At the risk of being called a PC gaming heretic, here's a discounted version of the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 with built-in graphics, priced at $379 at Walmart (down from $499), which is affordable for a laptop that can play some games on its own hardware or through services like Nvidia's GeForce Now is affordable for a laptop that can play some games, either on its own hardware or through services like Nvidia's GeForce Now.

On the latter point, you don't need a super-powerful PC to stream games from the cloud. In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 on GeForce Now is great if you don't have a GeForce RTX GPU. So what does this laptop have on board?

The heart and soul of this affordable machine is AMD's Ryzen 5 3500U, based on AMD's 12nm Zen+ architecture, a quad-core chip with 8 threads and 4MB of L3 cache running at 2.1GHz to 3.7GHz.

It also features AMD's Vega 8 graphics, with eight graphics "cores" (compute units) running at 1.2 GHz. Being an integrated solution, it is not possible to extract much gaming performance from the GPU portion of the 3500U. However, there are many titles that can be played, depending on the game, settings, and resolution.

The caveat is that there are slightly more expensive laptops with discrete graphics. And we occasionally see Gateway's Creator series with GeForce RTX 2060 on sale at Walmart for $699 (down from $999).

It is not currently on sale, and even when it is, it is almost twice the price of the Lenovo IdeaPad 3. This product is for those who want to spend as little as possible (under $400) and don't mind integrated graphics.