Micro Center Stores: Gateway Laptop: 15.6" FHD 120Hz, i5-11400H, RTX 3050, 16GB RAM Expired

I hate that I'm not near a microcenter. There are a decent amount of deals I would have jumped on in the past if I was.

This is a pretty good deal if you want a gaming laptop for bargain bin pricing. I do have some concerns about gateway though. Gateway was bought by acer, but the gateway laptops are made by Shenzhen Bmorn Technology and imported by EVOO, acer is not the manufacturer. It shouldn't be a major issue since this is a new product sold through microcenter, but I wouldn't count on gateways' support and customer service to be as good as major brands.
The i5 11400h is a two (soon to be three) gen old mid-range 6-core processor that is rather weak by current gen standards (12th gen and beyond intel processors were a major generational leap over 11th gen). That being said, the 3050 will be the bottleneck in 99% of games anyways. As long as you don't tend to do productivity work or play extremely cpu heavy games the processor shouldn't be a major concern at this price tier.
The 3050 is the last gen lowest mainstream tier mobile gpu, and is significantly weaker than the desktop version. It'll do just fine for 1080p gaming as long as you don't want to play the latest Triple-A titles with max settings at high refresh rates, but the lack of vram (4gb is extremely poor for 2023) and overall weak performance means it is firmly bottom budget tier for discrete gpus. It will still run circles around the integrated graphics in current gen apus though, beating even the top of the line phoenix point apus. A mobile 3060 can be up to 50% faster (depending on wattage) and has 50% more vram, however the cheapest I've ever seen a new 3060 laptop go for is ~$600. Rtx 4000 series laptops offer a significantly worse price to performance ratio currently.
16gb of ram is the current standard; it's last gen ddr4 memory, but at this price you won't get better. The specs say 16gb "onboard" and a max of 16gb, so I assume it's soldered, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. The Gateway websites' questions and answers page for this model has an answer indicating that it supports up to 32gb, but some answers Gateway have given are contradictory, so I'd take them with a grain of salt.
A 512gb ssd is still smaller than it should be, but many laptops in this price range only have a 256gb ssd. According to the Gateway questions and answers page this model supports pcie gen 3 and "has a 2.5 SSD slot and a 2nd M.2 slot", but once again I am unsure of the veracity of this answer.
Assuming this model uses the same screen as the previous model, it's the standard disappointing budget gaming laptop fare. The previous models' screen measured at 235 nits of brightness and 44% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which is quite bad, though not significantly worse than other gaming laptops in the $500 and below range. It being 120hz is nice at least.
The array of ports on this laptop is decent, there's no thunderbolt but for the price it's perfectly fine.
Battery life is supposedly quite poor, but that's only to be expected when it comes to budget gaming laptops since portability isn't the main priority. Likewise it's a bit bulkier and heavier than any laptop without a dgpu is.
Overall, this is an extremely good value for a budget tier gaming laptop.

Edit: The user KyleZ9225 has posted a link to a youtube video which confirms this laptop has 2 memory slots so the memory is upgradeable, and confirms it has both an additional m2 and 2.5" sata slot. It does not confirm whether or not the usb-c port is full function and has video output.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ocgm0nTNT8U

Wow, a laptop well under $500 BNIB with a decent discreet graphics solution. Anyone on a budget but still want to game look no further.

Man it even has 16gigs of ram straight out of the box.