Need a reliable mid to low tier gaming laptop for work and a little gaming

Thank you Ed. I am sorry if my original post was not clear. For me the screen size is not the important part. I am OK with 15 or 17 inches as long as it has a number pad and good cooling. I lean towards 17 because I have had better experiences with them in the past but 15 is good too.

 

Thank you both. I can see a Lenovo Legion 5 on their website right now for $899 that has a Ryzen 5 4600, a GTX 1650ti, 8GB ram, 512 ssd's plus 1tb hdd. It has a number pad. If you think it is a quality computer with good cooling and I can potentially upgrade ram if it would make a difference, that might be the one.

 

That's the exact machine I'm looking at, very tempting. It's fairly easy to upgrade RAM on these machines yourself (simply take off the bottom panel and add the stick of RAM in the empty SODIMM slot, plenty of Youtube tutorials). Again, I stress I haven't personally played around with the Legion, but based on reviews and my experience with past Lenovo machines (I had the Y540, solid machine overall), at that price it seems hard to go wrong. Worst case scenario, if you aren't happy you simply return it. I'd mention that you should upgrade that RAM to dual-channel by adding another 8GB 3200MHz DDR4 stick as soon as you receive it (or decide to keep it) - it really makes a difference with Ryzen chips.

Another machine that seems almost universally praised is the Acer Predator Helios 300, though that's more expensive. A bit noisy, but apparently has good cooling (explains the noise) and good performance.