A little over $600 buys budget shoppers a large hard drive, plenty of RAM, and a decent AMD A8 quad-core processor with graphics, but the battery life of the Gateway NV55S05u is a letdown.
The landscape of budget laptops often looks like a police lineup of suspects: a muddy confusion of similar-looking faces and bodies. For $600 you can buy a lot of computer lately, though you're not likely to get something that's particularly sexy.
The $629 Gateway NV55S05u is one of more than a dozen 15-inch Gateway NV laptops with a galaxy of different processors. In the case of our 15.6-incher, an AMD A8-3500M APU is inside. AMD's A8 processor is part of a new line of AMD Fusion processors with graphics and CPU on one chip (called an APU). The A8-3500 in this Gateway is a quad-core CPU paired with AMD 6620G graphics, which gives a better-than-Intel integrated-graphics experience playing mainstream 3D games. As for the CPU power, it's comparable to an Intel Core i3, but slightly less fast.
A 640GB hard drive and 6GB of RAM are more than you're likely to get elsewhere for the same price, but otherwise this $629 laptop is the picture of decently made mediocrity. Get it if you're desperate for an all-around laptop with some better-than-average graphics at the lowest price possible. Just be aware that even at its reasonable price, there are other options out there.
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Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion.