does undercut the cost of some competitors and offers ample storage with good connectivity, so it's not to be ignored. On the whole, however, it's an unremarkable system that's not in the same league as our economy Editors' Choice winner, the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14.
Walmart's latest 14-inch Gateway laptop has flaws but offers good performance, battery life, and connectivity for a low price, making it a decent overall bargain.
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I’m one of the consumer PC experts at PCMag, with a particular love for PC gaming. I've played games on my computer for as long as I can remember, which eventually (as it does for many) led me to building and upgrading my own desktop. Through my years here, I've tested and reviewed many, many dozens of laptops and desktops, and I am always happy to recommend a PC for your needs and budget.
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